Members of Student Media sat down with Jay Leutze, author of the 2015 NC State Common Reading book, “Stand Up that Mountain” Tuesday afternoon. The book deals with a small community’s efforts to combat a mining firm which intended to exploit the mountain town for economic profit. The following interview has been condensed for the space alloted.
Q:I know that you have been continuing to work on growing national parks and conserving land. How much [money] have you been able to raise to conserve this land?
A: There are 23 land trusts in North Carolina, plus the Nature Conservancy, the Trust for Republic Land and The Conservation Fund. Those are sort of the big land trust organizations. So my land trust, the Southern Appalachian Highland Conservancy, has accumulated 68,000 acres of land over the last 40 years. The Nature Conservancy statewide has protected more than 700,000 acres. The numbers are starting to add up. If you take all the nature conservancies together, we’re really making an impact. Of course, North Carolina is a political unit with state boundaries that are artificially drawn, so they don’t follow ridge lines necessarily, or watersheds. I think it would make a lot more sense to have our states be the ‘State of Neuse River Basin’ or the ‘State of the Watauga River Drainage.’ That’s a more rational way to divide resources into political boundaries. But we didn’t do that. I understand that. You have a lot more rivers that are born in North Carolina and flow into South Carolina. If all the folks in North Carolina want to use the water for agriculture, folks in South Carolina might be robbed of that resource. So how do you work out equity across political boundaries that don’t really respect riverine boundaries or aquatic boundaries? So that’s a challenge. The land conservation movement across the country has been enormously successful. We don’t have a lot of resources, but we enter voluntary agreements with landowners in the form of conservation easements, and sometimes we buy land. And more land has been saved by land trusts over the last 10 years than has been converted by sprawl. In the aggregate, the conservation community has had a real impact on the environmental landscape, and without it, we would have poorer resource planning than we currently have, and that extends not only to protecting beautiful places where we like to hunt, fish and hike and play. It extends to the loss of farmland and our capacity to feed ourselves in the future. North Carolina is number two in the country of having the most farmland loss over the last decade. You don’t want to be number one on that list. We need to do a better job of protecting our soil resources if we want to feed ourselves close to home in the future. So that’s a concrete conservation challenge. People who don’t buy the climate challenge can say ‘Oh yeah, I eat food. Maybe it would be best to eat food grown locally.’
Q: Would you say that we are conserving land at a linear rate? As in, are we conserving the same amount of land every year, or is our rate of conservation faster or slower than years past?
A: I think that we are having an uneven impact because so much of it depends on funding. What we saw beginning in 2007 was a recession, and that hammered state budgets across the country. And what we see is a continued pressure at the federal level for land conservation. And we are falling behind on our needs. Take North Carolina for example. North Carolina is adding 100,000 citizens every year. Those 100,000 people moving into North Carolina all want clean water, and they all want clean places to mountain bike, hike, recreate and canoe. But the number of resources have more users of the resource. There was a very rational system established in North Carolina 20 years ago when the proceeds of a real estate sale flowed into the state, a portion of the deeds stamp tax went to a trust fund that helped buy park land and conservation land that helped offset development. Unfortunately, the general assembly eliminated that policy three years ago. So you can see for students, engaging in a multiprong to protect this conservation funding, it’s political, it’s economic. There’s so many ways you can come at our environmental challenges. And one of the clearest way for a lot of people to understand it is just money. If you have less money, you can buy less land.
Q: We often hear about the small town kid making it in the big city. However, your experience was the opposite of that. Can you talk about what drove you to the mountains of North Carolina from Chapel Hill, where you grew up?
A: I left Boston where I was working for a book-selling company, and I really craved the feeling of a rural community. But when I was young, Chapel Hill was rural. And so the Chapel Hill I returned to as an adult wasn’t the same Chapel Hill with the tobacco fields I would run through as a child. I realized that the mountains still had enough rural character and enough scenic beauty to feed me, I hope for a lifetime. The mountains were where I spent my summers, and I’m truly a summer creature. That’s when the fishing and camping is at its best. So when it wasn’t summer, I was just waiting for summer to come around the corner.
Q: Why do you think your book is relevant for incoming freshmen?
A: I know that a lot of freshmen in the student body at NC State are from North Carolina, and I was really honored that they chose the book, partly because I thought it would be a good fit because this is a part of North Carolina that not a lot of people are very familiar. It’s a small subset of North Carolinians that have ever heard of Roan Mountain, ever heard of Hump Mountain and Dogtown. I really thought I could expand students’ knowledge of their own home state. I also think of it as a story of the wherewithal, the tenacity, the persistence of the families that were engaged in this battle, Ollie Cox and Ashley Hood and their family. I hope this is inspiring to students who are facing challenges as they try to be when they grow up, what to do with their lives, how to spend their time productively while they are at NC State. And hopefully it inspires students who are facing challenges that perceive them as insurmountable not to be so unsurmountable. Maybe if you reach out in your community, and you tap every resource you had access to, you will accomplish more than you thought you might.
Q: How do you feel the conservation movement can proceed forward in this political and judicial climate that we have today in North Carolina?
A: We are living a different political climate than when the case that was in the book took place. Luckily, I think land conservation is fairly non-partisan. It’s fairly appealing to conservatives, progressives, liberals, libertarians. The method that you use to conserve land, all of those groups probably don’t agree on how to do it or what funding mechanisms to use to get there. We live in a political climate that is always trying to put downward pressure on taxation and public investment, and I think we are in a time where a certain segment of the population has lost trust in the government to be able to handle public investment. I know a lot of people in the agencies within the state and the federal system that are land managers and land stewards, and I have a lot of trust in them. Sometimes they make decisions I oppose, and I’ve even sued an agency when I’ve opposed a decision they’ve made. That’s OK. It’s not the end of the world. When a state agency is sued by citizens, that is my speech right, and nobody at the agency that I sued was terribly offended that I filed a lawsuit. I am not going to say that it was unicorns and butterflies every day about it, but these are public servants. I believe strongly that we need to have a system of taxation that needs to support the public good, and what is more good and right and true to our future as a species of healthy people than clean drinking water and outdoor spaces to connect to our natural state? It should be non-controversial. It’s a lot less controversial than the regulations portion of the debate. If we value a piece of land enough, we should have the public resources committed to buy it, using eminent domain we should purchase it in the public marketplace, and that really does appeal to liberals and conservatives alike.
Q: Now that mountain-top blowing is no longer primarily in practice, what is the largest problem that faces us as community today?
A: I think the sheer size of our population is an enormous strain on our resources. If you are drinking a glass of water on the eastern part of the state, downstream of the headwaters of the start of that stream, you are probably drinking water that has traveled through septic systems. The more people we have, the more people we have filling septic systems with waste, the more our water is going to become impaired. I think that is a paramount concern. I think that reducing our dependency on coal-power dependency, all of our other ways to generate energy have a carbon footprint as well. Manufacturing wind turbines does; installing solar panels on a large scale on what was farmland has an impact, so we really have to focus on energy usage. NC State is doing an amazing job right now by building energy efficient buildings that are LEED certified. The more efficiently we build in the places that we live and work, the more we can get the cheapest conservation dollar. It’s cheaper than buying land. It’s cheaper than creating solar energy for distribution. Conservation really takes the edge off of your carbon footprint. The more we can do that to reduce emissions, the more we can do to at least address the low-hanging fruit of what needs to be done.
