More than just a pretty space

The missus and I recently spent a couple of days at the Great Smokies National Park and Gatlinburg in Tennessee after a stop in Asheville, N.C., at the famed Biltmore house, places she'd never been.
Before we left, I'd heard stories that people who make their living on tourism in Tennessee were keeping a general lack of gasoline from visitors.
With family and a job in North Carolina, my wife Beth knew that prices had risen and remained higher there than in Virginia.
Reluctant to give up an already-paid-for vacation to some of the greatest public places on the East Coast — down the Blue Ridge Parkway and over to the national park — we carefully researched gas prices and availability before we got on the road.
Finding about six gas stations online where we could fill our tanks at our ultimate destination left us feeling reassured.
Gas prices in Hillsville remained about about $3.76 a gallon, as I recall, and they rose to just about $4 in areas of North Carolina, such as just outside the tourist trap created by Mr. Vanderbilt.
Those high prices didn't keep people from traveling. 
In quick succession, Beth recognized a co-worker from her information technology department coming out of the mouth of Linville Caverns, and down the parkway at Mount Mitchell, highest place in the East, we had our picture taken by a couple from Hillsville.
A friend of mine from Indiana drove down for no other reason but to spend a few hours with us in Asheville. And my brother had made plans in July, separately from us, to take his family to Gatlinburg, as well.
Having attended post-college reunions in Gatlinburg, this was about the ninth time that I'd been.
Usually, the sidewalks of that city tucked in the valley at about 1,800 feet above sea level had been full to overflowing.
While others joined us at the window to the old-fashioned taffy pulling machines — that place has three within a couple blocks of each other on the main strip, as my gear-head engineer brother pointed out — there was no absolute crush of humanity gawking there.
Still, inside the Smokies the next day, when Beth and I took advantage of their picnic facilities, nearly every table hosted families feeding their faces, having a good time.
People on their way down from Clingmans Dome, the park's highest point, kept up their stream of encouragement for us climbing out of breath the steep slope to the observation tower.
A couple from Utah struck up a conversation with Beth at Newfound Gap about their joy in being in the Smokies and how far they'd come for a second visit, and we got tips on the side of a hiking trail from a local couple on little known and little accessible attractions.
With all those people around, it's a wonder there's any space left for the wildlife. But my brother's car came within about 15 feet of a black bear.
And a bunch of cars pulled over to the side of the Cades Cove loop for a rather obscured look through the woods of what we believe was an example of the Smokies' reintroduced elk population, but what another observer insisted to Beth was a really big deer.
The nine million visitors to the Smokies a year probably unconsciously understand something that a study just out in medical journal The Lancet confirmed — people who have green spaces to enjoy live better healthier lives. 
Maybe that unconscious understanding is why so many people make an effort to go to the Tennessee mountains, despite the time and expense involved.
The recent study involved green spaces in urban settings where people could exercise and unwind, rather than remote nature preserves.
The BBC reported that having green spaces available halved the so-called "health gap" between the poor and the rich, who are better able to afford medical care.
Researchers Richard Mitchell of Glasgow University and Frank Popham of the University of St. Andrews saw a correlation between greens spaces and lower incidents of heart disease and stroke.
This may be from the ability of people to be more active, and they also found green space could lower blood pressure and even promote faster healing after surgery, the BBC reports.
So what can municipalities do to encourage better health in their citizens? Add green spaces, the researchers answer.
Parks will do a lot more than pretty up the place, writers in The Lancet added.
I learned the story of the Smokies being created about 75 years ago, when citizens and civic groups pushed for the preserve, cobbling the eventual park together from many home and logging tracts.
It wouldn't be nearly the challenge for a city to set aside an undeveloped tract for its residents to throw a frisbee, pass a football, take a stroll or just sit on the lawn and soak in the sun.
That bit of land, the study shows, could be the proverbial ounce of prevention.

