There is a new report analyzing the value of protected open space in SE PA that should interest you. The study, commissioned by the GreenSpace Alliance and Delaware Valley Regional Planning, reports the following:
Approximately 300 square miles, or 14%, of the five-county region is protected open space. The study found that this area:
Adds $16 billion to the value of southeastern Pennsylvania’s housing stock – an average property value increase of $10,000 per household;
Saves local governments and taxpayers more than $132 million a year in costs associated with provision of environmental services such as drinking water filtration and flood control;
Helps residents and businesses avoid nearly $800 million in direct and indirect medical costs as a result of recreation that takes place on protected open space;
Generates more than $270 million in state and local tax revenue; and
The flight from Houston to LA is earth toned. From 30,000 feet the earth below is a Wheat Chex, a neatly gridded oil-and-gas field once prairie, bison, and surface life rather than subsurface petroleum. We will eventually suck this planet dry, every drop of oil and every whiff of gas. From my airborne vantage point Texans look well on their way in the Trans-Pecos.
After an interminably taxing campaign, the Americans who cared to vote have spoken. Billions were spent; a few listened. Simple messages of anger, hate, and desperation, endlessly repeated, inspired the susceptible (try 25% 65 and older) to give the keys back to rubes that wrecked the country in the first place. If you liked the profligacy of the past, laissez les bons temps roulez!
Not much surprises me. History shows that the American democracy is a two-step-forward, one-step-backward affair. Until the early 20th Century and the 17th Amendment our senators were “elected” by the state legislatures. Now there are a few boneheads in ascendency that would repeal the 17th Amendment and snatch the vote back from the American people. Americans have been able to ignore the most egregious inequities (slavery, for example), while vigorously debating the most trivial. What matters is the latest casualty on Dancing with the Stars. At times America has risen to astonishing heights; this is not one of them.
One of those transcendent moments dates to the earliest days of the 20th Century. Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot have topographic maps strewn around the president’s offices, and the two are pacing about trying to identify those last open lands to be protected under the Antiquities Act before the senate exercises its “advice and consent” prerogatives. Their legacy lives on in our national parks, forests, and wildlife refuges, the most perfect manifestation of the American democracy. Now there are those in ascendency who would sell those lands, privatize the parks or shut the gates, and deny the American people what has been their birthright for over a century.
Isn’t it odd, even slightly queer, that American conservation, one of our most precious gifts to the world, found its voice first in the Republican Party? Now there are some in this same party, the party of Lincoln, who would undo Roosevelt, Pinchot, and Muir’s painstakingly crafted handiwork. Now there are some in this same party who would auction the lot to the highest bidder.
As I said, not much surprises me. Roosevelt, Pinchot, Muir, Bird, Chapman, Dock, McFarland, Rothrock, Edge, and Carson would not be surprised, either. Roosevelt relished the fight, the rare opportunity when a person can war for right against wrong, for good against evil, for what is fair against what is unfair. Conservation has always been intensely political rather than stridently partisan. Even Republican Richard Nixon recognized the deplorable condition of America’s air, waters, and wildlife in the late 1960s, and passed the most progressive suite of environmental laws in the world (NEPA, Endangered Species Act, Clear Air Act, Clean Water Act).
To protect America’s special places, to insure that our public land legacy will be inherited by future generations, we will need to transcend partisanship once again. Like-minded Republicans, Democrats, Green Partiers, and independents will be called to band together and confront those in the ascendency who care nothing for this American legacy, nothing for this American heritage, and nothing for the American space. Compromise in conservation is no more palatable or conceivable than compromise in civil rights, or free speech, or the right to worship, or the right to peaceably assemble. All of these rights, these values, are fundamental to the American character. I, for one, am willing to sacrifice none of them on an altar of greed, spite, myopia, and partisanship.
Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, said “I like to see a man proud of the place in which he lives.” Would Americans be as proud of their country without Yosemite, or the Grand Canyon, or Acadia National Park, or the Everglades, or Independence Hall, or the Statue of Liberty, or Gettysburg, or the Black Hills, or the Tongass National Forest? Would you be as happy (yes, happy is an American word, as in “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”) in your skin and community without parks, libraries, trails, greenways, scenic byways, museums, or sanctuaries?
If not, if you cannot fathom life without having the riches of culture, history, or nature within arm’s reach, if you cannot imagine sacrificing any of these for personal gain or partisan greed, then accept that all are at risk without your active political engagement and effort. Conservation is a calling, one that views all political parties with skepticism and trepidation until good intentions are proven. At this critical juncture, this defining moment in the American experiment, conservation is calling again. I wonder who hears, and who will answer.
