To the Editor:

Have you ever heard the expression “waiting for the other shoe to drop”? I thought of it as I was reading all the recent news and opinions about the U.S. Forest Service studies on wood harvesting in Western North Carolian. I felt there was something not being said. Well, the answer came in a Jan. 29 article by Politico reporter Michael Grunwald.

Grunwald writes about a Nov. 19 memo from the EPA stating the Obama administration is looking to declare forestry products “carbon neutral.” In keeping with Obama’s on-again-off-again position on climate change and his “all-the-above” energy policies, declaring wood products carbon neutral opens the door to massive new exploitation of our forests. Thus the rush to re-evaluate forestry practices across the country. 

But burning trees for energy is not carbon neutral. It is true that a tree soaks up carbon and seals it in the wood, but burning it in a matter of minutes is a sudden rush of carbon. And even if you buy the premise that the gain is neutral, we have already gone over 400 parts per million of CO2 in the air, and we surely don’t need to go any higher.

According to Tim Searchinger, a researcher at Princeton University, burning wood (and other “biomass” sources of energy) is appealing to policy makers but is totally unrealistic. The oft-cited goal of 20 percent energy from biomass by 2050 would require burning every tree in our forests and all our food stocks as well. Searchinger also calculates that just the current policy proposal alone would require a 70 percent increase in American forestry production. 

And do you get the scent of money in all that smoke? Politicians on both sides of the aisle are lining up to support the increased denuding of our woods, and to take big campaign gifts from the people who will profit from it. Chipper mill owners are already increasing production in order to ship our forests to eager energy consumers in Europe, nations willing to make similar declarations of carbon neutrality.

Boyd Holliday

Lake Junaluska

To the Editor:

At first blush the idea of a 200-foot cross seemed kind of cool. It could make Maggie Valley famous for having the tallest cross. 

But I’ve been mulling it around in my head because there’s just something not right. First, having the tallest cross is a vanity thing. Vanity is a sin. You don’t have to build a bigger cross to be closer to God. Look how that Babel tower thing worked out.

Secondly, and more important to me, I absolutely do not want a 200-foot night light blocking out the sky! Nearly everyone in Maggie Valley can see the roller coaster from their front porch. It’s practically over our heads. Now imagine 200 feet up from there is a well-lit cross.

We moved to the country over 15 years ago to get away from noise and light pollution. There’s nothing more beautiful than a sky full of stars on a clear dark night. But in the city you’re likely to forget there are stars.

It’s an urban blight. Appreciate what you have and stop messing it up. Having the world’s tallest cross is a grand idea. But it’s not a good idea.

Larry Wright

Maggie Valley

Bills to get rid of the oil and gas extraction rules developed by the N.C. Mining and Energy Commission have been introduced in both the House and Senate of the N.C. General Assembly, with Rep. Joe Sam Queen, D-Waynesville, signing on as a co-sponsor of the House version.

A $30,000 grant from the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation will help the N.C. Wildlife Federation further its mission of conserving and protecting wildlife and their habitats. 

Learn about the Highland Plateau Greenway’s vision to build a public trail to the top of Satulah Mountain at a public meeting held 4 to 5:30 p.m. Monday, March 2, at the Highlands Civic Center.

An annual Wild Game Dinner hosted by the Wildlife Club at Haywood Community College will serve up a meal of home-cooked wild game dishes while raising money for the student group.

The weather is wintry, but spring is just around the corner. Mark your calendar for some of these upcoming springtime events.

A “buy local” directory for wood-related products from Western North Carolina is looking for more businesses, artisans and organizations to add to its listings before launching a searchable database version of the directory later this year.

Haywood Tourism Development Authority is currently looking for volunteer guest travel bloggers to contribute articles to its Homegrown Blog on www.visitncsmokies.com.

Haywood Community College’s Workforce Continuing Education Creative Arts Department will offer an Introduction to Sound Recording/Engineering class on Mondays from March 2 through May 18.

Boojum Brewing Company, Waynesville’s newest (and fourth) brewery, will officially open its downtown taproom at 11 a.m. Saturday, Feb. 21, at 50 North Main Street.

The Galaxy of Stars Series will present the one-man show “Man 1, Bank 0” at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 28, in the John W. Bardo Fine and Performing Arts Center at Western Carolina University.

Presented as a live radio broadcast onstage, “Robin Hood – The Legacy” will be held at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 26, in the John W. Bardo Fine and Performing Arts Center at Western Carolina University.

