I grew up on a street named Meadow Road, because, well, there was a two football field-wide meadow behind the houses that stretched to the town’s main thoroughfare. At least that is what my parents told me. All I can recall is the back of a changing collection of stores, restaurants, barbershops, and laundromats, and a sea of black pavement behind and in front of a nondescript strip mall.

My parents bought the house in 1969. They didn’t know a massacre was coming. By the time my brother was born, in 1972, the meadow was buried under asphalt and concrete. The closest meadow-like spaces have long been a Little League-sized baseball field at a nearby elementary school, a driving range surrounded by netting, and chemically treated lawns.

My mother still lives in the house, and long ago became accustomed to all that impervious surface behind the backyard fence.

I’m glad I don’t remember the meadow and its subsequent murder.

Countless green space in Massachusetts and throughout southern New England has been lost in the five-plus decades since the name of Meadow Road should have been changed.

I have resided in Rhode Island for the past two decades, with most of that time living on Hope Street. I don’t have much, especially when it comes to the state’s efforts to protect the environment.

It seems the plan largely consists of cutting down trees to create better hunting habitat to sell hunting licenses to fund the protection of open space. It makes no sense, I know.

While the state changes forestland into meadowlands — no, not where the Jets and Giants allegedly play football — and mows areas that could be meadows, the region’s collection of priceless habitat continues to dwindle.

A meadow is much more than just a field. These green spaces are diverse, dynamic habitats dominated by native grasses and wildflowers. A single meadow can contain some 200 plant species. They provide habitat for pollinators, and shelter, food, and nesting sites for birds and other wildlife. They support biodiversity.

They also absorb stormwater runoff, which helps prevent flooding and soil erosion. And they’re good for our health.

Meadows used to be widespread across the region, like behind a family’s new home. But relentless development, much of it shortsighted or gluttonous, has greatly reduced their numbers and diminished the free ecological services they provide.

While we have no problem covering them with concrete, asphalt, and solar panels, we also refuse to let them grow, even in areas with little economic value, such as highway medians. (We could install ground-mounted solar arrays on medians, but since this green space has little value and no trees to cut down, we’re in no rush to ruin it.)

The Rhode Island Department of Transportation, for one, mercilessly mows medians, wasting taxpayer money to buy fossil fuels to keep the natural world down and greenhouse gas emissions up.

Wouldn’t it make more financial and environmental sense to let many of these areas — some need to be continuously mowed for safety reasons — grow into meadows?

Of course it would. But Rhode Island, like much of the region, runs on old-time thinking. It goes like this: “But we’ve always done it that way.”

It’s lazy, usually not true, and routinely antithetical to the climate crisis we put ourselves in.

That kind of “logic” is why Rhode Island’s land-use management remains atrocious, despite a 156-page, taxpayer-funded plan that outlines exactly what the state needs to do.

Land Use 2025 was created to reflect “the growing realization of the urgency for Rhode Island to plan, develop, and conserve more intelligently.” It was intended “to guide future land use and development and to present State Guide Plan policies under which State and local land development activities will be reviewed for consistency.” It challenged “Rhode Islanders to work collectively to design, build, and conserve the State’s communities and landscapes.”

It was published in 2006, by the Rhode Island Department of Administration’s Division of Statewide Planning, and then promptly forgotten, joining a long list of reports, studies, and laws pertaining to the environment that are routinely ignored.

There’s no consistency in the state’s development practices, except the bulldozing of forests, the mowing of potential meadows, the persistent building of unaffordable housing, and the continued disrespect of the natural world. It’s what special interests demand and elected officials provide. Future generations will pay a heavy price.

Destroying open space is more profitable than redeveloping our concrete jungle. And even when it’s not, like mowing medians, we do it anyway, because we always have.

Frank Carini can be reached at [email protected]. His opinions don’t reflect those of ecoRI News. He was born in 1967 in Boston and didn’t move to Medway until he was close to 2.