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Rob Messick contributed an immense amount to the report, also based on his personal knowledge of many of the places we detail. He proposed new area boundaries in many cases and recommended several new areas, drawing on his extensive old-growth field work. Rob also provided the original delineation of the Mountain Treasures boundaries.
Amy Tidwell, a former Wilderness Society staffer, kept the revision process moving forward and made sure that key players remained in touch at critical stages.
The Wilderness Society, in partnership with many other conservation groups, has published Mountain Treasures reports for most of the national forests in the Southern Appalachians; North Carolina's was the first and a model for those that followed. In turn, this report reflects the best of others in the series. In the 1994 report, the goal was to depict individual wild areas. And it did that well. Bill Thomas suggested grouping areas into clusters, a device that both improves the utility of the report and reflects the important idea of landscape-level conservation that flows from the principles of conservation biology.
The 2002 book, Return of the Great Forest: A Conservation Vision for the Southern Appalachian Region, admirably set forth the challenge. Recognizing, planning for and protecting these places at the landscape level, rather than in isolation from one another, is our best hope-perhaps our only hope-of securing for our region a conservation network that sustains the life forms that are natural to it. This book from the Southern Appalachian Forest Coalition also involved the Wilderness Society and other conservation organizations. It envisions "a biologically diverse region sustained by a connected network of large natural areas."
The future of North Carolina's wild lands is central to this vision because many of the most significant large natural areas in the region are partly or wholly within our state.
This report also builds on an earlier publication by The Wilderness Society -- Mountain Treasures at Risk: The Future of the Southern Appalachian National Forests (Jackson, 1989). This publication took an early and important cumulative look at the forest plans adopted for the six national forests surrounding the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. It criticized those plans for promoting excessive logging and road building and the impacts of those activities on scenic beauty, recreation, biological diversity, clean waters and other natural values.
The Society's work continues in the region. The Wilderness Society's Bolle Center for Forest Ecosystem Management coordinates the Southern Appalachian Project, applying The Society's expertise in forest policy, research, ecology, economics and law to the development of new models for sustainable forest management.
In addition to The Wilderness Society and the Southern Appalachian Forest Coalition, ____________________(need list to go here) are cosponsors of this website.
The Wilderness Society, founded in 1935, is a non-profit conservation organization dedicated to safeguarding the nation's public lands. The Society's headquarters are in Washington, D.C., and it has 14 regional offices around the country. The Western North Carolina office is in Franklin, NC. |
