On October 24, a politician-appointed Virginia state panel will pass judgment on a Fort Monroe real estate development plan purporting to respect inescapable economic realities. The plan permanently deletes Chesapeake Bay sense of place from that national treasure of four centuries' standing. 

It's the eleventh hour, but there's something citizens can do.

The alarm is being sounded by the National Parks Conservation Association, with its more than half-million members, and by Tidewater's leading daily, the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot. See FortMonroeNationalPark.org for links (and for an instantaneous visual overview).

Consistently over an eight-year process, Virginia's leaders of both parties have shown grim resolve to kowtow to the development industry concerning this billion-dollar waterfront's post-Army future. So they've failed in their fiduciary duty, and on Oct. 24 will almost surely cement the failure.

Unfortunately, they've succeeded in hoodwinking the national media, and--until a very recent awakening--preservation organizations including Citizens for a Fort Monroe National Park, a small committee that I co-founded but no longer represent. Good people trusted a deeply rigged process, hoping in vain that a split, hobbled national monument (national park) could be expanded and repaired later. (Please challenge me on "deeply rigged.")

Most damagingly, good people at the National Trust for Historic Preservation withheld NTHP's national moral authority from efforts to protect Fort Monroe's sense-of-place-defining bayfront viewsheds. (Please challenge me on this charge too.) No prominent historian--not the scholar Ed Ayers, not the writer Adam Goodheart--has stood up for Fort Monroe's sense of place.

Support for saving Fort Monroe is nearly unanimous in Virginia, but it is developers who bankroll political campaigns. So Virginia needs national media attention--a national spotlight on the impending Fort Monroe failure, with its thousand-year implications for American civic memory.

A discussion of sorts is underway beneath a new posting in the New York Times's online Civil War "Disunion" forum. At http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/15/the-real-rebels-of-the-civil-war/, please click "recommend" on, and please consider responding to, my Fort Monroe comment and also that of another Fort Monroe defender, Scott Butler.

It's a long shot. In Virginia the issue is all but decided. We lost. But national media attention could still, just conceivably, change things. The Times's online "Disunion" discussion gets widely read.

Thanks.

Steven T. Corneliussen
Poquoson, Virginia
http://www.fortmonroenationalpark.org/
http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/magazine/physicstoday/news/science-and-the-media

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