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the public. He also discussed fire control, law enforcement, boundary control and the role park rangers perform in keeping peace with neighboring landowners.
Whereas the park today is protected against many of man’s environmental intrusions, the students learned that Rappahannock’s delicate balance of nature and people is not something that’s promised or guaranteed for future generations.
“Ecology is a really active word,” forester Lyttelton Wood told the students. “I think of words like growing, living, dying. Ecology involves the study of interrelationshops of plants, animals and their environment. The human being is the most dominant animal. ”
Mr. Wood explained how people have altered the area’s ecology by introducing alien species of plants and animals. Some, like the peach tree, are beneficial; others, like the gypsy moth, are devastating.
He expressed concern about widespread logging operations in Rappahannock, both past and present. “There is little virgin timber here — trees that are 300 to 400 years old” which comprise a “climax forest,” the ideal habitat for wild turkeys, gray squirrels and other animals. He took the. students to Red Oak to see examples of “commercial clear cut” and “selective cut” logging operations and he talked about the chestnut blight, another element introduced by man which sent the American chestnut tree into extinction.
County Administrator John McCarthy went over the history of Rappahannock’s zoning and subdivision ordinances and the economic basis for the county’s land use policies. Residential development costs more money than it generates in taxes while the opposite is true for both commercial development and forest, farm, and open land including property in the use value taxation program, he explained. “The point is not to have a sudden rush of development when you can’t pay for it,” Mr. McCarthy said.
See MOUNTAINS, p. 15
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