| 12 | CONCLUSIONS |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Benton MacKaye seemed to have it just about right when describing the role of nature in our learning processes. That he was describing the Appalachian Trail and not the Blue Ridge Parkway does not matter so much in that regard. What matters is the pace of the learner, the "putting it all together," and the process of looking out and looking within for understanding of our natural environment and our place within its many landscapes. While it is difficult to put all the pieces together regarding the history, the socioeconomic associations, the political confrontations, the complex diversity issues, and the environmental concerns, it is the aesthetics that continue to come forward in our conversations, our mind's eye, and our memories of the Blue ridge Parkway. Somehow this seems to be just as it should be, that we should interact with our landscapes, and that we should expect that when we do, that we change our open spaces and our urban spaces. The human experience as it is manifested in our sense of place is a universal phenomenon and one that has increasing importance as those regions we "own" become increasingly contested. Whether it is oil floating onto beaches in the Gulf, or nitrates in our soils, or heavy metals in our drinking water, or other short-sighted assaults on our living spaces, the sense of rage many of us feel is is tied to our sense of place, to our sense of self and to our sense of responsibility to one another. The empathy shown by John Collier on behalf of Native Americans and of Harry Hopkins for African Americans during the construction of the Blue Ridge Parkway could have been a turning point in the relations with those two under-represented populations. However, in many ways the actions of these two men were mis-aligned. Many of the views they held, while well-meaning, were drawn from a cultural consciousness that today is known to be seriously faulted. When we draw boundaries around something as important as our public spaces, our parks and parkways, our re-creation spaces, those spaces need to be truly public....all public. The Blue Ridge Parkway has been a lesson in cultural diversity and continues to teach us many lessons regarding our identity, our love and our fears related to our public parks. And where are the women? The presence of women in the planning, design, construction, economics, politics, and environment is obscure in the history of the Blue Ridge Parkway. This is a story waiting to be written even while correction is continuing. The construction of the Blue Ridge Parkway also called to our attention the discriminatory practices of labor as the politicians, planners and engineers tried to address labor issues, use issues, and the "taking" of land. With only the tools at hand at that time and in an economic climate of fear and urban modeling, those early reconstructionists did the best they knew how. There are many other discriminations and in-equities at work in our society, many of which are born in our urban settings but which play out in our rural areas. It is an irony that many of these issues often come back to the cities in the form of socioeconomic failures; regional out-migration, inner-city poverty, urban renewal, and racial division, to name a few. No matter the good intentions of the exceptional individuals whose work is highlighted in this exhibit, some of their processes now appear to us as wrong-headed. Yet, in the future our decisions may also look wrong-headed. While the Parkway planning, legislation, and construction contained many instances of exploitation of Native Americans, African Americans, women, and the Appalachian mountaineer, for most of the history of the Parkway minority populations have not been intentionally exploited or marginalized by either practice, or legislation, or politics of the government. Blame should not rest entirely on the shoulders of government. The decisions, ideas, and actions were those of individuals who cared deeply (or didn't) about people , nature, progress, social welfare, and other noble or ignoble causes. For our failures to become real, they must often bear the weight of time. In those early years of the Parkway and the grim years of the Great Depression and the rapid response of the New Deal, many positive programs and ideas were born and shared with all segments of society. Those who shaped the Parkway were generally men of vision and high ideals. The failure to "get it right" was a failure shared across our entire society. That they "got it right" in an over-arching manner has been to the benefit of us all. Urban echoes along the Blue Ridge Parkway are found in the exercise of the power of government agencies in pushing forward imminent domain, work programs, and farm rehabilitation. Urban echoes were also seen in the narrow vision of some reformers who wished to re-shape the landscape to conform with elitist and sometimes European visions of city parks and life-styles. The City Beautiful Movement and the Good Roads Movement, while contributing significantly to the look and feel of the Parkway have now started to bump up against contemporary issues spawned by these early quasi-utopian visions and elitist exclusion. Steep-slope development, water-quality issues, and other environmental degradations also grow as the desirability of living "along the Parkway" grows. In many ways the aesthetic successes of the Parkway are also its major challenges --- and, at the least, some of its unpleasant surprises. When New York, Atlanta, Miami, Charlotte, Asheville, and other cities looked to renewal programs for their cities, they used models formed by those early parkway and park builders. John Nolen, George Stephens, John Abbott, Stephen Mather, Horace Albright, and others who left a legacy of elegant and often romantic urban and national park planning scenarios. Yet, occasionally along the way, those early ideas were co-opted by political power, by greed, and by uninformed aesthetics. The desire to remove "linear slums" in the early urban parkway planning was often later used as an excuse to divide communities and/or remove communities so commercial or industrial progress could be instituted. These self-serving exercises often resulted in the even greater blight of shopping malls, elite and gated housing developments, and other impatient consumerisms. Along the Parkway the desirable real estate often