By Jeff Buckett on Sunday, May 27, 2001 - 02:53 am:
I don't know anything about the Hancock-KNHP tug of war, Lynn, but I do know this: the KNHP is making an honest(though tragically belated) effort to make audio recordings of what few old timers remain in order to acquire any remaining first-hand eyewitness history of what it actually meant to be a hard-rock miner in the Keweenaw when copper mining was the way things were.
Who else has made this effort?
For that alone, we owe this new park's curators our thanks.
By Lynn Torkelson (Ltorkelson) on Sunday, May 13, 2001 - 08:33 pm:
Last week, one anonymous ranter urged us to turn a blind eye to the future and to concentrate solely on our own problems. To buttress his contention, he wrote:
Quote:After all, no one in the past ever did anything to make our lives any better today!
If members of the congress of 1916 were alive today to read that nonsense, I'm sure that they'd be surprised and disgusted. When congress established the National Park Service that year, they directed it
Quote:to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.
I found it interesting to read (A Brief History of the NPS) that the first director of the NPS was a conservation-minded businessman from Chicago. From the start, one of the main objectives of the NPS was to promote tourism.
Because the Keweenaw lies a good distance off the beaten path, tourists need specific reasons to come here. The KNHP is unique to this area and could develop into a useful attraction. If we wish to exploit this resource fully, we should embrace the park and shape land use plans to complement it. Calumet keeps moving ahead on this (and I've heard lots of positive reactions from visitors), but other communities seem more ambivalent towards the park.
Hancock, in particular, seems constantly at odds with the KNHP. Hancock's actions concerning the color of the new water tower, for example, were embarrassingly childish. If we accept park money into our area from the federal government, then we naturally have to put up with the strings attached to it. Surely everyone realized that from the beginning. Now that the KNHP is here, let's try to coordinate closely with the NPS to extract the maximum benefit for the people of the Keweenaw.
