Subdivisions, Pollution Threaten Shenandoah National Park : Environment: Civilization is encroaching on the park to an extent that conservationists fear the area will not be there for our children.

As autumn spreads its colors across Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, nearly a quarter-million visitors will flock to Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park to enjoy the views.

Park officials and many conservationists suggest they take a good look and remember what they see, for the views are changing. The patchwork of fields and forests below the 50-year-old drive in many places is under siege from subdivisions, and a haze of air pollution on some days makes it hard to see anything at all. Ozone is weakening many park trees, and streams are becoming more acidic from rain laced with pollutants.

“What’s happening brings up the question of whether the Shenandoah National Park will actually be there for the next generation,” said Tyson B. Van Auken, executive director of the Virginia Outdoors Foundation, a state-run organization that promotes open space around the park and in other areas of Virginia.

Even a decade ago, the park’s 195,000 acres, which stretch southwest from Front Royal to Rockfish Gap near Waynesboro, Va., seemed worlds away from urban hurly-burly or suburban sprawl. Now property on its boundaries is within commuting distance of northern Virginia’s gleaming new office buildings as well as the fast-growing Charlottesville area. To the west of the park, parts of the Shenandoah Valley are beginning to see sustained growth.

Park officials are alarmed by the surrounding development and point to several threats to the park’s environment.

- As the rural landscape gives way to a suburban one, views from the park’s main tourist attraction, the 105-mile-long Skyline Drive, will suffer.

“You’ll soon see from the Skyline Drive pretty much the same thing (suburban landscape) you could see back home,” said Warren County Supervisor Stuart Rudacille, whose magisterial district borders the Shenandoah Park’s northwestern edge.

- The park is concerned that its wildlife, which now can roam outside the park, will be increasingly trapped inside it. Although bears and deer are not welcome on today’s farms, they will be even more of a nuisance in tomorrow’s subdivisions.

- The effects of acid rain have doubled the acidity in one Shenandoah trout stream in the last eight years and are threatening others, according to scientists at the University of Virginia who are studying the problem.

“Within the next several decades . . . we’ll lose 40% of the trout streams in the park, and that’s a fairly conservative estimate,” said James R. Webb, who is directing the study.

- Air quality is deteriorating as cars and industry crowd into the countryside.

“The blue haze is turning more gray, and gray means sulfates,” said Daniel Salkovitz, staff meteorologist for the State Department of Air Pollution Control, which during this decade has seen an increase in the numbers of industrial plant permits sought in the Shenandoah Valley, upwind of the park. Permits are necessary if an industry expects to release more than 25 tons of pollutants annually into the air.

In the summer of 1988, Big Meadows, a ranger station and campground halfway down the Skyline Drive, registered unhealthy air quality on two days. Park officials fear it may portend more of the same. “We may have to warn hikers about exerting themselves on such days if that happens again,” said Park Supt. J. William Wade.

Shenandoah is not the only national park under pressure. “Thirty years ago, parks like Acadia in Maine, Rocky Mountain in Colorado, as well as Shenandoah were seen to be in really remote places,” said Duncan Morrow, spokesman for the National Park Service. “Now all of these are in range of the distances people are willing to commute.”

But, according to Wade, who assumed his position more than a year ago, the park is uniquely vulnerable to land-use pressure and is severely limited in its ability to respond.

Not only does Shenandoah include parts of eight counties, “we are the only national park of such size and complexity that is completely surrounded by private land,” Wade said. Most parks are buffered from private property by national forests.

To protect itself, the park cannot step in and buy adjacent woods and fields. The act of Congress that established the area in 1926 prohibits the park from condemning any additional land. It can only accept donations or trade land it already has for land it wants.

Whenever the question of park expansion comes up, it reopens wounds left from the park’s formation out of private farmland. Mountain people were forced off the land they had worked for generations and resettled forcibly on homesteads in the hollows.

