Some folks look upon our verdant forests, our awe-inspiring mountains, the fresh, clear water coming from the Mills River, the French Broad River and the Green River, and they feel connected to something bigger than themselves.
However, others look at the very same thing and see market value and personal enrichment, as if the natural world was nothing more than an investment portfolio, something to turn into development tracts, sterilized from the circle of life. They forget that economic activity is only successful when our natural resources are conserved not depleted.
Yet I don’t recall anyone telling me that what Western North Carolina needs is more concrete. That we have a shortage of roads, fast food “restaurants,” strip malls or pharmacies. Or that our streams need more sediment and that more native trout need to perish so that “progress” can continue its ceaseless march forward.
Nonetheless our development community and many of our Board of Commissioners are doing exactly this. It’s not that they don’t see the forest for the trees. What many of them see (if they have a vision at all) is an un-forested, hopeless, bounty of roads and development with only a glimpse of mountains shadowing concrete canyons.