Only rarely do I find the time or inclination to let you know what we have accomplished. One of the curses of a business like this is we never have time to recline and enjoy our handiwork, We are invariably rushing to the next contract, to the next meeting. As my grandmother often said, “there is no rest for the wicked” (which, to this date, I still do not understand). We are proud of all of our projects, and here are a select few that are in the headlines at the moment.
Illinois
Illinois River Road Scenic Byway
Starved Rock
A few weeks ago I wrote on our weblog about the Illinois River Road Scenic Byway. This byway runs along the Illinois River from (roughly speaking) Starved Rock State Park to the Nature Conservancy’s Emiquon sanctuary and Havana.
Anaise Berry is the Director for the Illinois River Road National Scenic Byway, and this morning she sent me the following:
The Illinois River Road National Scenic Byway’s website had 7,790 visitors during the month of September, a 25% increase over the average number of monthly visitors – a new high for the two-year old website. Although visits to the Byway website have been trending steadily upward, this boost likely resulted from a lengthy feature article about traveling the Illinois River Road, which appears in the October 2010 issue of Midwest Living® Magazine.
The Midwest Living® article has generated considerable interest in the Byway region, stretching from Ottawa to Havana, also resulting in a record number of requests for information about the region. These requests for visitor information are coming not only from Chicago area residents, but also from Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan and Iowa. This kind of attention puts all of our Byway Gateway, Portal and Supporting Communities in the “visitor spotlight,” showcasing this very special region to potential visitors.
With the Calendar of Events being the most frequently visited page on the website, this is a great time for communities, sites and organizations to upload events and goings-on scheduled for this Fall, Winter and next Spring! Byway travelers are looking for authentic experiences along their journey, and will plan their itineraries based upon events and sites in the various Byway communities. Festivals, cultural events and eagle watching are just a sampling of the events are visitors want to explore.
Hackmatack
Big Bluestem
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has announced their decision to proceed with a study to determine the feasibility of establishing a Hackmatack National Wildlife Refuge in the bi-state region of southeastern Wisconsin and northeastern Illinois. Long known as an ecological hotspot, the region is home to many rare bird, fish, freshwater mussel and plant species, as well as some of the world’s most globally imperiled natural communities, including tall grass prairie and oak savanna. Fermata, under contract to Openlands and the Trust for Public Land, developed a viability study for this proposed refuge. This effort has received unflagging support from the Friends of Hackmatack, and nowhere did their support count more than in the four public meetings held by the USFWS to discuss the refuge. We are elated to see that USFWS continue on with this important project.
Pennsylvania
Columbia bridge, Lower SusquehannaFermata finished its final Conservation Landscape Initiative (CLI), the Lower Susquehanna. Of the seven PA DCNR CLIs Fermata developed five. This approach to sustainable development, recreation, and tourism has already received recognition. In 2009 the National Association of Recreation Resource Planners (NARRP) recognized PA DCNR with its planning award for the Laurel Highlands CLI, one of Fermata’s projects. The department’s regional approach to conserving landscapes and tying them to economic growth for communities is one of the creative government initiatives chosen for the “Bright Ideas Program” by the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Ted Eubanks and Fermata began working for PA DCNR in Pennsylvania a decade ago, and our earliest work on elk watching in Northcentral PA became the PA Wilds and the CLIs. Congratulations to all.
The weather heads salivated for days. Nothing provokes a Pavlovian response in weather geeks more than another storm of the century (How many are we allowed in one century?). I knew Pittsburgh to be in the path, but we glided into town with little trouble. Deplaning I watched the frontal system sweep the runway, and by the time we entered the terminal spitting rain and raging winds shook the building. Scheduled to speak in West Virginia the following day, I sprinted to my rental car and headed west toward the interstate. I made the mistake of following the directions dictated by my iPhone, and soon I left the interstate far behind and slid toward Appalachia on a narrow, serpentine two-laner.
While certainly no hurricane (I love how the weather heads trot out that analogy.), I decided that the rain, wind, darkness, a narrow road, and 60-year-old eyes did not blend well. I bailed early. Reaching I-76 (my route south), I navigated toward Cambridge, Ohio. I am not sure if I had previously heard of Cambridge, but I am certain that I never visited (To be honest, I still don’t know why I ended up in Ohio.). Situated at the intersection of two interstates, I suspected that I could find a hotel and restaurant along the highway. I exited the freeway at Cambridge and entered the American Everywhere.