“Many people are still so resentful. And they have a right to be. It went hard with them,” said Madison County Supervisor Polly Powell. “People can still get their dander up. They can’t just wander up there and fish in the stream where grandpa used to fish. That’s all gone now.”

Even though they acknowledge the park as a source of jobs and a magnet for tourist dollars ($20 million a year in Page County alone), many people whose families formerly owned parkland consider any park expansion as further federal encroachment.

Despite the constraints he faces, Wade is responding to what he sees as “a critical time in the history of the park.”

His staff members have begun appearing at public hearings in surrounding counties, if not to promote the park’s interests, at least to listen to plans for developments, rezonings and land-use plan changes that affect the neighborhood.

He has submitted to several land-conservation groups a list of properties park authorities would like to see purchased and donated or protected with open space easements, which would restrict how the property is used. Some parcels are threatened with or ripe for development. Others would provide access to park trails.

Wade has not placed a dollar figure on those parcels, but Robert Dennis, director of the Piedmont Environmental Council, which promotes open space and development restrictions in nine counties, including four on the park’s eastern edge, reckons that a $15-million revolving fund could buffer the park and protect its views.

The park is also undertaking a $500,000 one-year study of nearby property using infrared satellite imagery. The images, which show the park and a 30-mile strip of land on either side, will document every cornfield, forest and subdivision in 15-square-meter increments.

The study, Wade said, will “give the park an organized way to look at adjacent land use. Then we can try to determine what values need protection and figure out how to do that.”

Land-use issues are complicated for the park because each of the eight counties surrounding it has different land-use controls and civic needs. Wade said trying to work with so many jurisdictions “kind of boggles my mind.”

For instance, Warren County needs a new landfill, and three of the five proposed replacement sites are near the park’s border. Two can be seen from overlooks on Skyline Drive. Park officials are frantically lobbying the county to put the landfill elsewhere. Local officials say they will take the park’s needs into consideration, but the new landfill is a necessity in the fast-growing county.

If counties are difficult, landowners can be downright ornery. Last summer owners of property along Jeremy’s Run, one of the park’s best trout streams, blocked public access where the stream crosses their property.

“They’ve pretty much said they’ll shoot anyone on sight who crosses their property,” said Larry Hakel, the park’s chief ranger. “We’re trying to put up signs warning people.”

The demand by newcomers for homes near the park is the most disturbing prospect for Shenandoah, and the forces of geography and economics that create that demand seem almost impossible to stop.

Parts of the Shenandoah Valley west of the park are attracting more business and industry along Interstate 81. Also west of the park, Rockingham County has recently been re-designated by the state from a rural to a suburban county. There, Adolph Coors Co. built a beer distribution plant and plans to expand into a brewery. In Harrisonburg, James Madison University’s student population has doubled, to 10,000, during the decade, and there are plans for further expansion.

South of the park, Albemarle County planners expect that University of Virginia expansion, including a research park now on the drawing boards, may swell population figures by more than a third to 100,000 early in the next century.

As a result of growth and growth potential, the value of farmland around the park--a staple of Skyline Drive’s vistas--is rising. Dennis of the environmental council estimates that values have quadrupled in four years along some parts of Route 29.

“As small farming is no longer profitable, and taxes continue to rise, soon the only thing profitable for the farmer to do is to sell his land,” Warren County Supervisor George Baggarly said.

And nowhere is the pressure stronger than in Warren County, on the park’s northwest flank, where demand for housing brings with it not only needs like the new landfill but subdivisions where they’ve not been contemplated before.

During this decade’s first eight years, Warren grew by 18.4%. “We have more demand than we can actually supply,” said Shelva Rice, a Front Royal-area real estate agent. “It’s coming from mainly the Fairfax area and Manassas.”

Rice’s husband drives each day to a job in Reston in suburban Washington.

In Warren’s formerly bucolic Browntown Valley, nestled against the park’s northwestern border, three subdivisions have been proposed in two years.

Two, totaling about 25 lots and houses, have been approved. Residents are fighting the third, planned for 14 houses on one-acre lots.