Multi-platinum country music artist Mark Wills will perform at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 28, at the Smoky Mountain Center for the Performing Arts in Franklin.

Legendary outlaw country singer Willie Nelson will perform at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 28, Harrah’s Cherokee.

QUESTION: Where does Ingles Laura Lynn milk come from?

ANSWER: Most (80%) of the dairy farmers who supply Ingles Markets with Laura Lynn milk live within about 100-150 miles of Asheville. These dairy farms generally have about 100-200 cows and are family owned like English Farm in Marion NC and Ramsey Dairy Farm in Fairview.

To the Editor:

It’s true, you only get one chance to make a good one. Entering Waynesville from any direction does not make a good first impression. 

Coming from the east on N.C. 19/23 you only have to be about 500 feet inside the town limits before encountering a junkyard. There are dozens of unlicensed over-the-road vehicles that haven’t moved for at least the last 20 years. Several are parked within six or seven feet of the sidewalk and obviously are on the road right of way. Keep going a little farther and at the traffic circle you have a great view of a drive-in movie screen that has been falling apart for the last decade. Go another half mile and enjoy the next junkyard on your left. Continue on North Main another half mile or so and gaze upon the next junkyards on both sides of North Main. I have been to ghost towns in the West that gave a similar first impression. Now let’s come to town from the south on U.S. 276. Immediately upon entering the town limits on your left you will see a junkyard that has been growing for the last 15 years. Then come in from South Main and encounter another junkyard on your right, inside the town limits. 

Some of these aren’t real junkyards, but they are businesses who need to clean up their act.

What has happened to our junkyard and sign ordinances? We had temporary real estate signs removed and not returned just days after putting them up. South on U.S. 276 about a half mile from Main Street, there is a development sign that has been there at least 20 years for a development that has never been or will ever be. Consistency in enforcement would be nice. 

I guess my question should be: what individual does the performance review of the town employee being paid to enforce our ordinances? It appears that neither of these people are doing what they are being paid by the taxpayers to do. We have the ordinances in place and code enforcement employees on the taxpayers payroll. Isn’t it time to clean up the impression we make on people coming to Waynesville?

Bruce Gardner

Waynesville

To the Editor:

It took newly elected Sen. Thom Tillis , R-N.C., merely a month in Washington to make himself North Carolina’s reigning national embarrassment, succeeding Rep. Mark “Shutdown” Meadows, R-Cashiers, and John “Casanova” Edwards. People elsewhere are asking how we elected a U.S. senator who doesn’t believe the government should make restaurant workers wash their hands before work or after using the toilet.

The simple explanation is that too many people didn’t care enough to vote; those who did seemed to know what a throwback Sen. Tillis is and most must have approved.

The surprise is not that he’s babbling like a disciple of the nihilist author Ayn Rand, but that he chose so offensive an example to make his point. Sen. Tillis isn’t saying that cooks or servers shouldn’t wash their hands, but simply that it isn’t the government’s job to make them do it. The public deserves only to know whether their employers require it.

His ideology is the law of the jungle. It used to prevail nationwide until Upton Sinclair and other crusaders began writing about such things as spoiled meat disguised with chemicals and littered with rat feces. To return to such unfettered free enterprise is the not-so-secret ambition of the big shots in every sector of the economy and their stooges in the Congress and the legislatures.

In Sen. Tillis’s dream world, restaurants are required only to tell their customers whether employees must wash their hands. To a bemused audience, Sen. Tillis remarked that the market — meaning the patrons — would “take care” of those establishments that didn’t.

Of course, every place would claim that it did. But so what?

To say, as some do, that Sen. Tillis proposes to replace one regulation with another misses the point. As a Bloomberg Politics essay put it, “he’d rather make things easier for businesses than safe for consumers.”

Requiring a restaurant to say only whether it orders its workers to wash their hands isn’t the same as holding it responsible — as the law does — for seeing that it’s done and done well.

North Carolina’s hand-washing rules are fairly detailed and explicit, and properly so. The water needs to be warm, hands and arms should be scrubbed with an approved product for at least 20 seconds, there have to be clean towels or a dryer, and there must be a separate sink so that the one where food is prepared won’t be used for post-toilet sanitation.

In Tillisland, none of that would matter.

Overall, there are 204 pages in our state’s Food Code. If you think that’s too many, you have not suffered such miseries as E. Coli, shigella, or salmonella. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that there are 48 million cases of food-borne diseases in the U.S. every year. That’s one for every six of us. At least 128,000 people are hospitalized and 3,000 die.

