Our Parks Worth Fighting For pt. 3 (a retrospective.)
Anyone who believes a nation’s history has to be perfect, and hides any imperfections to project a ‘perfect’ image is perfectly a fool.
Our parks are awesome places full of of wonder, mystery, history, and wild things well worth preserving. Sometimes this is as simple as collecting a group of like minded people who agree, but usually it involves a fight. And that fight never ends.
It’s retrospective time, on an article from a month ago.
Why?
Well, as it turns out: It’s incredibly pertinent.
I’m not here to play coy, weave an elaborate story to make my point or practice prose.
This is all about one simple fact. U.S. Park History is being erased, by perfect fools, who are also perfectly weak.
Here is the point: recently there has been an initiative to mark certain signs, webpages, and other media in U.S. National Parks which don’t immediately and positively highlight the ‘natural wonder and history’ of America. Or anything which goes so far as to insult Americans. Any Americans, despite the fact that some of them, like some people from any country, suck.
You can stretch back and read the article about it here. It’s in two parts, and I feel it was well written. (the link goes to the second one)
Why a retrospective, and why now?
Because this: …
Literally became the Truth!
Try it out for yourself.
Here is the link to the original page as provided by the wayback machine: (archived version of the page: here)
And here is what it looks like today:
Woops! Seems to be gone!
Want to check for yourself? Here is the address without the wayback machine:
https://www.nps.gov/bicy/learn/historyculture/miami-jetport.htm
The Page about the Everglades Jetport is gone. It was a big enough part of Everglades and Big Cypress history it still features on Big Cypress’s webpage. I don’t want to go into the whole history now, but
basically: The fight for the Everglades resulted in a much smaller park than anyone anticipated. So small, in comparison, that Ernest F. Coe, one of the leaders declared the establishment of the Everglades a loss, not a win. The Greater Everglades once extended from Lake Okeechobee all through southern Florida, and the park was a small part of that. And, it was still a swamp, which is why in the mid 1960’s plans were made to turn a large part of that that swamp into the first of it’s kind, an International Jetport. An airport, but for passenger jets capable of traveling faster than the speed of sound!
Only, no one wanted the endless sonic booms overhead, so they chose an area of land west of Miami in the swamp. There would be 10 runways, a massive building and a train to take people to Miami proper. They broke ground in 1968. The only problem. ‘They’ weren’t people who lived in, hunted in, fished in, or appreciated the Everglades. ‘They’ were politicians and people far removed from the area only thinking about the money.
And yet, as is often the case in stories about people fighting for parks, People who cared about the Everglades organized and fought back. And Many people from across the aisles joined hands to fight against the Jetport. And they had good reason for that fight. As part off construction, and a consequence of the environmental movement which was moving towards the establishment of the EPA, President Nixon ordered a report on the environmental impact of the proposed jetport. (That’s only a link to the Wikipedia article about it if you want the whole 178 pg article here it is.)
I’ll save you the 178 pages. The report was bad. To quote a better writer: “There are no other Everglades in the World.” (Marjorie Stoneman Douglas.) And there was a good chance that the Jetport would have taken out the only one we had. If not all of it, it would still have done massive damage. Pushing the the already shrinking and struggling one-of-a-kind environment past the brink. More swamp land would be drained, more birds would die, (already a problem in the Everglades) wildlife would vanish and the Everglades would be forever ruined.
This only added fuel to the fire of the growing movement to stop the Jetport, or at least move it out of the Everglades. Hunters, fishers, birders, farmers, the Seminole and the Miccosukee, environmentalists, and many more all came together to oppose the construction which would take that land.
And in 1970, the jetport was stopped. (and good thing too, as it turned out the supersonic concord passenger jet program was a dud, and the continued construction would have opened an already abandoned building.) But even without hindsight, It was a good thing that construction was stopped. The worst things in that report never came to pass. A single runway was built, but the Jetport was stopped.
But that wasn’t the end. Movements have momentum and that can carry even small efforts far into the future. In 1974 Richard Nixon signed into law the first two National Preserves, and Big Cypress was one of them. It was established, in large part, because of the fight against the Jetport. And, because it was established with help across the aisles, it was established as a preserve, so that hunters, fishermen and other outdoorsmen who aren’t always allowed their activities in National Parks could continue to enjoy them.
