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David Spates Drop in Smokies visitors? That's good news! You can't have your cake and eat it too. Quite a way to start off a column, don't you
think? There's nothing like a tired old cliché with which
to begin an award-winning column in an award-winning newspaper.
That's how we've won all those awards you see when you walk into
the Chronicle offices -- by employing overused clichés
at every opportunity. I kid. We at the paper are proud of our awards. It is true, however. Once you commit to an
option, the other option often vanishes. Still, some folks would
like to be able to chow down on their devil's food while at the
same time gazing upon its luscious brown beauty. Take the people involved in the struggle between pollution control and tourism dollars in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Business owners near the park depend on the millions of visitors for their livelihoods, and yet the park has become one of the most endangered U.S. parks because of air pollution. So far this year, the park has tallied four
days in which ground-level ozone levels were unsafe -- the air
was unfit for human consumption. Some of the ozone problems are
tied to coal-fired power plants, but much of the problem centers
around the visitors and their cars. Cars and coal-fired power
plants produce nitrogen oxide, which combines with sunlight to
produce ozone, a parent of smog. So there's the rub. You can't have your tourists
and eat them too, or something like that. The Great Smoky Mountains National Park is
the most-visited national park in the country, and people have
proven themselves to be dirty little animals. We make messes
wherever we go, and the Smoky Mountains are no different. In
fact, the park recorded 32 "bad ozone" days in 2000
and a whopping 52 days in 1999. Visiting the great outdoors for
a breath of fresh air is getting pretty tough to do. So everyone agrees air pollution in the park
is a problem, and we also agree that people and their gas-guzzling
vehicles are a big part of the dilemma. With that in mind, why is the editorial board
at The Knoxville News-Sentinel worried that park visitation
is down for every month since the first of the year compared
to the same months last year? I spotted this little item in the Saturday
Sentinel's comment page. (That's the opinion page to you
and me.) It's one lone paragraph in the paper's editorial under
the "Grimaces" heading. According to the Sentinel,
park camping is down by 14 percent, and total visitors to the
park from January through June 2001 is 3,678,528 - a drop of
more than 341,837 from 4,020,365 visitors for the same period
in 2000. The Sentinel seems to think that this
drop in attendance is bad news. I don't. As a matter of fact,
I think the paper's editorial board should have listed this item
under the "Grins" section rather than the "Grimaces." This is good news. It means that there were
tens of thousands less SUVs, minivans and family sedans belching
filth into the air, and if this slight dip in tourism forces
Crazy Dan's Fireworks, The Old Tyme Tacky Antique Shop and the
Discount House of Smoked Jerky out of business, then so be it.
There's more than enough of that junk in and around the park
as it is. Culling a few of the weaker businesses from the graceless
herd is fine by me. Don't get me wrong. It's not my fondest wish
for anyone to lose his job or business, but I think preserving
the park takes precedence over moccasin sales and taffy factory
attendance figures. A national park is supposed to be a sort
of refuge from the sprawling urban and suburban jungles that
have sealed the landscape in a thin layer of concrete. There's
plenty of strip malls and outlet stores already, thank you very
much. Perhaps the drop in park attendance reflects
this sentiment. Maybe people are tired of wading through a 90-minute
traffic jam en route to a hiking trail or mountain stream. Have
you taken a good look at the main thoroughfare to the Great Smoky
Mountains National Park? It's reminds me of the tackiest and
most "touristy" beach towns I've ever visited. I keep
thinking that just on the other side of the yard ornaments store
and Rebel flag emporium must be the ocean. I'm sure I'm not the
only one who is weary of all that tourist junk, and perhaps the
low attendance figures are the people's way of saying, "Enough
is enough." Sure, there are some nice manmade attractions
in and around the Smokies, but those are few and far between.
There are many more Bob's Airbrushed T-Shirt Shops than there
are Ripley's Aquariums. The Smokies have been called "an economic
engine for tourism in East Tennessee." I'd say that's pretty
accurate, but if steps aren't taken to clear the air, a 14-percent
dip will seem like just a drop in the bucket. Wow. That's two clichés in one sentence. Quite a way to wrap it up, don't you think? · · · |