Kieran Roe

Partial Transcript: I’m Kieran Roe, Executive Director of Conserving Carolina. I’ve been working for Conserving Carolina, and before that The Carolina Mountain Land Conservancy for coming on 20 years here, enjoying to be a part of the Hendersonville community and get to know this region - Henderson, Transylvania and now Polk counties. And some of the other areas in this part of the world. I grew up in suburban New Jersey, so, for me, Western North Carolina is paradise, you know, just the bounty of nature here, the wonderful natural places, the biodiversity, all these public lands we get to enjoy and recreate in. If you’re going to work in conservation, this is a really great place because there are so many wonderful natural resources and people really appreciate it here. People have an emotional connection to this landscape, so I really love doing what I’m doing and love being here in Western North Carolina.

Partial Transcript: Yea; well, as I mentioned I grew up in the suburbs of New Jersey, down near the shore there in Monmouth County. And like so many places development and growth was very much a trend there. And I remember growing up as a boy I used to take my dog walking through this little patch of woods not too far from where my house was, and just loved getting out there. It wasn’t public land, but it was land that nobody said you can’t walk on. So, we would just get out and get away from everything into nature for a little while and sometime when I was in high school, big plans were announced for the big mall that was going to be developed there and taking up that land. And all of us know there are good things that come from growth and development but that really kind of disappointed me a lot that that little place that I had enjoyed getting away with my dog and just having a good experience in nature was no longer going to be around and , I think for all us, those lessons of that kind of change , that is when we realize that “Oh, nature is not going to always be there the way we thought it was going to be”. So, I guess probably a pretty common experience but that was one moment for me that sort of changed how I looked at what was important to me and made me question how and why certain things like that occurred.

Partial Transcript: Tom Fanslow, among others here, talks a lot about the importance of conserving small spaces. We’re really glad when we get to protect places like headwaters, state forests and these other big 10’s of 1000 of acres of land which are really important for a lot of reasons but those little pocket parks, those little places close in to where people live, maybe ½ acre or something like that, it may be just as important to some folks who don’t have a chance to get out to these more remote spots. So, I think we need to keep that in mind too.

Partial Transcript: Land conservation has an important history in this country and I think in this country is among the places where conservation of nature, national parks, that idea was somehow created.in the U.S. So, we have that great tradition going back to people like Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir, back in the early part of the 20th century, when that idea of creating parks, setting aside land purely for enjoyment and for protection of wilderness, first became something that people began to realize was important and so, since that point I think conservation has only grown stronger as a value of many people, although , of course, there have always have been competing concerns. And people who see that conservation may impair economic development. I think many people feel like conservation and economic development can be quite compatible and, certainly, that’s the approach that conservationists like myself try to take.
0:06:32 So we are, Conserving Carolina is a local land trust. Many people are perhaps not familiar with that idea, what is a local land trust? We are a community-based organization that a local land trust is a community-based organization comprised of people who value various kinds of natural spaces.
A local land trust is a community-based organization made up of people who value nature in their local communities and want to go about finding ways to save many of the places that are special. Many people have heard of organizations like the Nature Conservancy which are actually a national or international organization with a focus particularly on rare plant and animal species. Local land trusts such as ours use a lot of the same tools and take the same approaches, but on a much more local level and we have a perhaps broader set of values that we look at when we do our conservation work. We’re certainly very interested in protecting rare plant and animal species, but we look at things like protecting land along our rivers and streams, protect water quality, which I know is something you are really interested in. Protecting scenic views along places like the Blue Ridge Parkway, protecting farmland and working forest land so we keep our green spaces that are working lands but that still bring a lot of natural values and avoid other kinds of development that might occur there. So, that’s the kind of thing we do. We are one of about 1700 local land trusts working in the U.S., about 25 local land trusts in the state of North Carolina. And that’s how I’d define it.

