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'Anthony Shoals" by Philip Juras (2009).
the south bank of the river, and as I stood
WHAT SHOULD OUR PRIORITIES BE?
WHATS UP IN lEW DEVELOPMENT
There are times when I look at how our
elected officials spend our tax dollars and I
shake my head in amazement, asking: "What
are these people thinking?"
I've done a lot of head-shaking over recent
discussions about a new stadium for Arthur
Blank and the professional football team he
owns, the Atlanta Falcons. It appears that the
World Congress Center Authority will agree
to build that new stadium for Blank, despite
the fact that the Georgia Dome is less than
20 years old and would have to be tom down.
The price tag for that proposed sports edifice
is estimated at just under S950 million. The
General Assembly passed a bill in 2010
that authorized the City of Atlanta to
collect $300 million in hotel-motel.
taxes to help pay for the stadium.
Mayor Kasim Reed supports a
new stadium and has no prob
lems with turning over the $300
million in tax funds for that
purpose. But is that really the
best thing we could do with the
money? Wouldn't it be a better use
of those tax funds if Atlanta spent it
to rebuild highways and improve transit
facilities? The tax proceeds could also be used
to help finish the city's court-ordered renova
tion of its water-sewer system..
Arthur Blank has a net worth estimated at
$1.4 billion by Forbes magazine. If he really
wants a new stadium that badly, he can raise
his own money to pay for it. That's the beauty
of our free-enterprise system.
Atlanta and the surrounding metro counties
would benefit far more from using that $300
million for better roads and sewer facilities
than from a new stadium.
We recently learned that state and local
governments are giving the healthcare prod
ucts firm Baxter International a package
of tax breaks and financial incentives that
potentially could total more than $240 mil
lion in return for Baxter's agreement to locate
a manufacturing facility in a suburban area
east of Atlanta. Baxter International is not
a struggling startup company that needs
government assistance so that it can launch
a new business operation. It is a huge multi
national corporation that reported total
revenues of $13.89 billion in 2011 and net
earnings of $2.25 billion.
. With Baxter International and Arthur
Blank, our elected officials have chosen to
funnel huge amounts of taxpayers' money to
entities that already are making billions of
dollars.
At the same time that we're giving away
that tax money, we're asking Georgians to pay
another penny in sales tax so that we can
raise funds to repair our current roads
and build some new ones. We've also
been cutting state funding to local
school systems, which has forced
school boards to lay off teach
ers and increase class sizes.
A recent report in the Atlanta
Journal-Constitution disclosed
* that budget cuts will result in
1,800 fewer employees among the
major Metro Atlanta school systems
for the upcoming academic year. The
' Gwinnett County school system will
cut 585 teaching and non-teaching positions,
while Cobb County will cut 250 positions,
Atlanta 250, Henry County 200, DeKalb County
133, Clayton County 100 and Fayette County
100. Those funding cutbacks have adversely
affected the smaller school systems in rural
counties as weU.
It's all a matter of where your priorities are.
Is it better to give our tax dollars to wealthy
corporations that don't really need them? Or
is it a better investment for Georgia's future
to use that money to build roads, hire school
teachers and provide clean drinking water?
To me, that one's a no-brainer. I'll go for
smaller class sizes and better roads every
time. Many of our elected officials disagree
with that, of course.
That leaves me shaking my head.
Tom Crawford lcrawford@gareport.com
by TOM TOMORROW
An Expedition: I recently took a journey out
to the spectacular Anthony Shoals, die last
tumbling stretch of the Broad River before it
coalesces with the series of slack reservoirs
that constitute the Savannah River in this part
of the state. The shoals spiderlily (hymeno-
callis coronaria) was the target of the journey.
The shoals spiderlily only occurs in the rocky
shoals of the Piedmont, and there are a few
stands scattered around in South Carolina,
6eorgia and Alabama. This rare butimpres-
sive flower, which blooms in early May, is
endangered, and largely unknown, despite its
charismatic blooms. Could two-tiered blooms,
sometimes six inches across, become a symbol
for our Piedmont rivers, as the salmon are for .
the wild rivers of the Northwest?
My discovery of it came through the paint
ings of Philip Juras, whose stunning work
often involves careful documentation and rec
reation of historic landscapes and ecological
communities. There were a few somewhat mod
est clumps of the spiderlily scattered along
~ While Congaree may mark the largest such
collection remaining, these floodplain forests
once Hned every river In the Southeast,
including the Savannah and Altamaha (into
which our own Oconee flows). A combination
of luck and determined effort and planning
allowed the Congaree forest to survive where
ours haven't. And while Congaree is a coastal
plain forest, the slopes of the Appalachians
and their foothills were once dominated by
equally mighty Chestnut trees; since the
blight, we've simply forgotten them and the
potential our forests really have in them.
What Was Is Not* Shifting baseline syndrome
refers to the skepticism with which modern-
day scientists often treat historical accounts
of natural bounty. Descriptions of changes in
the environment are based on the memories of
a single lifetime, and as generations progress,
the world each person remembers from his or
her early years is progressively degraded and
uicic, x uicu w ivmijuic uptjuia) linage vi uit
place and envision what the rivers could have
been like before centuries of agriculture,
pollution and damming. I also wondered if
these wonderful flowers might also have once
been common on the Oconee. Did my great
great grandfather once walk past them as a
mill worker in Whitehall, or were they gone
even then, affected by the dam that powered
that factory? If they did in fact once grace the
many shoals of the Oconee Rivers, might they
again one day, or is the stand I saw one of the
last, soon to disappear altogether? If William
Bartram's writing on the flower marked its dis
covery, are present-day writings like this here
a eulogy for this fantastic species of ours?
Outing: On.another recent trip, I vis- ’
ited Congaree National Park, just outside
Columbia. The park, established as a national
monument in 1976 and a park in 2003, is
dubbed "the largest intact expanse of old
growth bottomland hardwood forest" in the
Southeast a seemingly specific accolade.
Just below the Fall Line, these woods contain
some of the tcltest trees in the East with
many reaching over 150 feet into the air, the
tallest in the park being a Loblolly Pine, 167
feet tall and 15 feet in circumference. Bald
cypress, swamp tupelo, tulip poplar, oaks and
enormous American hollies are also common in
the forest
Everyone ought to visit these places, just
to see for him- or herself how big the world
can be, to recalibrate his or her baseline for
the potential that our landscapes have within
them. That forests not far from Athens once
held trees as mighty as redwoods is exciting,
and perhaps one day they will again, but in
order for that to happen, we must first accept
that the world around is much diminished,
and It is our fault As a sidebar, more specifi
cally it is the fault of those who are currently
middle-aged and old, rather than the increas
ingly disenfranchised and belittled younger
generations of Americans. It is interesting just
how little of the baby boomer campaign rheto
ric today has to do with what is being left for
future generations.
A Crooked Line: What we do talk about quite
a bit today are economics and growth, with
the desperation of recession coloring so much
of our decision-making. Does the road back
to a less diminished natural world lie only
through econopiics, with ecosystems services,
carbon offsets and conservation tax breaks as
the only ways we might set aside wild places?
Even projects that couple sustainable use or
harvesting and conservation still exist in eco
nomic terms. Will we ever again, as William
H. Jackson once did, give great trees over to
themsetve*, to be on their own terms? .
Kevan Williams athensrising@flagpole.com
MAY 16,2012-FLAGPOLE.COM 7
IMAGE COURTESY PHILIP JURAS