During a salmonella outbreak two years ago that sickened 100 people in Fayetteville — yes, right here in North Carolina — inspectors identified multiple possible rule violations at the restaurant in question. They included improper water temperature and a lack of hand-washing supplies. The report also noted that seven employees had violated the code by working when they were ill.

Granted, the employees shouldn’t have worked. But without paid sick leave, it was likely a matter of breaking either the law or their leases.

For public safety, the law should demand paid sick leave for food service and health care workers, so many of whom live precariously from one pay check to the next. But we’re not likely to get something so obviously necessary from a General Assembly of Sen. Tillis clones. With a committee chair’s gavel now in her hands, Rep. Michelle Presnell, R-Burnsville, is promising to attack what she calls “onerous regulatory overreach.”

Tom Tillis and Michelle Presnell: King and Queen of the jungle.  

Martin A. Dyckman

Waynesville

Maggie Valley’s inaugural WinterFest Smoky Style will celebrate the best of the cold-weather season 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 28, at the Maggie Valley Festival Grounds, with other events bookending the festival Friday and Saturday nights.

Runners will take to the streets of downtown Waynesville as the inaugural Gateway to the Smokies Half Marathon starts from Main Street at 7:30 a.m. on Saturday, May 2. 

Haywood Community College just became the only two-year community college in North Carolina to offer a forest management technology program accredited by the Society of American Foresters, a national organization for professional foresters.

Registration is now open for the fifth Wilderness Skills Institute, a training program for Wilderness stewardship and management, held at the Cradle of Forestry in Pisgah National Forest.

Lake Junaluska was only 39 degrees on Jan. 31, but 120 people still braved the cold to participate in Haywood Waterways Association’s Third Annual Polar Plunge.

Two open houses this month will offer the chance to meet and greet the Great Smoky Mountains National Park Superintendent, Cassius Cash, who had his first day at work this Monday (Feb. 9).

A nonprofit organization, Catch the Spirit of Appalachia wishes to once again provide four opportunities for a scholarship in the amount of $500 each for Appalachian Studies to be presented to four deserving seniors in the Western North Carolina counties.

• The Annie Lee Bryson Memorial Scholarship is for a local student who has declared a major or minor in Appalachian Studies or related studies with an interest in traditional crafts.

• The Mary Jane Queen Memorial Scholarship is for students who have declared a major or minor in music, with an interest in the traditional music of the Appalachian Mountains.

• The Elmer & Irene Hooper Memorial Scholarship is for high school seniors who have demonstrated excellence in volunteerism and leadership. 

• The Founders Scholarship is awarded on the basis of merit or potential within the visual arts, writing or history, with consideration of financial need.

Applicants must submit a completed application and all supporting documents to the guidance counselor of the applicant’s school by March 10 in order to be considered for this year’s scholarship awards. Home-schooler applicants should complete the application and send it to CSA, 29 Regal Avenue, Sylva, N.C. 28779, also by March 10. The application may be downloaded at www.spiritofappalachia.org.

828.631.4587.

A collection of images by acclaimed photographer Tim Barnwell that reflects the musical and craft traditions of the Southern Appalachian Mountains is currently on display through April 1 at Western Carolina University’s Mountain Heritage Center.

The Downtown Waynesville Association is seeking heritage themed vendors for the fifth annual Appalachian Lifestyle Celebration that will take place Saturday, June 13.

Renowned classic rock act Heart will hit the stage at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 21, at Harrah’s Cherokee.

Jackson County commissioners will spend $100,000 on a storage room at the Cashiers library for the Friends of the Cashiers Library to house used book donations.

Haywood County Schools will be offering signing bonuses for teachers in hard-to-get fields starting next school year.

QUESTION: Do you do talks for the public and if so, what is the cost?

Answer: Yes! I frequently do presentations on nutrition and food related topics for various non-profit groups, students, and community organizations. I request that you have a minimum of 50 people in attendance for the presentation. There is no cost. The best way to check on my availability is to e-mail me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or call me at: 800-334-4936.

The Experience Your Smokies program is looking for applicants who want to get an insider’s look at park operations while getting some exploration into their lives as well.

Two potential candidates for wilderness designation in the Pisgah and Nantahala national forests were accidentally left off a master list compiled by the U.S. Forest Service.

The N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission has publicly denounced the red wolf reintroduction in coastal counties, calling for the red wolves to be rounded up — despite being the only wild population of red wolves on the planet.