Partial Transcript: So, what is now Conserving Carolina; sorry David, I have to be conscious because I’ve always been telling the story of Carolina Mountain Land Conservancy and now we have merged and there is another thread of history I am needing to combine but I don’t know that history very well with the Pacolet Conservancy so I think I will just, with this editorial comment, I think I’m just going to focus on the history with the Carolina Mountain Land Conservancy, probably because I think people down in Polk Country may not see this as much as people around these parts. Sorry for that interruption.
0:09:57 So, what is now Conserving Carolina, was started back in the, early 1990’s. A group of people in Henderson County, many of them women affiliated with the League of Women Voters said “We need to do an inventory here of this county, we need to learn about what are the important places. Growth is coming, growth is changing things. Let’s identify those places that are special and shouldn’t be disturbed”. So, they worked with the state Natural Heritage program, hired a botanist who came in for two years and worked - went all over Henderson county and identified these special places - did a thorough assessment of plant and animal species there, produced a booklet that we still have in our office with about 75 sites that were identified then that are natural areas worthy of protection. And that was completed around about 1994 and many of the same people who helped to get that inventory off the ground said that you know now that we have this description of these great places we ought to create an organization that can go out there and actually work to protect some of them.
0:11:20 So that was the founding of at the time was called the Natural Heritage Trust of Henderson County; in a couple of years they improved the name by changing it to Carolina Mountain Land Conservancy, expanded the geographic area at that time to also include Transylvania County and places in the Hickory Nut Gorge which
(traffic interruption – Kieran: Maybe we should have went off into the deep woods somewhere. Interviewer: we would not have had any light – there is always a trade-off – short discussion of NPR segment about how many places are more than 15 minutes away from ….)
I can’t remember where I was…. I think I was saying so at that time they created what was called the Natural Heritage Trust of Henderson County, that group after a couple of years changed its name to Carolina Mountain Land Conservancy when it expanded its geographic focus to take in Transylvania County and some neighboring counties, particularly up in the Hickory Nut Gorge which includes parts of Rutherford County and Buncombe Counties. That organization worked for about 20 years before merging with our neighboring land trust the Pacolet Land Conservancy in 2017 and at that point we became Conserving Carolina with that now broader geographic reach as well. So that’s kind of the history of how things got started. There was another part of your question earlier, David, about how our work impacted water quality.

Partial Transcript: Yes, so, it has been a really great experience to be a part of this organization and to watch things grow and evolve for this organization, and to find success as time has gone on in a whole variety of ways. Some early successes were helping to create what is now Chimney Rock State Park back in the mid-2000’s when land values were really escalating quickly. We worked with many partners to acquire a 1600 acres tract of land called World’s Edge which is just kind of south of Chimney Rock where the Blue Ridge escarpment has a very steep … I feel like I am giving more details than I need to – a place called World’s Edge that has some spectacular views up in the very ….

Partial Transcript: World’s Edge, a really wonderful piece of property south of Chimney Rock Park that we went out on a limb, borrowed 6 million dollars, had members step up and serve as guarantors for those loans, we were able to acquire this tract of land and work with the state to add it to what has become Chimney Rock State Park , the first tract of land added to that state park. And it was a kind of a new level of activity for our organization up to that point. Up to that point we’d done many conservation easements with a whole variety of land owners in the region but since that point we have done a lot more working with public agencies, places like Dupont State Forest where we’ve helped to add tracts of land to that very well-loved public land. We’ve added land to the Pisgah National Forest and have worked with counties and municipalities to create local parks and trails so altogether we have protected over 40,000 acres up to this point and since those early days we’ve kind of added to the work that we do.
In addition to conserving land and stewarding it and managing it, we’ve gotten into things like restoration, trying to take streams that have been negatively impacted over the years and turn them into more natural watercourses; take places like our mountain bogs which are some of the places in our region that have the rarest plant and animal species there, and where we can restore them to a more natural situation. So, restoration, I made reference to it earlier. We’re doing a lot with trails and greenways, getting people out into nature, creating public access. We feel like letting people experience these places we are conserving first hand gives them a close-up awareness and appreciation of what we are doing and why it is important.

