The Fingerprints of Change

The fingerprints of change are often evident decades before they are credited in narratives.

In the United States, concern for the environment is often traced to then-Republican President Richard Nixon’s announcement in 1970, the day after my 22nd birthday, when he laid out plans to establish the US Environmental Protection Agency, following the enactment six months earlier of landmark environmental policy legislation.

However, by then, concern for the environment at the federal level had been percolating for at least 80 years, beginning with the 1899 passage of the Harbors and Rivers Act under another Republican President William McKinley.

It was the states that pushed for central supervision of environmental matters and by 1913 the federal government began to study the health risks related to water pollution.

At the turn of the 19th century, Chicago, Illinois was seeking to stem forty years of typhoid outbreaks there, the disease that had claimed the son of Republican President and Illinois-favorite-son, Abraham Lincoln after sewage from army camps had polluted the Potomac River adjacent to the US Capitol.

Chicago rechanneled its sewage discharge away from Lake Michigan, where the city also drew drinking water, to the west and into the Mississippi River where it eventually found its way downstream and fouled drinking water for St. Louis, Missouri, creating one of the earliest environmental interstate conflicts.

According to sustainability historians such as Dr. Jouni Paavola, early in the 20th century, New York and New Jersey similarly clashed when NY objected to NJ sewage being rechanneled into upper New York Bay and NJ objected in return that garbage was washing up on NJ beaches after being dumped at sea by NY.

In the 1920s, under another Republican President, Calvin Coolidge, federal agencies were first granted authority to protect migrating water fowl, regulate pesticides, study air pollution and control pollution from oil.

A week after my seventh birthday, in mid 1955, just a year after the US Supreme Court had desegregated schools and as officials were preparing the first nation-wide immunization of school children against polio, federal agencies under another Republican President, Dwight. D. Eisenhower, were first granted the responsibility to control and mitigate air pollution, 15 years before Nixon created the EPA.

Far from being a power grab, as it is stigmatized by many of today’s Republicans, the federal government centralized environmental protection only after attempts failed so miserably to incentivize control and standards at the local and state levels.

Today as many elected Republicans sabre-rattle in my adopted home state of North Carolina threatening to overturn environmental regulations including those that safeguard air and water quality, hopefully they are reminded that:

• They owe their election not to extremists or anti-environmentalists in their party but to political Independents, a majority of whom are moderates who overwhelmingly, in North Carolina and across the nation, place a high priority on clean air and water.

 

• North Carolinians love their state and its beauty and sense of place.  The majority of voters in all three parties view what’s good for the environment as good for the economy.

 

• As a North Carolina native and conservative Republican, who champions his party’s environmental legacy, wrote recently about environmental desecration: it “is as impious as it is imprudent. It is certainly not conservative.”

 

• They remember the rule espoused by the late William F. Buckley, a famous conservative Republican, when he implied that anyone voting to foul the environment should first be required to similarly foul the area around their own home and family and neighborhood including the water they drink and the air they breathe.

A Recovery For Penn’s Woods

As I drove recently for the first time up through central and northeast  Pennsylvania, from near Gettysburg up past the Great Bend, I wasn’t prepared for how beautiful it is nor how unusual its mountains are.

They rise sharply, each in solitude, from pastoral valleys as short, narrow, very even and individual tree-laden sandstone ridges, some as high as 2,300 feet, around which the broad, pre-existing forks of the Susquehanna River meander through softer limestone and shale as they are replenished from streams issuing from the ridges.

One near Frackville offered a bit of “energy” irony with a row of sustainable energy windmills along its top surrounding what looked like a fossil fuel fracking tower (the town’s name pre-dates that technology.)

It would have looked much different a 111 years ago as President Theodore Roosevelt cut across the path I took, as he rode the train in 1901 carrying the body of the just-assassinated President McKinley from Buffalo NY back to Washington, DC.

