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Trump Budget Cuts Threaten To Kill Blue Ridge Parkway, National Park System
A perspective from Anne Mitchell Whisnant
Blue Ridge Parkway. Great Smoky Mountains. The Appalachian Trail. Carl Sandburg Home.
Cape Hatteras and Cape Lookout. Fort Raleigh and the Wright Brothers. Revolutionary War battlefields Guilford Courthouse and Moore’s Creek Bridge.
Not to mention the Blue Ridge National Heritage Area, Trail of Tears National Historic Trail, over 3,000 historic places on the National Register, 2 million museum objects, dozens of community conservation and recreation projects, more than 20 million annual visitors, and nearly $4 billion annually in economic benefits from park tourism. (Details: www.nps.gov/state/nc/index.htm).
North Carolina knows a thing or two about national parks (and the National Park Service), and every one of us should pay attention to the Trump administration’s current attack on these treasures.
An impending “reduction in force” targets crucial and committed Park Service scientists, historians, archeologists, curators, interpretive planners, resource managers, rangers and other experts. The proposals for a catastrophic $1 billion budget cut and turnover of some parks to states threaten to kill the national park system altogether.
Trump and his accomplices are standing on Pennsylvania Avenue poised to shoot the National Park Service. Will North Carolinians — and those who represent us in Congress — stand by and watch?
I have studied our state’s national parks for 35 years, mostly researching the magnificent Blue Ridge Parkway — long the most visited of all national park sites. The national parks have always been political. Their creation and maintenance have always been contested and must always be defended.
Over the 50+ years it took to build the iconic road, its supporters and users have included conservationists, engineers, landscape architects, birders, leisure drivers and motorcyclists, hikers, campers, picknickers and lovers, as well as tourism business interests, especially in Asheville. Strange bedfellows, at times, but evidence of how this breathtaking scenic drive has delighted audiences across the political spectrum.
The Parkway reflects a North Carolina vision. A primary proponent was state highway engineer R. Getty Browning of Raleigh and Blowing Rock. His leadership of route selection and N.C. land acquisition — financed with state dollars that paid hundreds of owners for lands then gifted to the United States — assured a wide scenic corridor that would preserve the spectacular views.
Browning and his allies knew, however, that some commercial stakeholders — often wealthy and well-connected in state politics — would seek to capitalize on the road in ways that would compromise it.
In the 1930s, Little Switzerland developer (and state Supreme Court justice) Heriot Clarkson forced the state to narrow the Parkway and agree to four entrances serving his inn and resort community. Later, Grandfather Mountain owner Hugh Morton delayed project completion for two decades as he enlisted state political leaders in a successful battle to re-route the road to benefit his private tourist attraction.
Similar stories of political conflicts, influence, and struggles to protect our incomparable places from self-serving interests could be told about all of North Carolina’s national parks — with our national seashores also testament to how national park status has saved fragile landscapes and cultural treasures for public enjoyment in ways that neither state nor private entities could or would do.
What Browning and almost all N.C. park advocates understood — and what we must now remember — is that the Park Service’s deep well of planning, design, engineering, conservation, education, and preservation expertise was essential to realizing the park vision here. Without the NPS, the Parkway and its thoughtful lodges, campgrounds, trails, signs, and visitor facilities would not exist. The same can be said for all of our other national parks.
Backed by federal law — the 1916 Park Service Organic Act, which charges NPS “to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations” — the NPS and its employees in the parks, in regional offices, and in Washington, D.C., have been essential partners in creating and sustaining the North Carolina places we all love.
Our state’s 10 national parks, along with other NPS sites, safeguard and open to the public many of our most valuable jewels. They are gifts of North Carolinians’ vision, advocacy, sacrifice, money, land, history, and labor to all who visit them. It is time for North Carolinians and our political leaders to step up once again to help save them — before they are lost forever.
Dr. Anne Mitchell Whisnant, author of “Super-Scenic Motorway: A Blue Ridge Parkway History,” is a member of the faculty and director of the Graduate Liberal Studies Program at Duke University.
“Viewpoints” on Chapelboro is a recurring series of community-submitted opinion columns. All thoughts, ideas, opinions and expressions in this series are those of the author, and do not reflect the work or reporting of 97.9 The Hill and Chapelboro.com.
Viewpoints: Trump Budget Cuts Threaten To Kill Blue Ridge Parkway, National Park System Chapelboro.com.
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