2002 – Issue 3 (August)
Raising A Wild Child
images/voice_uploads/littlered.gif Ask the typical 10-year-old how to surf the Internet, and he or she will probably be able to show you a few things on the computer. It’s a skill many kids learn at school these days. But ask the same child to identify an oak tree from a maple and you’ll likely get a…
Read MorePaddling In The Land Of The Noonday Sun
Have I told you about the time I and 900 of my closest friends went paddling on the Nantahala River? It all began on a sizzling hot August day when I suggested to my buddy Mark Shelley that we go kayaking on the Nantahala, located near Wesser, North Carolina. Mark, director of the Southern Appalachian…
Read MoreBristol Celebrates Birthplace of Country Music
images/voice_uploads/peer.gif This summer, country music achieved a major milestone: July 25th through August 3rd 2002 marked the 75th anniversary of the historic 1927 ‘Bristol Sessions,’ literally, the “Big Bang” of country music. Over that 12-day period, the three most important acts in early country music — the Stonemans, Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family —…
Read MoreTobacco Farmers Go Organic, Join Forces With Enviros
Martin Miles has been farming tobacco in southwest Virginia since he was 6 years old. At 60, he’s trying something new – organic produce. While tobacco allotments — the amount of tobacco a given farm is allowed to grow — in southwest Virginia have been declining, the national market for organic produce and meat has…
Read MoreTripping Over Toads
I started reading about frogs in early February, when last winter’s strange warmth made me admit, at long last, that there would be no more snow in which to practice my mammal tracking. Now I turned my mind to an obsession with anurans — frogs and toads. I wanted to be prepared for their early…
Read MoreHolding Back a Firestorm
In this summer’s hubbub to develop government spending bills, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle quietly slipped into a bill language exempting his home state of South Dakota from environmental regulations and lawsuits, in order to allow logging in an effort to prevent forest fires. The move, when discovered by fellow lawmakers, angered Western legislators whose…
Read MoreWise Use Groups Spread Into Southern Mountains Scaring Rural Residents With Demagoguery, Deceit
images/voice_uploads/stevehenson.gif Once strictly a Western phenomenon, the Wise Use movement and its agenda of opening up public lands to unrestricted timber, mining, and off-road vehicle development has spread into the East. From North Carolina to Alabama, Wise Use organizers are demonizing conservation groups and using rural landowners as unsuspecting pawns in their quest to log…
Read MoreVirginia’s New Birding & Wildlife Trail First In Nation
They say everything is bigger and better in Texas. But Virginia’s about to change all that. The Virginia Birding and Wildlife Trail may be the first state-wide wildlife-watching trail in the United States when it is finished sometime in 2004, says David Whitehurst of the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries. To be fair,…
Read MoreTraining Loggers For Restoration Of The Future Forest
The Southern Forestry Foundation (SFF) held a three-day workshop on “Chain Saw Safety and Precision Felling Techniques” on August 5 – 7 at the campus of Warren Wilson College. The workshop was affiliated with Soren Eriksson’s “Game of Logging” and was designed to improve the skills and capability of working loggers and forestry professionals. The…
Read MoreThe Paradox of Pokeweed: Poison or Peculiar Cure?
As summer begins to fade, pokeweed begins to dominate open areas of the southern Appalachian landscape. The plant is a familiar feature in traditional mountain cookery, and widely used as a folk remedy. Paradoxically, folklore also identifies pokeweed as a lethal poison. Even today, modern medical researchers believe that pokeweed may lead to dramatic medical…
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