The young Republican President described seeing seas forested by nothing but stumps and more stumps, the aftermath of another era of unsustainable resource plunder and failed public stewardship that saw two-thirds of the deforestation of the last 400 years in this country take place over just a 60 year period, eroding soil, flooding commerce and polluting rivers.

Were Roosevelt not already an ardent conservationist, that sobering trip may have become his epiphany.  Thanks in part to his inspiration the state literally named Penn’s Woods would be much different today.

With the exception of where fracking has been enabled even in state forests, 60% of the Pennsylvania Commonwealth is covered by 17 million acres of quality hardwood forest, an increase of 30% from its historic low, anchored by 26% that is owned and managed in the public interest, including watersheds, by state, federal and municipal governments and 70% of which is controlled by private forest owners.

On our return to Durham, North Carolina, we carved a route through the scenic Delaware Water Gap where, from its source at Mt. Jefferson in New York, the Delaware River cuts a dramatic gap through the Blue Mountains of the Appalachians as it courses along the entire border of Pennsylvania and New Jersey before emptying into the Atlantic through Delaware Bay below Wilmington forming the border between the states of Delaware and New Jersey.

Prior to road trips I’ve taken over the last couple of years, my only impressions of Pennsylvania were limited to flying into Pittsburgh and Philadelphia on business trips .

Several of my ancestors spent their first years as Americans in that state, including those with names such as Arbuckle, Buzby, Bowman, Evans, Harper, Longworthy, Livezey, Messersmith and McCrory, so the trip this summer definitely will not have been my last.

Behind North Carolina's Scenic Byways

People may be surprised to learn that Durham County where I live, is the only one of North Carolina’s urban counties that is home to one of the state’s Scenic Byways.

This is because Durham is not only home to the state’s fifth largest city, which is also the core anchor for a four-county metropolitan area, but it is the 17th smallest land area of the state's 100 counties. Durham even rivals the county where the town of Asheville is located in North Carolina’s mountain region for scenic byways.

Little did I know when I was first recruited to Durham in 1989 to jumpstart the community’s official marketing agency that within days I would be sitting next to then-Governor Jim Martin behind plate at a Durham Bulls baseball game in the Historic Durham Athletic Park.

Nor did I realize at the time that this Republican governor, only the second since Reconstruction, had just set in motion the development of what would become the state’s award-winning Scenic Byways program.  

People such as Martin with a PhD in Chemistry have become increasingly rare in the Republican Party, an affiliation claimed by only 6% of today's scientists, 12% counting the portion of political Independents who lean that way.  Blinded by the lack of empirical voice and research-based decision-making, members of that party are now trying to eliminate the National Scenic Byways program as well as grants to enhance roadsides.

It was a few years after that evening with Governor Martin that I first  became acquainted with the name Bill Johnson, who was the State Roadside Environmental Engineer and one of the driving forces in developing and evolving the byways program.  As the head of the Durham Convention & Visitors Bureau I had been asked by the then-chair and vice-chair of the Durham County Board of Commissioners  to identify and help qualify potential byway routes here.

The state accepted two of several potential routes we identified including a spectacular 27 mile loop through the northern part of  Durham County including rural parts of the City.  We identified another through Duke Forest which was accepted as the terminal segment for the 92-mile Colonial Heritage Byway that begins near the border between Guilford and Rockingham counties, cutting across and up through Caswell County to within view of Hyco Lake along the Person County line before dropping down through Orange County and then over into Durham and through Duke Forest before terminating very near where I live.

During his tenure as the state’s roadside executive Bill also had a hand in implementing the beautification of North Carolina's roadways with spectacular beds of wildflowers, an idea spurred by Governor Martin’s wife Dottie.

Bill understood research showing that when it comes to maintaining roadsides, removing litter is a short-term inhibitor to littering behavior but coupling it with beautification creates a shared sense of responsibility and a longer term and more sustainable fix.

