Anyway, to pick up from where my earlier post left off, after a few days in Portland, Oregon, last September, we headed up to "the other Washington," to spend ten days in the Olympic National Park and the San Juan Islands.
One of the things that struck me throughout our trip was the ever-present hand of the Civilian Conservation Corps; they built the park lodges, headquarters, observation towers, roads, and even the trails our footsteps traced through the mountains. The history of the CCC and the establishment of the national park system is too fascinating and too long to be even outlined here; Ken Burns took six years and six episodes to do it. However, as i think about the state of our economy, and the stress fractures showing in those structures, i wonder why it is that, as a nation, we now scorn Roosevelt's economic and environmental policies. The CCC created public works and brought back from the brink of permanent destruction our most beautiful lands that not only now belong to each of us (and to the world), but also gave starving men (and some women) jobs working to improve the infrastructure of our country. Their profit was the nation's profit (not that of any particular individual, company, or hedge fund), and these investments seem to have been some of our most valuable; if you look at how well things were built and how long they have lasted, it seems like the work of the CCC is one of the greatest returns on investment our government has ever received.
