We have a saying in the national parks: “Only the losses are permanent.” Core to the National Park Service’s mission is our responsibility to protect the places where America’s history happened from forces that would permanently deface them or diminish their national significance.
Right now, we face that very threat at Jamestown, where a proposed power line would lacerate the river with 17 towers — each 300 feet tall — forever marring the river, the view and the setting that framed the experiences of this nation’s first settlers, including my ancestor.
Like any native-born Virginian, I like to tout my roots in the commonwealth. In the spring of 1620, the English ship Diana landed at Jamestown, and one of the 80 street kids who had been rounded up and shipped to the new land was John Jarvis. He survived the famine, and started a line of Jarvis families, who moved over the Blue Ridge in 1770 and into the Shenandoah Valley where I was born in 1953.
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In the fourth grade I learned my Virginia history, which is our nation’s history, starting at Jamestown with famous people like Captain John Smith, Pocahontas, Powhatan and John Rolfe. In high school I worked at Natural Bridge, learning of its survey by George Washington and ownership by Thomas Jefferson. I attended the historic College of William and Mary, deepening my appreciation for both history and nature, often spending time on the James and York rivers and following the new archeological discoveries at Jamestown. I know these experiences led me to a 40-year career with the National Park Service, where I now serve as the director.
For those four decades, I have fought many battles to protect special places from those who would mar them for short-term economic expediency, extraction of finite and limited resources, and other excuses backed by powerful politics. The threat to Jamestown is both a professional and personal concern for me.
Jamestown has been nobly preserved by the people of the Commonwealth of Virginia for more than 400 years and in partnership with the National Park Service since 1940. Each successive generation of Virginians, as well as countless visitors from across the nation and around the world, have been able to stand on that sacred ground at Jamestown and look downriver, feeling the isolation and challenges our first citizens experienced.
If the proposed power line moves forward, that historic view will be overrun with towers, power lines and blinking lights. There are other viable alternatives to the route of Dominion’s power line, but there is only one Jamestown, and we must protect it from this threat of permanent loss.
Jonathan B. Jarvis is director of the National Park Service. He may be contacted at director@nps.gov.