Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
built—but there was an increasing emphasis on individual sports. The
broader natural environment was cast as a recreational space through which
one could run, bike, or hike. This health consciousness, together with the
desire to develop more environmentally sensitive methods of commuting,
established bicyclists as rising influences on park management. During the
late 1960s, Rock Creek Park officials began restricting automobile access to
the main park drive on Sunday mornings.This initiative soon expanded to
weekends and holidays. By 1971 the rising popularity of cycling produced
a short-lived attempt to allocate one lane of Rock Creek and Potomac
Parkway to bicycle commuting. The resulting traffic congestion infuriated
motorists, whose complaints ended the experiment. Parkway officials paved
over the old bridle path in an effort to placate bicyclists. By the 1990s, park
trails had become so popular that overcrowding created significant conflicts
between different types of users, forcing park managers to develop and post
guidelines for “multi-use trail ethics.” Calls for additional trail construction
ran afoul of environmental considerations, however, underscoring the con-
tinued tension between making Washington's natural areas more accessible
and protecting them from adverse development.
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By the 1990s, bicyclists and wilderness advocates were lobbying to
close Rock Creek Park to commuter traffic on a permanent basis, pro-
claiming that they were protecting the park and promoting more enlight-
ened forms of nature appreciation. Commuters and recreational motorists
responded by extolling the psychic and spiritual benefits they derived from
driving through the park's leafy scenery. Restricting this experience to
athletic recreationalists, they insisted, reflected an elitist and exclusionary
vision of the purpose of public parks and the role of nature in the urban
environment.
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The perennial tension between preservation and access was just one of
the many challenges facing Washington's natural resource managers at the
turn of the twenty-first century. The “open space” issue became increas-
ingly pressing as the ever-widening circle of suburban development con-
sumed former farmland at an alarming rate, prompting local and regional
governments to debate “anti-sprawl” policies designed to concentrate
building activities and maintain significant expanses of rural scenery and
protected countryside. Traditional landscape planning and design values
experienced a resurgence in some circles. Growing appreciation for the his-
tory of landscape architecture led to a flurry of efforts to research, restore,
