Park supporters hope Bush visit makes case to help Smokies

Traveling to picturesque Cades Cove, about 30 miles south of Knoxville, Bush will help restore a trail and give a speech emphasizing “personal environmental stewardship, cooperative conservation and volunteerism,” aide Taylor Gross said.

It will be the first visit by a U.S. president to the 520,000-acre preserve on the Tennessee-North Carolina border since Franklin Roosevelt came to dedicate the park in 1940.

“It’s a great opportunity to show off the Smokies … and help to educate the White House and a national audience about the benefits of volunteerism in the Smokies and raise awareness about what is being done to improve air quality,” park spokesman Bob Miller said Thursday.

“I think it is a good news story, but people will also need to know that a lot of things will have to be done for this progress to continue,” he said.

More than 9 million people annually visit the Smokies, which was created in 1933 from donations by the two states and their citizens. Today, more than 2,100 people give their time each year to help staff the park’s visitors centers, clear trails and refurbish buildings.

Critics say the volunteers are needed because the Bush administration hasn’t done enough to reduce the parks’ mounting maintenance backlogs. Bush supporter U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., who lives near the Smokies, said the president has “lived up to his commitment to spend $5 billion on the national park backlog.”

But Alexander said more is needed. On Thursday, Alexander and others introduced a proposed “National Park Centennial Act of 2005” that would provide additional funding for these purposes through a taxpayer checkoff on income tax forms.

“Why single out the national parks on our tax returns?” Alexander said. “I think I have an answer to that: Egypt has its pyramids, England has its history, Italy has its art, and the United States has the great American outdoors. And the national parks are the best expression of that.”

The Smokies also have a pollution problem. Industrial soot and smog from near and far away collect here and percolate, particularly in the summer, reducing mountain vistas with haze, stunting plants with acid rain and threatening the health of asthmatic visitors with ozone.

The park already has recorded three days of unhealthy ozone levels this week. That’s as many as all of last year, which was the fewest since record keeping began in 1980 and a suggestion that air quality was improving — in part because of billions of dollars in new pollution controls on Tennessee Valley Authority coal-fired power plants.

“We welcome President Bush’s visit and … support his initiative to recognize volunteers that work in the park,” said Steve Smith of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy. “But Earth Day is a time to reflect on environmental records and necessary steps going forward.”

Any recent improvements in air quality in the Smokies, he said, “are happening in spite of this administration, not because of anything this administration has done or is doing.”

“While it is appropriate to celebrate volunteerism and to acknowledge any air improvements around the Great Smokies, it is the height of hypocrisy for President Bush to come to the Smokies on Earth Day,” echoed David Muhly, regional representative for the Sierra Club.

“The president’s policies have basically been to turn back or slow the rate of air quality improvement in and around the park,” he said.

Mary Anne Hitt of North Carolina-based Appalachian Voices said Bush’s visit reinforced that the Smokies are “not only a crown jewel among our eastern national parks, but also one of the most special places in America.”

“I think we are all very proud that the park is getting this kind of recognition,” she said. “But we are also concerned that the president’s policies, particularly on air pollution, would really pose a long-term threat to the health of the park and to the future of the tourism economy that is dependent on the health of the Great Smoky Mountains.”

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