Why hasn't the Civil War Trust done anything?
Karen
On Oct 17, 2013 7:40 PM, "Steven T. Corneliussen" <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:

> 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 co-founded but no longer represent.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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