Partial Transcript: So, our main primary mission is to protect land, but we feel like protecting land is actually one of the best ways you can go about protecting the quality of water. So much of what happens on the land ends up affecting what happens in our rivers and streams. So, our strategy of keeping forestland protected, natural areas permanently preserved, will we feel help to permanently protect also the water quality in the rivers and streams that come through those properties. So, we’re really excited, for example, by the latest news here in our region, the establishment of our state’s newest state forest Headwaters State Forest, over in Transylvania County there right on the state line in the center of Transylvania County. It protects much of the watershed of the east fork of the French Broad River so when you can protect so many streams, and there’s about 50 miles of streams coming through that property that are all headwater streams, tributaries to one of the major waterways in our region, the French Broad River you are doing a lot to permanently ensure that the quality of the French Broad River stays at a high level.

Partial Transcript: Another thing we are really excited about, we’re partnering with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which just a few years ago established the very first National Wildlife Refuge in the Southern Appalachians - it is called the Mountain Bogs National Wildlife Refuge and, as the name implies, it is focused on protection of mountain bogs in this part of the world where mountain bogs are among the most important ecological places. Our bogs and our wetlands are important not only because of those rare plant and animal species that occur there, but they tend to be places that filter water before and take out pollutants and nutrients, so that they don’t get into our rivers and streams. They also do a great job of mitigating floods and other impacts like that when we have high water situations which we seem to increasingly with climate change here face more extreme weather events and, so, protecting those places that kind of absorb our rainwaters and reduce the amount of water getting into our streams in those flooding events, we feel is important.
So, it’s really great to be working with partners like that. Almost everything we do involves working with partners of one kind or another and most national wildlife refuges are big blocks of land, particularly down on the coast where they protected a lot of land for migratory waterfowl, the Mountain Bog National Wildlife Refuge, is, because of the nature of bogs, pockets of protected land here and there. The upper French Broad River watershed has a really high percentage of these important mountain bogs so we feel fortunate to be able to protect a lot of these places because of the geographic area that we are working in.

Partial Transcript: So we’ve been fortunate to work with private landowners in this region as well- folks like Sandy Schenk at the Green River Preserve; we have our biggest conservation easement that we’ve acquired there, on 2600 acres that covers a lot of that summer camp which is located right at the headwaters of the Green River, a really beautiful river that runs through southern Henderson County, then down into Polk County and into South Carolina. So that conservation easement there permanently protects the quality of those headwater streams on that important river. Maybe I’ll talk just a minute or two about a conservation easement. That’s one of the primary tools that local land trusts like Conserving Carolina uses. It’s essentially a legal agreement between a private landowner and a group such as ours that spells out certain future restrictions on the use of land and primarily we’re concerned with protecting from future development and so we work out the details with the landowner, write it down and record it at the county land records office. It runs with the deed of the property, so it is binding not just on the landowner who grants that easement to us but on all future landowners there.
So, it is a way of permanently protecting land in a voluntary way with landowners who have an emotional connection to their land and want to work with us to see that happen. Once we acquire that easement then our responsibility is, moving forward from that point, going out to the property, we generally go out about once a year just to monitor, make sure that the terms of the easement are being upheld. Generally, the landowners that grant those easements to us, we never have any problem with. Sometimes when land changes hands we need to be vigilant about those future landowners and making sure that they understand and get on board with the purposes of the conservation easement.

Partial Transcript: Gosh, well there are so many important benefits that come from protecting nature. Obvious things like protecting water quality, protecting air quality, having more trees around absorbs pollutants, puts more oxygen into the air. Makes it so that the air in our communities is more breathable. Having places where nature is protected keeps our plants and animals, gives them a refuge from the growth that impacts their habitats elsewhere. And the economic benefits of land conservation, of conservation of natural resources, I think, are well-documented. So much of the ecological services that we rely upon are provided by nature and it’s much more cost effective in many cases to protect the quality of our waterways before they get impaired so that we have clean drinking water for instance that doesn’t have to be treated and improved. So those ecological services bring our communities a lot of benefits.