A good friend now, Bill’s retired and lives “down east”, as we call it, where he has a business and does some farming but his passion remains the overall scenic beauty of North Carolina, especially as viewed from the state’s roadways, that is, except where easements to block that scenery as well as clear-cut football-field sized swaths of trees and vegetation on each side have been gratuitously granted to more than 8,000 huge, stationary outdoor billboards.

Now also in retirement, it is my honor and privilege to continue to work with Bill in a renewed statewide grassroots effort to preserve, protect and restore the state’s scenic character including what is evident along its roads and highways.

Bill and his wife have driven every one of North Carolina's Scenic Byways and on my Harley Crossbones I'm trying to do the same.  Anyone wishing to join us can:

• Click on this link for website of North Carolina's Scenic Byways.

 

• Using the interactive map shown, select one of the three regions of the state to view the Byways then click on the icon next to a Byway of interest for a pop-up with a brief description and a link for more information.

 

• Download a PDF of all of the Byways by clicking this link or use the information on the website to request the booklet.

The Fire That Ignited Environmentalism!

Heading west on a cross-country trip a few months ago, Mugs (my English Bulldog) and I took our first drive on historic turnpikes beginning with a slice up through western Pennsylvania and then across Ohio and Indiana.  These roads seemed refreshingly free of the blight of outdoor billboards.

Even though our trip was routed to include National Parks such as Theodore Roosevelt, Glacier, Yellowstone and Grand Teton, for some reason it hadn’t dawned on me until I was there on the Ohio Turnpike  that I would first cross through the tiny but sixth most visited Cuyahoga Valley National Park (CVNP) which embraces 22 spectacular miles of that famous river once traversed by Johnny Appleseed.

Crossing the Cuyahoga River that day, as it winds between Akron and Cleveland on its way to emptying into Lake Erie, brought back memories of when it caught on fire further downstream in 1969, the ninth time it had done in the previous hundred years dating back to 1868.

The news media latched onto the 1969 event as though it were the first occurrence, just as the news media mistakenly identified a Civil Rights event nine years earlier in Greensboro NC as the first sit-in when many had been held years earlier, such as the many held in Durham where I have lived since 1989.

However, while far from the first, the 1969 fire on the Cuyahoga River as it passed through Cleveland, a city known for its parks and open spaces, served to reignite nation-wide concern about protecting the environment and spawned guardians such as the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and a host of other environmental protections defamed today by hundreds of attempts to roll them back by Republican-led votes in Congress and state legislatures across the country.

Efforts to establish the Cuyahoga Valley National Park date back to 1910. While it gained some Federal protection just five years after the infamous pollution-fueled fire just downstream, CVNP didn’t become a complete reality until 2000.  However, plans were intensified by the shame of the river being branded in the news and by late-night-talk-show comics by references to the 1969 fire in the river as it passed through Cleveland.

Belying the fact that a Republican President spawned the conservation movement more than a hundred years ago and another the EPA only 17 months after that emblematic fire on the Cuyahoga, ultra-conservative members of that party have long-loathed parks and open spaces as well as environmental protection and dismissed them as “nature socialism.”

In his now-prescient 2007 book Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You With the Bill,) investigative journalist David Cay Johnson notes that advisors to 1964 Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater lobbied for elimination of all national parks.

He also notes that in 1981, the libertarian-ultra-conservative think-tank Cato Institute argued for eliminating all public parks and in 2007 an institute named for the mentor to Republican-Libertarian cult-economist F.A. Hayek denounced parks.

To me, as a moderate-Independent, Republican opposition to conservation, public parkland and clean air and water has been as consistent as it is incomprehensible.  Based on the current votes in Congress and in our state legislature, it is more than fringe support in that party.

Fortunately, many Republicans eventually come to their senses as Goldwater did when in 1996 when, at age 89, he joined the newly-formed Republicans for Environmental Protection.  In the meantime, we just need to protect the environment from those still on the other side of the issue.

Republicans today, all but purged of anything except conservative and ultra-conservative viewpoints, need to heed that organization’s slogan “Conservation is Conservative® !”