To the editor:

Hats off to all of these forward thinkers who understand the need for green space in Douglas County and America. Green space and farmland are becoming an endangered species, considering the number of acres lost to unnecessary development such that is being planned in North Lawrence.

Thank you very much Robert and Suzanne McColl, Dave and Barbara Clark, Tensie Oldfather, the Ethel and Raymond Rice Foundation, Elizabeth Avery Schultz, the Wallace Genetic Foundation and the Wilderness Community Education Foundation for realizing the other tools important to research and learning. The community cannot thank you enough.

From the Sept. 30, Journal-World, there is a deed which deserves further recognition. As a 70th birthday present for his wife, Robert McColl, a Kansas University professor emeritus of geography and East Asian studies donated the money to purchase 160 acres of land three miles north of Lawrence for the KU Field Station and Ecological Reserves.

“The Rockefeller Prairie is important to KU researchers,” the article said, “because less than 1 percent of native prairie in Douglas County survives, and two rare plants, Mead’s milkweed and the western prairie fringed orchid, grow there. The donated land stands in front of the prairie.”

Richard Heckler,

Lawrence