ConserveLand Blog

Historical and ecological conservation overlap in the work of many land conservancies and allied efforts. Sometimes an issue comes up that challenges the values behind that vital connection in a particularly sharp way. Such an issue in the news again is whether to build a casino at Gettysburg, antithetical as such a proposal is to the preserving, nurturing, highlighting and articulating of valuable and often neglected narratives of place throughout the Chesapeake Bay watershed. At a time when the National Park Service is considering a proposal to designate the Susquehanna River corridor near Gettysburg as a connecting corridor to the Capt. John Smith Chesapeake National Historic Trail, Pennsylvania mulls making a casino a symbolic economic centerpiece to arguably its most precious historical area in the Chesapeake watershed–a place where a vision of historic conservation offered a model for conserving landscape-narrative connections between human communities and their environment in our watershed.

Lewis Mumford in his study of the history of cities noted that the charm and environmental sustainability of communities such as the New England village sprang from a spiritual center. People in those villages originally were required to live within walking distance of church, so their houses were clustered together while their farms were scattered beyond and a village commons in the middle functioned as a center for the landscape as a whole. The lack of such focus today (or rather its replacement with material profit as the focus of landscape) has been a spur to regional sprawl that has harmed so many communities, contributed to the draining away of our wealth as a people, and irreparably damaged our environment. Ask yourself in this context, what should be the focus of Gettysburg as a landscape central to the intersection of history and conservation in our commonwealth’s central watershed–a for-profit corporate casino or the history (human and natural) of the Chesapeake watershed itself?

I remember as a newspaper reporter in Chicago being pulled into a surprise editorial board meeting at our paper with developers proposing a huge “family entertainment complex” in downtown Chicago that essentially was a mega-casino, with the mayor’s blessing. One of the representatives of the project threatened that if Chicago didn’t approve the project, Native Americans would come and open their own. In retrospect, considering the overly groomed out-of-town “suits,” I would have preferred an Indian casino to the proposed corporate operation. Indeed, later disclosures highlighted alleged organized crime associations of a key back-room “fixer” of the project. It fell through because of the principled opposition of Illinois Gov. Jim Edgar, the only one of Illinois’ last three governors not to be convicted of extra-legal shennanigans, although typically maligned at the time for  alleged goody-two-shoedness. I’m beginning to understand, after eight years of living in Pennsylvania, that miraculously things here can be even worse than the land of Blagojevich in terms of  the potential for government to become a vast ethical wasteland. All we may have to rally around on this (something powerful still as an idea)  is the nomenclature of our state as “commonwealth,” evoking as it does the original noble experiment in Penn’s woods, something which cannot be taken from us along with all that was not nailed down in Harrisburg..

One of the main City Hall fixers of the Chicago proposal, after having researched my background, pulled me aside after a meeting once to ask  me: “What religious commandment would a casino break?” Start with not stealing and go from there perhaps to psychological murder of the gambling addicts it would feed on, I thought but didn’t reply. Luckily the then-governor did. The line between libertarianism and a predatory libertinism in our corporate economy is always thin and on this as on many environmental issues virtually non-existent.Placing casinos in effect at the center of our regional and national economies (and their interaction with the world), in ultimately a dizzying array of electronic and paper financial and housing markets, led us into national economic decline entwined with a moral decline behind it. All these types of economic activities indeed feed on addictions and vulnerabilities of our neighbors and fellow citizens, in ways that would make our claim here to be a commonwealth into a joke. The Gettysburg casino proposal, even if a local project, will stand as an ultimate national symbol of those lessons unlearned if it is approved.

As I wrote in an article in Illinois Issues on metropolitan planning in Chicago, envisioning a regional landscape must involve more the imagination than efforts to quantify policy.

“In the end, the task of crafting long-lasting regional feng-shui … remains necessarily cultural: Without a common spiritual or aesthetic ethic, there’s no core to a regional community. [Daniel] Burnham’s plan [for Chicago's lakefront and forest preserves] succeeded in imagination in spite of substantial failure because its works lay in ruined fragments that shone like relics of a vanished giant race, sublime in the promise of their very incongruity with Nelson Algren’s ‘city on the make.’ In the battle between workaday materialism and utopian night dreams, the center rarely held in Chicago planning. By contrast, a sense of cosmic connectedness permeated the balanced landscape that travelers saw in traditional China. The street plans of historic Puritan villages in New England, beloved by Lewis Mumford, centered on churches. So, too, the city-as-artwork of sixth century Byzantium celebrated by W.B. Yeats, the layout of parishes in rural England, even the front-porched immigrant neighborhoods of Chicago. Daily life connected with universal cycles in a sense of community that linked heaven and earth. That doesn’t often happen in the commonwealth of cyberspace.  Nelson Algren wrote of one parish in an old Chicago neighborhood: ‘Summer on Seventy-First Street, when I was a Southside sprout, was blue as peace. The cross above St. Columbanus caught the light of a holier daybreak than ours while the wan gas-flares still wavered. Then the bells of early mass rang out, for our own morning had lightened the alleys at last. And long after the twilight’s last lamplighter had passed, ladder across his handlebars and gas-torch against his shoulder, somebody else’s twilight burned on behind that cross. The light that lingered, the light that held, belonged to somebody else’s night. Somebody else’s somebody else, who ran daybreak and evening too.’  The real task…will be to nurture the growth of such an aesthetic of community on a regional scale, an aesthetic akin to what the late environmentalist Aldo Leopold called a conservation ethic, but in a place with no central dome like Constantinople’s Hagia Sophia casting a shadow to hallow its ground, no certain consensus on environmentalism, and deep divisions among its people. Polish bars on the Northwest Side in the 1950s convinced Nelson Algren’s lover Simone de Beauvoir of Chicago’s world-class status as much as Burnham’s lakefront. But Algren’s art was the biggest factor of all.”

Casting the virtual reality of a casino in that central role of imagination in this symbolic place will cast a pale over efforts to shape the real world of the Chesapeake watershed’s complex natural and cultural ecology itself as a new symbolic focus for this region as a community. The video below asks the question, “What will be your legacy?” I dare any American with any sense of patriotism or conservationism (or hopefully both) to watch this without a tear. May those tears fall like rain on this proposal and expose any official supporters of it as traitors to the landscape of our commonwealth and its future unto the seventh generation.

Also check out what you can do here:

http://nocasinogettysburg.org/