STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — Along the 8.5-mile span that is Staten Island’s Arthur Kill Road, you’ll find strips of bustling businesses, clusters of homes, and acres of unbothered natural land. It’s a hub of restaurants and strip-malls, a two-lane thoroughfare that slices through 12 towns and winds past landmarked burial grounds, an historic mansion, a storied German eatery and an ice-skating rink before eventually passing underneath a small span of the Outerbridge Crossing.
The road is bordered by bridle paths and a 265-acre nature preserve, where butterfly habitats and bird colonies thrive. But Arthur Kill’s character is far from pristine: The remote wilderness has often been disturbed by illegal dumping, and most recently it has been scarred by excessive amounts of car storage and burgeoning battery energy storage sites.
And now, a large portion of the undeveloped land is marked as an area for industrial development…