Now, the view from the top of the mound once the site of the tribe s chief is sullied by residential sprawl. They are big, beautiful homes, but I don t want to see them, said Libby Bell, site manager of the Etowah historic site. And so many schools have been built around the site.
More schools means more traffic and more people.
Sprawl and lack of federal funding are the chief threats to the 10.8 million acres of the United States that contain 3,266 state parks, according to a report released Thursday by the National Park Trust. The National Park Trust did not rank the states, but Florida s director of recreation and parks, Fran Mainella, reported that 25,000 acres hang in the balance in the state. The parks are in imminent danger of being lost to development and residential sprawl wherever they happen to be. And these threats feed on one another, the report notes. What we need are big dollars to save the Etowahs all over the country, said Bert Weerts, director of the Department of State Parks, Recreation and Historic Sites in Georgia.