National parks should not be developed or modified to encourage yet more automobile traffic when every popular park ( Arcadia , Yosemite ) is doing what they can to limit traffic.

We might expect such sheep fodder from one of the world's corporate giants or from the self-gratifying gang in D.C., but from the NPS in GSMNP? Admittedly, it's not altogether unexpected, but it's tremendously disgraceful and terribly disappointing nonetheless.

Now there are those who feel construction within the boundary of the park is nothing short of ludicrous. However, such projects go on every day in almost every form imaginable across this country, administered by the NPS, as well as by the Federal Highway Administration. Within the past years, these two entities have administered contracts for new and remedial work, as well as maintenance of existing conditions across the Eastern United States in some of the most pristine areas in our country, totaling well in excess of one billion construction dollars.

The DEIS further fails to take into account the legal requirement that the park resources must be left unimpaired for the benefit of future generations. The managers of our parks are the trustees of the future generations. Those future generations do not have their own spokesmen. They have to rely on the NPS. One only has to juxtapose the two choices to see what is best for future generations. Are they to be handed by the NPS either (1) a vast, unbroken tract of mountain land where the forces of nature are at work, or (2) a broken, fragmented, place where both the geography and the reserves of nature are damaged by the irreversible imposition of a road? Future generations are given short shrift by this DEIS. The NPS has breached its trust to them. The Redwood Amendments added the requirement that parks be managed “to the common benefit of all the people of the United States .”

The history of the GSMNP gives us two important precedents for such a conservative action. In the 1930s, the popular proposal to construct the Skyline Drive from Newfound Gap to Deals Gap seemed destined for construction. In the 1960s, another popular plan to build a transmountain highway from Bryson City to Townsend , Tennessee , also appeared inevitable. In both cases, however, the Department of the Interior and the NPS resisted the pressure to build and stayed true to the mission of the national parks. Indeed, I believe the wise and timeless words used by Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, when he killed the proposal to build the Skyline Drive in the Smokies, are words worth repeating today, “I do not happen to favor the scarring of a wonderful mountainside just so we can say we have a Skyline Drive .” It sounds poetic, but it may be an atrocity. I urge the NPS to honor both commitments and avoid such an atrocity.