Gray Jernigan

Partial Transcript: My name is Gray Jernigan, and I'm your Green Riverkeeper. I work for an organization called MountainTrue. It’s an environmental advocacy organization covering all of Western North Carolina. We protect clean waters, resilient forests, and healthy communities across Western North Carolina.

Partial Transcript: Our water resources, public lands, land use, and transportation planning; they're also crucial to our society today, and they are all important to protect. We work to protect the resources that people rely on for their health, for their benefit and resources that can easily be exploited.

Partial Transcript: So Western North Carolina is a really desirable place to live, and that means that more and more people are going to be coming here. We just have to plan for the future, to plan to accommodate that growth in a way that balances development and protection of the natural environment.
Yeah, yeah. So, there're times when interest between development and the environment are going to conflict, and we've got to think about which places we want to protect and which places we want to develop for people that are—

Partial Transcript: Absolutely. So, more and more people are moving to Western North Carolina, and so we have to find a way to accommodate that growth but to protect the places that are special. So, we have to protect the special places, and that also speaks of economic development. I mean, people are moving here because of the beautiful nature, because of the special places that we have, and that creates growth. That expands the number of people that are moving here, the amount of land that we have to develop to accommodate that.

And so, it's essential to look toward the future to plan for that growth and to plan to protect those special places both for financial benefit for the businesses and the individuals moving here, but also for the protection of the wildlife and the aquatic species and the natural ecosystems.

Partial Transcript: So, MountainTrue, we have four Riverkeeper programs. We have the Watauga Riverkeeper, the French Broad Riverkeeper, the Green Riverkeeper, and the Broad River Alliance, which is a waterkeeper affiliate. We work to protect water quality and all of the watersheds of Western North Carolina. We do that by enabling citizen science by mobilizing people to conduct monitoring surveys, chemical analysis, biomonitoring of the aquatic species that live in the rivers so that we get a sense of the health of our waterways so that we can find the sources of pollution and stop them.

What we've done around stopping pollution sources has largely centered around industrial facilities like coal ash. We've also addressed development and sediment runoff. Sediment and bacteria are the number one pollutants of our waterways, and that comes from agriculture. It comes from subdivision development. It comes from—anytime you disturb the land, there's going to be run off, and we have to address that. We have to stop it, and we have to stop the pollutants from getting in the waterways.

Partial Transcript: So recognizing that Western North Carolina is going to continue to grow, people are going to continue to move here. We certainly don’t want to stand in the way of that progress. We just want to think about planning for our future to protect the special places that people move here for and to protect the economic benefit that comes along with that. Tourism development and business development; they're hand-in-hand with environmental protection.
So, when we're thinking about development from a green perspective, we're looking at concentrating development doing a cluster-style—development—and protecting green space. Those are the spaces that people enjoy, and that allows for recreational amenities for people that move here and also—when we're thinking about people moving here, we want to think about infrastructure development as well.

We have to have roadways, and we have to have—accommodate bicycle and pedestrian travel. We have to accommodate all of the types of ways that people get around our area. We have to think about where we locate our development; site planning. We have to think about where they're going to go, where they're going to come from and look at it from a holistic perspective. It has to protect the places that people live and also protect the places that they got to recreate.

Partial Transcript: So, as Green Riverkeeper, we've partnered with Hemlock Restoration Initiative, American White Water, North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission to develop protocols and safety measures, to allow skilled whitewater boaters to paddle into the Green River Gorge, the hard to reach areas; areas that aren’t accessible by foot, and apply pesticide treatments to fight the Hemlock woolly adelgid. If we let the Hemlock woolly adelgid just take over, it's going to decimate our hemlock stands, and these are very, very important to the ecosystem. The Hemlock woolly adelgid shades out the riparian ecosystem, allows native trout to thrive, native aquatic species to thrive in the riparian environment. It controls flows. It controls high-flow situations. It allows flood situations.
The benefits of the Hemlock woolly adelgid. We don’t want the Hemlock woolly adelgid to thrive. Hemlock is very important to the riparian ecosystem. They shade the water. They keep it cool for native aquatic species, for native trout populations. They control high flows and mitigate droughts. They're very important to the riparian ecosystem, and we want to protect those Hemlocks. If we allow the Hemlock woolly adelgid to come in and decimate this Hemlock population, this is going to completely change the ecosystem in the Green River Gorge. So we're enabling whitewater paddlers to get involved with ecosystem conservation, and this represents a partnership of a lot of different interests coming together and to protect a very, very special place down here in the Green River Gorge.

Partial Transcript: So rivers are very attractive places to a lot of different interests. They're attractive as—just their intrinsic value is ecosystems, they're attractive to recreationists, they're attractive to industry, they're attractive to businesses, and we have to balance all that. And since time immemorial—since the Cherokee Indians first moved into Western North Carolina, all the way through to Wilma Dykeman, and some of the river heroes that came before us, before the riverkeepers, and before all the other environmental organizations started doing this work in Western North Carolina, they saw the value in these rivers. And our job is to balance that love to use in both for the benefit of businesses and economic development, but also for just their intrinsic value as special places, as natural places, and as places that we can enjoy.