The fight against the Jetport is a huge part of Big Cypress’s modern history (it has a history extending back long before the establishment of the U.S. much less the park.) And yet you won’t find out about that today on https://www.nps.gov/bicy/learn/historyculture/index.htm.
Instead, for some reason, the narrative history skips from the draining of the swamp in the early 1900’s directly into the establishment of the park in 1974, with nary a mention of what so many people suddenly sprang up to support the formation of a park. Not only that, but a movement of Gladesmen, hunters, fishers, birders, locals, natives, environmentalists, scientists, and so many more has been distilled into a monotone mention of ‘early conservationists, scientists, and other advocates.’
The timeline which highlighed the groundbreaking of the jetport, the environmental report, and the closing of the jetport is gone. The page about the Everglades Jetport is 404 not found.
All that’s left is a single simple picture and a reminder of when the changes happened.
Click that link, and there’s nothing there. (on the page, this is just a picture of that picture.)
So, Now a few questions with obvious answers:
What is lost in the alteration of this page? History. A factual accounting off a movement which establishes not only the end result but the reason for the fight for Big Cypress. The understanding that it was a coalition of many different people who came together for the fight, and how their cooperation helped to establish something new and distinct: a National Preserve. Dignity. Honestly the new page is more insulting to the Americans that fought against the Jetport in it’s absence than anything on the page was to anyone.
If you want to read it, it’s a secret special blog I posted right before this one. Here.
Is it the only page which has been altered or changed so as not to hurt the feelings of the US people? (if you only skimmed or didn’t read the other two parts of pt. 3 That is reference to how the CCP has utilized the phrase “Hurts the feelings of the Chinese people” to use the imagined feelings of their citizen’s as a shield from criticism of the people in power.)
No. It’s obviously not. There’s a fun game: go back and check the pages of some of your favorite parks and find out what has been changed.
What happened to the runway?
Good question, and more important than it seems. The already constructed runway was allowed to stay, and the land to remain in Miami-Dade’s control as a compromise. And it was used for years as a practice runway for commercial flights, a practice which was winding down, and had, comparatively, minimal impact.
Why was this specific page changed?
Because the people in power right now are weak cowards. Weak maybe not of power, but of mind. The land where this jetport was to be built, the land where the fight for the Everglades continued and resulted in the establishment of Big Cypress, and the land which stood for decades as a monument to the success a massive, diverse, and collected environmental movement is being destroyed for a modern day internment camp, called by people who would have sold merch at the originals: Alligator Alcatraz.
Alternative question if you want to suggest that they aren’t weak cowards: Why would they bury the history of this place if they thought Alligator Alcatraz was justified? History doesn’t go away simply because new stuff is built on an old spot, and if there was anything about the page which established a strong argument against Alligator Alcatraz, then it’s only weak cowards who are unable to engage with opposing points of view and instead seek to bury them like a bone of shame in the backyard.
Why is it so bad that this page is gone?
Literally, there is no better focal point to explain the why’s, who’s, and how’s of the formation of Big Cypress. And more locally, excluding the history of the fight for and against the Everglades Jetport pretty much side-steps the entire point of this series, which is that often we have to fight for our parks. And sometimes that fight starts on the backfoot and from behind. Often the fight also comes out of nowhere and blindsides you when everything seems to be working out. But that’s just what happens when you find something worth fighting for.
What about this Alligator Alcatraz thing? Internment camp, that’s some pretty inflammatory language.
To be continued.
What can we do about this?
Park history in general? Visit the webpages of parks you like and start saving stuff now. Especially stuff that might hurt the feelings of coward too weak to face the truth that our history was a patchwork of good and bad from which we should engage and learn not hide and deny.
About this specific page? Read the previous blog, I’ve even included the timeline.
For any and all, you can always leave comments on the park’s webpages. Point out any errors, or missing information, or remind them that some of their links might be down. Heck throw them a bone sometime, the rest of the new history and culture webpage has a better layout than the old one. Just keep in mind that the person who will read the comments is a person, and might not have had anything to do with the changes. (be nice.)
Anything else?
There’s always more that you can do. But no one can do everything or do all of anything all alone, so pick a bite-sized project, in a park you like, find some other people, and work on it together. (This is not an encouragement to do your own trail maintenance, but instead to be proactive about finding a park worth fighting for and then doing that.)