The northern slopes of Little Sandy Mush Bald, an iconic view for those who live in the coves and farms of the surrounding Sandy Mush community in Buncombe County, will remain undeveloped following the Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy’s purchase of 241 acres in Madison County, which includes part of the bald.

The father of American landscape architecture will soon be memorialized at the North Carolina Arboretum.

Aldo Leopold and his writings are cornerstones of modern environmental ethic, and a program teaching how to use his work as a springboard to engage students in natural science and literature is now being offered through the Jackson and Swain county cooperative extension centers. 

To the Editor:

A rich man, a middle class man and a poor man walk into a bar. They sit at a table with 12 cookies. The rich man takes 11 cookies and then tells the middle class man that the poor man is trying to steal the last cookie. Such is the state of American political landscape at the beginning of the 21 century.

The Koch brothers are the rich man. They are going to raise and spend almost $1 billion on the next presidential campaign. They are going to tell the hard-working middle class that the money given to the less fortunate in our society is being taken away from them. 

They are going to spend more money in this election cycle than the whole of the Republican Party — or for that matter the Democratic Party — spent in 2012. And that was the most expensive campaign in history.

Their Libertarian agenda is even to the right of the Tea Party. But with all that money to throw around, the possible Republican party candidates for president are now lining up to became their new best friends. It is quite possible that they will choose who gets the money to run as the Republican nominee.

When the Supreme Court said via the Citizens United decision that money equals speech, they created new political order. One man, one vote, now seems like a quaint, old-fashioned notion, gone the way of the dodo bird. Money for advertising; money for paid staff; money to pay lobbyists; money to fund campaigns; money to register voters; money for sophisticated computer programs to get out the vote, money, money, money is the lifeblood of politics. 

The next time your friendly Republican or Democratic Party fundraiser asks for a $5 donation, try not to laugh. Even if 5 million people each give $5 and raise $25 million, that is only 2.5 percent of a billion dollars. The Koch brothers are worth over $41.5 billion; so, even if they contribute a billion dollars all by themselves, that is only 2.5 percent of their personal fortune.

This is not how democracy is supposed to work.

Louis Vitale

Franklin

Over the past couple of months there has been a fair amount of coverage in area media outlets about the “changing” landscape of women’s health care services in Western North Carolina. A couple of individuals have chosen to provide their independent opinions, though both of them are not without a conflict of interest due to past or current business relationships.

More than 30 downtown Waynesville businesses are offering discounts for local residents throughout the month of February. Look for the big red heart on the door and be prepared to show proof of local residence.

There will be an interactive presentation to “tour” the state of North Carolina during “Tar Heel Tour: Our State, Our Time” from 5 to 7 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 12, in the A.K. Hinds University Center at Western Carolina University.

Professional craft artists in Jackson, Macon, and Swain counties and the Qualla Boundary have a $3,000 incentive to create or update their business plans.

Valentine’s Day paper arts class

A book/paper arts workshop will be held from 2 to 4:30 p.m. Feb. 7 at Blue Ridge Books in Waynesville.

The Macon County Art Association will host a “Grand Re-Opening” of their Uptown Gallery from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Friday, Feb. 13, at 30 East Main Street in Franklin.

A special Valentine’s Day dinner and live performance by jazz singer Jesse Earl Junior will take place at 7 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 14, at The Classic Wineseller in Waynesville.

1950s pop sensation Frankie Avalon will perform at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Feb. 13, at the Smoky Mountain Center for the Performing Arts in Franklin.

A community museum and learning center at Fontana Village along Fontana Lake will commemorate the 70th anniversary of power production at Fontana Dam, thanks to an alliance between Proctor Revival Organization, Fontana Village Resort, Graham Revitalization Economic Action Team and Western Carolina University’s Mountain Heritage Center.

A 10-acre tract along the Blue Ridge Parkway and a new section of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail in Jackson County will likely become Blue Ridge Parkway land following its Dec. 18, 2014, purchase by the Conservation Trust for North Carolina.

Trail adventures for kids will expand in North Carolina over the coming years, thanks to a $921,000 grant from the Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina Foundation.

A three-year stream-mapping project in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park is now complete, revealing new information about the park’s water resources. 

Using a combination of aircraft-mounted scanners and a Global Positioning System verification system, scientists determined that the park holds 2,900 miles of stream, 1,073 miles of which are large enough to support fish. That’s a considerable jump from the previous estimate of 2,000 miles of stream in the park.