James Kunstler characterized America as “ever-busy, ever-building, ever-in-motion, ever-throwing-out the old for the new; we have hardly paused to think about what we are so busy building, and what we have thrown away. Meanwhile, the everyday landscape becomes more nightmarish and unmanageable every year. For many, the word development itself has become a dirty word.” Cambridge, I found, is this everyday landscape. The town offered its handshake with Ruby Tuesday, Hampton Inn, McDonalds, and Pizza Hut. All were the same as at home; all were the same as found throughout interstate America. To Kunstler this is nowhere; to me it’s everywhere.
America is new, rootless. Americans share an impoverished sense of place. We have no Mecca, no Angkor Wat, and no Taj Mahal. American natives have special places, but we immigrants see little value in them. Consider the conflict over Bear Butte, South Dakota. To the Lakota this is sacred ground. To Sturgis this is a potential campground and parking spot for Harley riders.
Early conservationists believed that America’s specialness could be found in her landscapes. Theodore Roosevelt said that “There can be nothing in the world more beautiful than the Yosemite, the groves of the giant sequoias and redwoods, the Canyon of the Colorado, the Canyon of the Yellowstone, the Three Tetons; and our people should see to it that they are preserved for their children and their children’s children forever, with their majestic beauty all unmarred.”. For Roosevelt, what America lacked in ancient monuments and edifices it more than gained with her transcendent lands and wildlife.
Americans, however, are now becoming detached from this heritage, with these special places. Roosevelt warned that “the lack of power to take joy in outdoor nature is as real a misfortune as the lack of power to take joy in books.” How many Americans take joy in either? In 2004, a National Endowment for the Arts report titled “Reading at Risk” found only 57 percent of American adults had read a book in 2002. The Outdoor Foundation reports that over half of Americans “take no joy in outdoor nature,” with alarming numbers of children divorced from the outdoors.
Now, slipping into Cambridge, I confront the America devised by its marketeers. I see the America invented by global hucksters, their goods relentlessly hawked on the ubiquitous television. The McDonalds on the screen is the McDonalds in Cambridge. The Wal-Mart on television is the Wal-Mart in Cambridge. The streets signs, billboards, traffic lights, and facades are no more real in Cambridge than on the tube. This version of America, known by all, is fakery unleashed and unlimited. I can’t decide if I am in the Matrix or the Truman Show.
As a child I would visit my grandparents in Paris (Texas) several times a year. In that pre-interstate age (President Eisenhower, who initiated the interstate system, did not begin his presidency until 1953.), the roads invariably wended from downtown to downtown. My sister and I knew every hamburger joint and rest stop between Bryan and Paris. Even today I remember the sweet-and-sour lusciousness of the limeade in Sulphur Springs. Each town along our route had an identity, a character.
Now, your McDonalds is my McDonalds, your Wal-Mart is my Wal-Mart. Why leave home if all that is offered away is the same as in your neighborhood? Forget the family that once owned and worked in that Sulphur Springs hamburger and limeade joint, or the snow cone cart by the railroad track that my grandfather would take us by after work. What is more important to Everywhere America is that (1) everywhere is the same, and (2) everywhere is cheap.
One hotel is easily replaced by another (Hampton by Holiday Inn Express). One restaurant is easily substituted for another (Ruby Tuesday by Chiles). But what about that for which there are no substitutes? Would you replace Gettysburg with any Civil War site? What about substituting a pileated for the ivory-billed woodpecker, or a mourning dove for the passenger pigeon, or a penguin for the great auk? In a world of cheap throwaways and easy replacements, that which cannot be replaced is at risk.
Returning to my factory hotel I jotted a note on Facebook about Cambridge, a brief snippet asking “where the hell am I?” The responses came immediately. One friend wrote “heard of it. Dangerously close to my old stomping grounds and soon to be new stomping grounds. And yes, there’s really not much there!!” My heart sank (not really; I stopped for a meal and a bed). Then another friend sent the following: “You are near an excellent birding location! It’s called “the Wilds.” It’s a reclaimed strip mining area… The facility also has yurts for overnight guests. Very cool place and staff.” Soon another posted that “that area is full of special places…the Wilds being number one.” Humm, there seems to be a there there.
