provide, and wildland areas that offer solitude, recreation and renewal to humans, we must protect the areas North Carolina’s Mountain Treasures identifies. The Nantahala and Pisgah National Forests feature some of the finest wild areas in the Southeast. Much has changed in these mountains since Native Americans migrated here thousands of years ago and even more since Europeans first arrived. But much remains in a natural state. Protecting the lands in that condition is our challenge and the subject of this book.
American Ginseng
photo by Lamar Marshall
other adjacent federal lands in mind. Many of the unprotected wildlands we identify in this publication are contiguous to wild areas in other national forests in Tennessee, Georgia and South Carolina. That adjacency--the “connectedness” of which the great conservationist Aldo Leopold spoke--should be the guiding consideration in forest management decisions. In 2002, the Southern Appalachian Forest Coalition published Return the Great Forest: A Conservation Vision for the Southern Appalachian Region. The book details the fact that the natural areas in our national forests comprise large landscape conservation areas that in many cases transcend the artificial boundaries of state and other agency management schemes. There are where they are, regardless of jurisdictional maps. Certainly, those maps serve as useful locators, name tags. But when they become rigid boundaries for compartmentalized management and parochial thinking they operate to defeat the natural values these connected landscapes serve and are meant to serve. Bureaucracies often can’t seem to see past the lines on maps; black bears and songbirds don’t even know they exist. It is thus crucial that the National Park Service and the U.S. Forest Service work together to coordinate planning for their various pieces of this complicated, interdependent web. State agencies, local governments, citizens and organizations also have a constructive role to play. Protecting and planning for these landscape conservation areas is our best hope for securing a functioning conservation network in the Southern Appalachians. Many of these landscape conservation areas, and many of the most significant ones, are either entirely or partially within North Carolina. If we are to secure a network of conservation lands that endures into the future to guarantee habitat for wildlife and rare species, productive mountain streams and the clean water they
“If your bank account was overdrawn, you wouldn’t keep spending, would you? Nor should we continue to log and build roads in what precious little remains of eastern wilderness. This book is a remarkable vision, a blueprint for the survival of a region as we’ve known it. May our policymakers have the valor and genius to carry it through. Long live the wild coves and balds, creeks and laurel thickets of the southern Appalachians, an American treasure more precious than gold. “ Janisse Ray Author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood
North Carolina’s Mountain Treasures
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