generated poorly planned personal profit projects, with names like Thunder Town or Gem City, or Ghost Town in the Sky. These tourist attractions and real estate endeavors often abutted Parkway property. It is again ironic that the land once described as "wasted land" could become such an economic gold mine. Today, that long and natural garden must need to stay vigilant to the pressures of profit that may lay waste to nature's garden. The "wasted land" that reportedly was claimed by the Blue Ridge Parkway developers, like the "urban blight" claimed by the 1960's and 1970's urban planners, sometimes discounted the sense of community that was present along the thin black band of the road. When local community was disturbed it sometimes destroyed whole neighborhoods and ways of life. If road improvement was centered on the development of agrarian markets and land improvement, those who farmed those lands saw little of the "improvements", which in many cases was focused on real estate development and elite tourism ventures and adventures. These short-sighted business deals continue, and if our open spaces are to survive and thrive, we need to all be "watch-dogs" in our garden of earthly delights. The "Reconstructionist" tendencies seen in Tench Coxe and even in Thomas Jefferson have never left us as we now move forward more rapidly than ever toward our 'Edenic' paradises and our 'Shining Cities on the Hill,' only to find them polluted, encroached upon, contaminated, and co-opted and leaking thousands of barrels of oil a day. We have lost our ability and in come cases, our will, to monitor those spaces held in public trust. The increase in automation and the speed with which our automatic systems track and monitor, have dulled our senses and reduced our power to control our lives and maintain our most basic processes. We have increased the speed of our development and we have supplemented it with extraordinary technologies and overwhelming bodies of information, but our ability for monitoring, for statistical aggregation, and for "fixing" things that fail, is truly failing us. We have gone from 45 miles per hour to unlimited in compressed time. We have ratcheted up even our walking time. It is now time to slow down our automobility, our corporate greed, our gee-whiz technology, our rush to get nowhere, and our information glut, and to reflect on where we were and where we are going. Maybe we can no longer relate to the linearity of the Blue Ridge Parkway and its sequential recreation, but it is still as close as we can come to individually monitoring our seasonal rhythms, and our cyclical selves and our natural environment. We may be increasingly hyper-real, but we continue to measure ourselves in linear and seasonal patterns. Go to the Parkway in any Autumn and watch the homage shown to the golden temporal change of seasons. As a metaphor for progress, the Blue Ridge Parkway has many lessons. Perhaps the most important lesson for our time is that landscapes have no fixed meaning and they have no vantage point or view-shed that is privileged. The design of the Blue Ridge Parkway was designed to slow us down. The early promoters of the parkway advised us to roll down our car windows, turn up our radios, feel the wind on our face as we soaked up health and wellness in a leisurely drive along a scenic road where no evidence of the city could be seen. But, the view through the windshield was and is discontinuous. Today that same drive increases our stress level as many of us fight to keep our heavy foot off the the pedal and stay within the 45 MPH speed limit. We are controlled by the demands and the speed of our technologies and our addiction to the speed and life stream of the city. Today we drive along this scenic and pleasant black sliver of a road that winds through some of the most spectacular landscape in America, but we do not do, as Benton MacKaye suggested, "look out, up, and down and learn." If the Parkway is to be experienced it should be experienced in its entirety. We need to get out of the automobile and amble among the ferns, and under the red ash, and listen for the whiddle-de-dee of the brown thrush. And, if we don't know what we see, what we hear in the un-identified tree, we need to learn nature's lessons. This was Benton MacKaye's message, and it is the message we hear whispering in the back of our brains. Today, roughly one-half of the world's population live in cities. By 2020 that number will grow to over 70%. It is the city brain that is driving --- literally driving, us forward at an ever increasing speed. We created the city, but it is rapidly re-creating us all. It teaches us to filter stimulus, to speed up our pace and to parallel process -- to multi-task. Today the average walking speed in the city is 4 miles per hour and the city dweller rarely changes that pace even in the country. The city has given us an appetite for speed and for technology. The more we "do," the more we want to "do." The more we have, the more we want to have. Speed is not our ally. It blurs the landscape, deadens our receptors and endangers our ultimate survival. We need to re-learn the lessons of "giving," instead of "wanting." Today the rural landscape of the Blue Ridge Parkway is changing in ways that reflect the cultural shifts within our cities. In North Carolina over 75% of our farmlands have changed use since 1948, according to information from the Blue Ridge Parkway 75, Inc. We are losing our agrarian base. Open fields with cattle and hay shocks have given way to Christmas tree farms and to planned communities, often exclusive and gated. A Blue Ridge Parkway study which was recently completed, notes that some two-thirds of the land that abuts the Parkway is privately owned and with this ownership comes the potential to radically shift the view-shed of the Parkway and to put pressure on access to the Parkway. The only hopeful sign in this scenario is that the economic downturn has slowed the purchase of both property and new housing along the Parkway. Looking to the future, the Conservation Trust for North Carolina is asking Congress to provide $75 million dollars over a five year period to purchase land in view-shed areas that are most threatened. Locking this land down through government purchase is open to debate, but the private alternatives may be even more grim with few informed or civic minded parties of interest attending to the Parkway's sustainability.
