Editor’s note: This is adapted from a formal statement filed by Ms. Franklin last week with the National Park Service.

I am Carol Franklin, FASLA, RLA, 85 years old, and a co-founder of Andropogon Associates, the Philadelphia-based landscape architecture and ecological design firm established in 1975. For 50 years I have practiced, taught, written about, and advocated for ecological design in the American public landscape. I have spent my professional life studying the relationship between the built environment and the natural systems it inhabits, disrupts, or — when we are at our best — restores. I write today as a citizen, as a practitioner, and as someone who has dedicated her life to the principle that the public landscape is a shared trust, not a vehicle for personal monument or political expression.

I write in formal opposition to the proposed 250-foot Triumphal Arch at Memorial Circle on Columbia Island, and I urge the National Park Service to use every authority available to it to withhold approval of this project in full. This is not a matter of aesthetic preference. This is a matter of environmental law, ecological integrity, democratic stewardship of public land, and the most basic standards of responsible design.

Memorial Circle and the surrounding Columbia Island — formally Lady Bird Johnson Park — is not an empty traffic roundabout awaiting embellishment. It is a carefully designed naturalistic landscape, shaped in the 1960s by landscape architect Edward Durell Stone, Jr., who introduced extensive plantings of flowering dogwoods, white pines, daffodils, and native vegetation. This planting plan was a deliberate act of ecological design that we have spent 50 years trying to protect.

I also must address directly what can only be called an act of environmental aggression: the reported plan to use cyanide-based M-44 devices — so-called “cyanide bombs” — to eliminate native predators and wildlife from the construction area. The Trump administration has reversed the EPA’s prior ban on sodium cyanide use in wildlife control.

Columbia Island and the Memorial Circle area are part of the Potomac riverine corridor — a migratory flyway and urban wildlife corridor of documented ecological significance. Foxes, raptors, waterfowl, and a range of native species inhabit or transit through this landscape. The use of sodium cyanide devices in an urban park, adjacent to the Potomac River and the Arlington National Cemetery, to clear wildlife that has as much right to this land as any human visitor, is an act of ecological contempt that has no place in the management of a National Park Service site.

The NPS Assessment of Effects acknowledges that the proposed arch will partially obstruct the sightline between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery — one of the most significant memorial axes in the United States. It will obstruct the view of the Lincoln Memorial from Arlington Cemetery. It will alter the view from the Washington Monument toward Arlington. It will impact the view of Arlington Cemetery from the Pentagon. These are not minor visual inconveniences. They are the destruction of designed and sacred spatial relationships that took generations to establish and that cannot be rebuilt once lost.

There is another dimension of this proposal that must be named directly: This arch would be imposed upon a landscape whose very existence is inseparable from the genius and labor of African Americans — and it does so with the full force of an administration that has demonstrated, in policy after policy, its contempt for that history.

Washington, D.C., was surveyed and planned in significant part by Benjamin Banneker — a free Black man, self-taught astronomer, mathematician and surveyor, born in 1731 to a free mixed-race mother and a father who had purchased his own freedom from slavery. When Pierre Charles L’Enfant, the French architect appointed by George Washington to design the capital, abruptly resigned and departed with the original plans, it was Benjamin Banneker who — according to documented account — redrew those plans entirely from memory. Banneker was appointed by President Washington to the six-man team that established the blueprints for the capital city, making him the first African American presidential appointee in United States history. He helped select the sites for the U.S. Capitol, the Treasury, and the White House itself. The city of Washington exists in the form it does because of Benjamin Banneker.

Furthermore, Washington was built — physically, stone by stone — by enslaved Black laborers. The monuments, the avenues, the ceremonial landscape that this arch proposes to crown were constructed by men and women who received nothing for that labor and whose descendants have fought for generations to see their contributions acknowledged.

The estimated cost of this structure is $100 million of public money. It is being rushed through a review process — with 20-hour-per-day construction planned for two to three years — in order to be completed before the end of this presidential term.

The National Park Service was created to preserve and protect, not to facilitate destruction on demand. I am asking you, on behalf of the landscape I have spent my life studying and the public whose land this is, to refuse this project. Reject it on historic preservation grounds. Reject it on environmental grounds. Reject it on the grounds of democratic accountability. Reject it in full.

Carol Franklin is a Chestnut Hill resident and co-founder of Andropogon Associates. She was an adjunct professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture & Regional Planning, University of Pennsylvania, from 1972–2002.