Crescent Resources, the real estate developing arm of Duke Power, announced in December that it has accepted a letter of intent from the North Carolina Chapter of The Nature Conservancy (TNC) to purchase the properties known as Needmore in Macon…
Crescent Resources, the real estate developing arm of Duke Power, announced in December that it has accepted a letter of intent from the North Carolina Chapter of The Nature Conservancy (TNC) to purchase the properties known as Needmore in Macon…
American mountain ash and American holly generally occupy separate ranges in North America. Their domains, however, converge in the Southern Appalachians, where the two trees exhibit an interesting duality along the mountain slopes. Mountain ash is found along the highest…
Over the past decade, public awareness of the perilous situation facing our native hemlocks in the southern Appalachians has grown. An exotic bug from Asia, the hemlock wooly adelgid (HWA), has ravaged hemlock stands from New England to Virginia and…
With classic below-the-radar timing, the Bush Administration unveiled plans the day before Thanksgiving to gut regulations that govern the management of our National Forests. Conservationists pilloried the move, saying it’s designed to suppress public involvement while undercutting ecological sustainability. A…
images/voice_uploads/rutledge2.gif The famously beautiful hills of Floyd County, Virginia, attracted hippies in the 1960s and ‘70s, New Agers in the 1980s and ‘90s, and most recently, Y2K wannabe refugees from Wall Street. But it wasn’t the Blue Ridge vista that…
Western North Carolina is perhaps not the first place that comes to mind when one thinks about ecotourism and especially not eco-retreats. While the ecotourism industry has taken off in the developing nations of South America and East Asia, the…
images/voice_uploads/minixmastrees.gif What could be simpler, more natural than a Christmas tree? A lot, it turns out. Among the thousands of Christmas tree growers in the Appalachian region, just a handful grow their crops organically, and they’re frustrated and puzzled at…
images/voice_uploads/bobcat.gif When Vice President Dick Cheney sneered that energy conservation was nothing more than “a sign of personal virtue,” he spoke exclusively from the point of view of rich American homo sapiens. For virtually every other form of life —…
At 4,545 feet, nothing grows on the summit of West Virginia’s Black Mountain except for stubby chin-high pines that have entrenched their twisted roots into what would otherwise be a lunar landscape of loose, white rocks, the remnant of a…
Kenneth Branham remembers when it was illegal to be an Indian in Amherst County, Va. From 1924 until 1967, the Commonwealth of Virginia operated under the Racial Purity Law, which criminalized interracial marriage and set up a caste system based…