Assessing a failure

Real estate taxes are all out of kilter.
Food from the grocery, eating meals out, tires, gas, vehicles, staying in a hotel room, paper goods, income, savings — all are taxed at a much higher rate than real estate — and reform is needed.
Though I get a queasy feeling each time my real estate tax ticket comes, it's easy to see that taxes on land are the best deal out there when it comes to government tithing.
They take the value of the land and the value of any improvements there upon, divide it by $100 and base the taxes on the remainder.
So if a house is $100,000, they calculate the taxes on $1,000, whether that land is on a mountain peak, a drained wetlands, a riverbank, a former cabbage field, a cut down forest, in the county or in the town.
And that's the crux of the problem.
Every budget season, I hear concerned citizens tell local officials that their governments should be run like a business, and I agree with them fully.
However, our real estate tax system with its generally flat tax on property, with the exception of large tracts of farms and forests enrolled in land use, ignores the economic laws of supply and demand.
Having just been through a county-wide assessment, I am aware that the system used to come up with values does consider variables of scarcity — such as putting a higher price on mountain land or tracts on the river.
But it's when comes to the actual set tax rate, applying it equally across the board, that's the part that makes the real estate taxes (as compared to income taxes, for example) regressive.
This reflects an oversight in our whole economic system — the failure to account for resource depletion.
Farmland, wetlands, forests, they all have intrinsic value. Just to belabor the obvious, farms produce beef, chicken, wheat, corn, etc. to supply food; forests supply timber for building; and wetlands contribute in a more abstract way to world health and biodiversity.
But real estate taxation in the current system will always value wetlands being filled in and farms being split up into umpteen housing tracts in a subdivision higher than it was as productive land.
That is the rule in the economic system that counts on resource-intensive development, i.e. "growth," as progress.
That's okay as long as there are natural resources to feed that growth. But the last time I checked the cliche about land that goes "they're not making any more" still holds true.
Real estate taxes at present rewards the consumption of open land by encouraging people to look for the tax impact will be the lowest on them.
That is not within a town's limits, as people who build there will be subject to both town and county taxes.
(Virginia differs from many states in the application of real estate taxes from towns, counties and cities. In states like Indiana, Illinois and Ohio, schools, fire departments, libraries, townships and more all have independent taxing authority in addition to the localities. The way Virginia allows cities to collect taxes without also the county being able to get a share is also an exception to the rule.)
The "double taxation" for people who live in municipalities is exactly backwards, allowable because the assessments do not take into account the intangible values of open space.
The vast majority of people should be encouraged to live in the world's urban centers, not driven out, I say.
To fix it, government officials, academics and economists would have to add to the equation the true value of open land and the negative impact of its loss.
The result, I expect, would be the inverse of today's flat real estate taxes.
People in town would see a low tax rate, as would owners of huge tracts of preserved open land, perhaps comparable to the way property is assessed today — at less than 1 percent.
Single-family dwellings out in the boonies would pay considerably more for the privilege of changing productive land out in the county to unproductive land.
The more scarce land is, the more the owners should have to pay taxes on it, applying the rules of economics to the taxing paradigm. Therefore, taxes would be the highest for land at a mountain's summit and at the river's edge.
And if owners are willing to pay extremely high taxes to build their 4,000-square-foot mansions across a couple acres, then wonderful, let them do it.
I understand that there's something for everybody to hate about this idea.
People who want luxurious homes in the middle of nowhere with a lot of elbow room will say that's their right and government doing anything to discourage that would be nothing short of communistic.
And people in urban areas would get a lot more development around them and a lot more neighbors, which normally leads to violence and the necessity for police and other emergency response.
This is not something that local governments could pull off alone — the tax system would have to be revised on a national and state level in order for true values of development to be considered and to implement something that would encourage conservation of natural resources.
To try and make an apt analogy, let's consider an independent trucker who runs his own business. Say that he runs his truck hard to make a living, but fails to account for depreciation and the need to eventually replace the truck.
Failing to sock money away will prove fatal to his business and his livelihood once his sole truck wears out and he has no capital to reinvest. That's exactly what we're doing with our land and the minerals in it, as well as water and air.
Unchecked development and overconsumption of natural resources will end one day, no matter what we do.
The tough choices that humankind are propelling ourselves toward amounts to whether we just want to continue the unrealistic attitude that we can burn through all our resources or adopt a model that actually accepts the essential value of controlling development.
People need to correctly assess the failures here.
What worries me most is that the system doesn't even look broken yet, and it won't look broken until a crisis emerges involving something that's hard or impossible to replace.

• First published in The Gazette , Galax, Va., November 2008.