Partial Transcript: I wish I could cite those numbers, David, but I have seen many studies that say that this region we are in, in particular, the economy is so much driven by people who come here because they really appreciate the natural resources, whether that is tourists that come and enjoy our national parks and places like the Blue Ridge Parkway and are drawn to the recreational resources that we have in this region, to people that move here from elsewhere, drawn by the very high quality of life. Companies like Sierra Nevada, and the many companies that move to this region because they know that their employees want to be in a place that they can have a clean environment, where they have opportunities to get out and get healthy exercise. Employees these days can choose where they want to be in many cases and so being a community that has these natural resources is really important.

Partial Transcript: I don’t exactly know how to answer that or I don’t feel like I’m very informed as I should be about some of that history. I mean I know the name Wilma Dykeman, I know that she, her book The French Broad River was really a turning point in many people’s awareness of the importance of that waterway to this region and, at the time, my understanding is, the French Broad River faced a lot of impairments and pollution was a problem. I’ve been in this region for about 20 years myself and so I’ve heard people say that, prior to the last couple of decades, we faced issues that have actually been getting better, that point source pollution has been reduced and we have been excited to work with partners like the Wildlife Resources Commission to do restoration of properties along the river.
We have been really excited to work with partner agencies like the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission on projects like one we are working on now - the confluence of the Mud Creek and the French Broad River; we are taking what had been a farmed field, almost entirely in the flood plain and converting it back to a flood plain wetland, restoring it to habitat that would have been there before people came along and changed this region. Now of course, we need farming, we need to be using our land for productive uses but there are places like this that were pretty marginal and, really, we feel like nature is the best use of places like that. The Wildlife Resources Commission is interested in the Muskellunge Fishery, a native species to the French Broad that is no longer able to reproduce there anymore so they add fish, they stock it every year with Muskellunge from elsewhere but we are getting to the point where with this restoration project, we may be able to have the Muskie reproducing themselves in the river so it is kind of fun and exciting to be a part of projects like that, that gradually step by step, place by place, begin to restore and improve still further the French Broad River and waterways like that in this region.

Partial Transcript: You know I think it’s always important to look back for inspiration to those who preceded us and sort of pointed the way in terms of consciousness, making people aware perhaps of what’s being lost and then also pointing the way to what can we do, what steps we can take to change that situation, once we realize that we may be losing something that’s important, that we don’t lose it. So, we have pioneers, folks I’ve gotten to know in this region, people like Jere Brittain, who back in the late 60’s, early 70’s were involved in opposing plans to dam up big stretches of the upper French Broad River watershed; think about how different our region would be if much of Mill’s River was under water right now, so it’s inspiring to look back at what has occurred before us and that gives us some direction to continue to move forward and continue that conservation work.

Partial Transcript: You know it’s rare, I think that you get to do things that make a permanent impact, but what we do in local land conservation, it’s all about the permanence of conservation, every conservation easement we do, every land we add to public ownership, will be permanently protecting that natural resource so it’s great to know that, not only we ourselves, but our kids, our grandkids and beyond, will benefit from the that work that we are doing today. So, we feel honored and blessed to be able to do things like that will have that lasting impact on our community.

Partial Transcript: We feel at Conserving Carolina it’s so important, I talked earlier about the permanence of what we do, but of course all the legal agreements in the world won’t stand up if the people in our communities don’t value and think what we’ve done is relevant to them and to their lives , so it’s really important that the upcoming generation understands the importance of conservation because they are going to be our future leaders and decision makers; and so we try, in our way, through a variety of programs to reach that next generation. They’re so great at working on their computers and spend a lot of times in front of screens and, get the sense a lot of times, don’t get out and get to know these places that maybe some of us who are a little bit older had the experience of doing when we were their age; so, I think it’s important for all of us to make sure that we get the kids away from the screens and give them chances, whether it’s coming to these wonderful summer camps we have in this region or just going with your family. Now that we have these, Western North Carolina, we just have so many great places, both further away from our residential areas, but even close by to get young folks out and enjoying themselves and connecting with nature. And I think it is those personal connections, like we were talking about earlier, what brought those of us who are interested in conservation to this world, it was really as young folks, having those connections and learning to value and appreciate just what being in nature gave to us in our lives and I think as adults we need to make sure we pass that along to young folks coming up, even with all the other distractions they seemed to be faced with.