Jamestown Island

Thirty years ago, in 1982, I was employed as the Natural Resources Management Specialist at Colonial National Historical Park. To be truthful, I didn't know much about natural resource management, though I was trying to learn as much  as possible.  Only later did I find out I had been about the seventh choice for the job. I suppose they were scraping the bottom of the baril when they hired me.

At that time, the National Park Service decided that there should be a new General Management Plan for the park, an effort undertaken once about every twenty years that specifies what the park managers should do until the next management plan is made. Often as not, none of the management recommendations are implemented, so they could save a lot of time and effort by simply copying the old plan every twenty years and calling it new. Lack of money is the reason the plans don't get accomplished.

But in 1982 we all went through the exercise, talking about all the wonderful visitor services we could provide and management actions we could take if only there was any money  to do so. Near the end of the whole process, there was a team meeting, almost a wrap-up session, and one of the planning professionals asked, "Is there a long-term problem we could be addressing here?"

I hadn't been invited to prior meetings, but was at the table for this one, and naively answered, "Well, Jamestown Island is actually sinking."

"Oh," said the planner, "Well, what about traffic congestion? Could we talk about that?"

Shortly afterward, I was called into the superintendent's office. It's almost never a good thing to be called into the superintendent's office, especially if the superintendent doesn't like you, and this one clearly didn't like me. (I know, I know, I might be the most likable  person on the planet, but the sad fact is that there are people who just don't  take to a fellow, no matter how much of a mensch he might be.)

Anyway, the superintendent didn't waste time on amenities, but asked me how I knew the island is sinking. I pointed out some minimal data and repeated what a geology professor had told me, that Jamestown is at the southern end of a tectonic plate stretching north  to Pennsylvania and the plate is gradually tipping, lifting Philadelphia and sinking Virginia.

"Well," he said, "I didn't come here to preside over Jamestown sinking into the ocean. What are you going to do about it?"

This was one of those moments when it didn't pay to answer too quickly. But I was already  on shaky ground with the man and figured I hadn't too much to lose. So I decided to just tell the unvarnished truth. "I suppose we could try to think of some way to jack up the island," I ventured. "It's completely unfeasible, of course. Or, we could build a kind of coffer dam around it to hold back the water. That would be an engineering project costing what, billions of dollars? Or, we could just take lots of  photographs, document everything we can think of and let the island go."

I was dismissed from his office rather bruskly.

I left Colonial National Historical Park a few years later and retired from federal service in 1997. I don't think I've been back to Jamestown in the fifteen years since then. I would be curious, though, to see whether the shoreline is obviously different now, and what, if anything, the Park Service is doing about it.

That superintendent has gone to his reward. I'll bet there's been yet another General Management Plan in the years since 1982.