But how would you know if you bumped into Cambridge from the interstate? Like America, Cambridge is hidden by a shiny plastic wrapper. Only when you peel the layers back do you find the meat on the bones, the Hocking Hills, the Salt Fork State Park, and the Wilds. The American marketing machine sells gloss and I am interested in gristle.
How can we save that which does not exist for most Americans? Federal programs such as the National Heritage Areas and America’s Byways are selective and only touch on a few of these special places. Getting people into the outdoors is only a small part of the challenge. First, they need to know where to find the outdoors. Second, once there they need help in connecting to the land, its recreations, and its stories. Modern television marketing is delivered turn-key, without any requirement that you think. In the outdoors, the experiences are earned rather than gratis.
Finally, our special places need space. The American soul (as tangibly embodied in these places) is being squeezed from all sides, with what makes the American experience special being pushed aside for a marketeer’s version of the American story. American places need space in the American mind and in the American landscape. These are the American touchstones, special places with names and physical locations where we return to remind us of who we are, what we have accomplished, and how to navigate forward based on our past experiences.
Blackburnian Warbler
Isn’t this a critical aspect and appeal of birding? Each spring I return to the Texas coast to see the same birds that pass through the same special places such as High Island. With each day new migrants appear, northern parula followed by rose-breasted grosbeak followed by blackburnian warbler followed by yellow-billed cuckoo followed by least flycatcher. What could be more reassuring than the annual reappearance of birds that we exert absolutely no control over? As long as we protect their places, their cycle will continue. As long as we protect their places, our children and grandchildren will find the same inspiration and joy in this spring ritual that I have for the past four decades.
In the early 1990s I begin developing the first birding trail with Texas Parks and Wildlife. I remember being criticized by a group from Colorado that assured me that “real” birders did not need my birding trails. Perhaps “real” birders can find these special places, but the vast majority of the rest of us can’t. With initiatives such as birding trails, IBAs, and eBird places we are bringing America’s special birding places to the attention of the public and the officials guided by their sentiments. Birding trails are a celebration of birding places, those parks, refuges, and sanctuaries where we return to reassure ourselves that the world is still spinning and that the birds are still migrating.
America is adrift, stumbling forward with a road map drawn by shock-jocks and gas bags. When lost we tune in our favorite bloviator and ask for directions. Yet there is a real behind the unreal, a wonderful store filled with goodies behind the facade. If you want to know the American story, you must experience the American places. If these places are to continue to comfort, inform, enlighten, entertain, inspire, enliven, guide, and reassure us, then they must be given ample space in the American psyche. America, now more than ever, needs space for place.
Common PauraqueStephen Hawking hurts my head. I am certain that he is the best-selling, least-read author in any of his infinite number of possible universes. I wonder how many have started A Brief History of Time only to bail by the second chapter. Has anyone actually finished one of his books? I do not doubt that he has helped popularize cosmology; I am not sure with whom.
Alternative universes, however, I grasp. I hear one every night as I stare at the 3 a.m. ceiling. Crickets and cicadas underpin the more penetrating tones. A screech owl’s tremolo vibrates through my bedroom, catapulting two cats into an open window. A raccoon cracks his way through this fall’s pecan crop. Nighthawks speent, horned owls boo, and plovers recite onomatopoeias across the night sky. In late fall these familiar sounds will be joined by migrants, each marking its presence in my airspace as they drift south.
Night has always mystified us. The dark space outside the campfire’s glow is the other world, a void filled with every conceivable monster, ghost, troll, and ghoul. Now I learn from Hawking that this is simply one of an infinite number of possible universes, along with mine filled with house cats, raccoons, and owls.
To ancient man these night sounds confirmed ancient fears. Could a ghost be any more terrifying than a cadaverous barn owl hovering around a church steeple hissing its goose-pimpling shriek? Consider the names given night callers such as chuck-wills-widow, whip-poor-will, and poor-will. What did Will do to deserve this fate? Known as nightjars (their calls jar the night), the Caprimulgids include the nightjars, goatsuckers, frogmouths, potoos, and the oilbird. Birds of the day become alluring tits, warblers, and kingbirds. Birds of the night suck goats.
Common Nighthawk
While we may not be awake to see them, the list of nocturnal animals is impressive. Owls, nightjars, rails, and night-herons are among the birds. In Galveston I have seen migrants such as Empidonax gleaning bugs from my well-lit window screens late into the night. Most land birds migrate at night, and an entire science has arisen to detect these movements through Doppler radar and night calls. Many seabirds leave their nests only at night to avoid predators. Night may be an alternative universe, but at least it is well occupied.