Aesthetics have a very large price tag when it comes to tourism. In the 2002-2003 visitor survey of the Parkway, some 25% of the respondents said they would not visit the Parkway if the scenic views were compromised significantly. As a recent article by the Blue Ridge Parkway 75, Inc., asserts:
Damage to these view-sheds could dramatically shift the some $2 billion dollars that comes to businesses that abut the Parkway or are located in near-by urban centers. Further, communities that benefit from tourism's tax dollars could see these tourist dollars go to other locations within the state if the aesthetic and recreational appeal of this park and way is degraded. |
|
|
Environmental degradation throughout the country is increasing at a rapid rate due to urbanization, industrialization and mining. Urbanization, in particular, alters connectivity of resources, energy, and information among social, physical, and biological systems in ways we have yet to fully understand. While we decry the loss of agricultural land, our farming practices over the last century have left a legacy of pollution. Fertilizers, particularly ammonia and nitrates in our soil and water, have consequences that even our scientific community cannot fully grasp on a regional scale. Land cover has changed and non-native species have been introduced and with these changes, a whole series of ecosystem changes are taking place. The human settlement patterns in western North Carolina are rapidly changing and with those new settlement patterns come changes in ecosystem services and also resource utilization that many say will eventually radically shift the landscape. Even though there are many vocal environmentalist who are convinced that parkways are well worth their cost in maintenance and the associated increases in land values, other environmentalists suggest that there is a law of diminishing return on investment if the Blue Ridge Parkway fails to bring in the needed tax revenues and new tourism because the landscape is being abused. The law of diminishing return can be seen in the up-keep of the Parkway. Staff and facilities cost money and if tax dollars continue to decline and the user base shrivels, the monies needed to pay the bills for maintenance will not be available and the degraded park will see an even greater loss of use. |
|
|
The questions first raised by Nolen and Hubbard in their Parkways and Land Values study are still under discussion today. Many of the predictions associated with the construction of parkways has been born out by history. The Parkway has in some ways facilitated traffic between outlying districts and central cities, particularly Asheville, where the Parkway provides a relaxing alternative to US 40 for those who commute into the city. The increase in land values is both a boon and an admitted boon-doggle. While the easements and right-of-ways have prevented the "linear slums" of many nearby cities, what is the responsibility of townships to this Federal thoroughfare? As cities expand their territory, what can we expect with regard to the Parkway boundaries --- to Parkway support? Who will bear the responsibility for decisions regarding encroachments? Will support come from all sides? Will cooperation be found at city, county, and federal levels? |
|
|
As the proportion of cars to population continues to go up, will there be pressure on this "pleasure road" to carry more traffic and to consider expansion of width and lane as the road abuts growing metropolitan areas? Will the parkway blend with the idea of the "freeway", and the metropolitan "express highway", or "beltway" idea? The clear need in the country for continued access to the three major roadway types: local service roads ; long distance commercial transport, and leisure and scenic highways will probably not go away, but the potential for hybrid roads grows with each leap in population, each change in technology, and each shift in fuel supply. Automobility will not go away and it will not cease to put pressure on thoroughfares. If Asheville continues to accelerate in growth, what are the transportation alternatives and how will they affect the Blue Ridge Parkway? What pressures will growth place on the use of this narrow and scenic corridor? Will the Parkway begin to resemble the New York Westchester Parkway system? Will alternative transportation systems offer relief for the growing population? |
|
|
The numerous recent books published on the topic of urban planning and particularly those that explore the deeply held beliefs of cultural regions or of individuals within specific regions is an encouraging sign that some of the major sticking points will get concentrated attention. One such recent publication is that by Matthew Dalbey, Regional Visionaries and Metropolitan Boosters: Decentralization, Regional Planning, and Parkways During the Interwar Years, (2004). The ideas set forth in this thoughtful work, are of particular interest. The authors intelligently explore the two theoretical stand-points of regionalists and metropolitanists. They also define the personal intellectual debates of those who helped to shape our environmentalism and our aesthetics, such as Benton MacKaye and Lewis Mumford and their opponent, Thomas Adams. While this book is largely centered on New York and their regional planning process, the lessons to be learned from New York continue to be tied to Asheville and other eastern cities that are served by the Parkway. The dialogue within the urban setting is often dominated by the dilemmas of urban sprawl, sustainable development and transportation. While these may not sound like Blue Ridge Parkway concerns, these dilemmas have a direct impact on the Parkway. While each region along the Parkway is unique, there are common problems and discussions that can help us define our issues and hopefully resolve them. The Dalbey book and other thoughtful discussions can help us come to terms with the new urbanism that is growing, not just in this country, but throughout the world. While many signals are in place that are cautionary, the literature explored in the process of researching this exhibit is largely encouraging regarding the health of our national parks and particularly the Blue Ridge Parkway, and there are other hopeful signals. The hope that we can regionally retain our unique identity and maintain its dignity and can also re-grow our economy sensibly, appears to be a very persistent desire in young and old alike. Recent local discussions on urban planning have everything to do with the sustainability of the Parkway and its planning processes. The concepts of urban morphology, and urban tourism and urban planning are inseparable in today's melded world and many understand this symbiosis. As we think about the Blue Ridge Parkway, on this its 75th Birthday, it must be within the context of our new urbanism. |
|
|
|
|