To birds add coyotes (until Hurricane Ike flooded our island, coyotes were frequently seen loping through the main tourist district downtown), foxes, armadillos, amphibians (the gulf coast toads that mate in my backyard pond drown out all other organic night sounds during their summer peak), and snakes. Life on this planet is 24/7, with no days off. Life is an inexorable, relentless force, sifting into every crevasse, every niche of this planet.
Most of what I hear, though, is the sound of oil. Mopeds, garbage trucks, police patrols, Boeing 737s, unmufflered street cars, churning locomotives, spewing oil refineries, petrochemical barges, and cruise ships pollute my sound scape, and shove native life and sounds into the background. I try to imagine life before Drake, before Oilcan Harry. I have read that the Greeks would not have developed their constellation-based mythology if faced with the light pollution of today’s Athens. More than one fifth of the world’s population, two thirds of the U.S. population, and one half of the European Union population have already lost naked eye visibility of the Milky Way.
What about sound pollution? Nightjars often have onomatopoetic names, but what if our forefathers had never heard them above an industrial din? Why are light and sound pollution secondary to that of water and air? Isn’t the quality of one’s life impacted by the ability to see and hear, not just being able to breathe and drink? Noise is pollution. Artificial light is pollution. We accept both by scarring them over, accepting deprivation as a cost of “modern” life. How difficult is darkness? How hard is silence?
Ten people who speak make more noise than ten thousand who are silent… Napoleon Bonaparte
Fulvous Owl, El Triunfo, MexicoThe night may be familiar where you live but the exoticism of night is enhanced elsewhere. In 1980 I joined two friends, Fred Collins and Jim Morgan, in a birding trip from Houston to northern Mexico. Fred drove his International Harvester Scout, and I rode shotgun to keep my hands on a four-wheel drive shift that kept jumping out of gear. After a brief stop at El Salto we continued to Mante, arriving in late afternoon. After enchiladas suizas and a couple of Dos Equis, we wandered off in search of los pajaros de la noche, the birds of the night.
Fred knew of a river nearby, and we decided to drive the road that paralleled the riverbank in hopes of seeing one of the Mexican owls. Fred had brought his 1 million candlepower spotlight that plugged into the cigarette lighter, and we puttered our way along the river while punctuating the night with intermittent bursts of blinding light. Close Encounters of a Third Kind had been released just a few years earlier, and I was certain that any spotlighted owl would be blazened in place like Richard Dreyfuss at the railroad crossing.
Our trip halted, sans owls, where the road ended at a small dam. We decided to give the light one last try, and noticed a common pauraque squatting on the road’s warm pavement. Pauraques are common in South Texas, though, and we were in search of exotica. Again Fred lit the trees, and within moments a rifle barrel thrust through his open window. We froze, so blinded by the spotlight that we could not see outside the Scout. Fred doused the beacon, and as our eyes adjusted we saw a young federale fingering the gun. Every governmental facility is guarded in Mexico, and we had unknowingly (or stupidly) wandered into a protected site (did I mention that I also carried a Bushell Spacemaster spotting scope mounted on a gunstock, and while Fred spotlighted I had been looking through optics that to this young man surely looked like a missile launcher or bazooka?).
Joined by a couple of his fellow guards, he asked what we were doing. In my broken Spanish I said that we were looking for pajaros de la noche. He asked me again, and I repeated the refrain. Without warning he and his compadres exploded in laughter, with rifles, spit, and gut-busting guffaws flying loose in every direction. We had no clue what I had said or done to set them off, but we smartly decided that laughter beat bullets. Ted Eubanks, Fred Collins, and Jim Morgan, El Salto, Mexico, February 1980
Eventually the federales regrouped, and I tried to rephrase my earlier answer. I thumbed through my Mexican field guide, and showed the youngest of the group an illustration of an owl, el buho. The group erupted again, this time combined with looks of incredulity. Eventually he blurted out the word “whore,” and we began to get the drift.
Pajaros de la noche had an alternative meaning there – prostitute. The federales had discovered three wide-eyed gringos with binoculars and a spotlight looking for prostitutes along the river. We had stumbled into one of the alternative universes, one in which tourists search for nighttime entertainment with spotlights and a field guide. We all shook hands and enjoyed a good laugh. Fred then aimed the Scout toward the hotel, drove us back through the worm hole, and into warm beds.
