On April 17, 2021, volunteers from Haywood Waterways, Haywood Community College, Climate Action Coalition, and others, gathered at River’s Edge Park in Clyde. Our job was to plant native species of deep-rooted trees and shrubs to stabilize the banks of the Pigeon River. There was a sense of urgency. When the job was done and over 40 specimens were planted, the group gathered together to share some thoughts.

Growing up in Franklin, Katie Peek never dreamed she would one day be living in the mountains and working as a coastal scientist in Western Carolina University’s Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines.

Did you know a family in Denmark uses, on average, four single-use grocery bags per year while American families use one per day? 

“Eleutheria” is the Greek word for “freedom.” It is also the reference name of an island in the Bahamas (Eleuthera). And it is the title and the setting for Allegra Hyde’s first novel (Vintage Books, 2022). 

By Steve Wall • Guest Columnist | The place — Canton; the time — 7 a.m.; the date — September 9, 2004. 

Mayor Pat Smathers and I walked down Park Street in disbelief. Colonial Theater, Canton Medical Office, police and city offices had all flooded with up to seven feet of water from the Pigeon River. Hurricanes Ivan and Frances hit within a week and left a grim mark on Haywood County. That was 2004.

By Patrick Gleason • Guest Columnist | The alarmist rhetoric and proclamations found in Mary Jane Curry’s recent column published in The Mountaineer, “A Life Or Death Matter,” (Aug. 15) are certainly worrisome. The good news is that they are completely detached from reality.

“It’s the new normal.”

It was the husband who had spoken. The couple we had encountered were lean, fit and tanned, obviously spending a lot of time outdoors.

By Mary Jane Curry • Guest Columnist

“Nature never did betray the heart that loved her.”

— William Wordsworth, 1798

Agreeing generates peace and optimism — emotions hard to come by over the past year. Fortunately, a growing majority of Americans do agree that we must do more to lessen the climate crisis and they want to be part of the solution. But how and what?

I was one of the lucky ones. I met and befriended Thomas Berry on Earth Day in the late 1980s during his youthful middle age and at the beginnings of his meteoric rise to prominence as an author of books on spiritual ecology. These were books that raised the bar on the beginnings and what would become the awareness and movement regarding what was then being labeled “Global Warming” and what is now a full-blown “Climate Change Movement” that is global in scope and scale.

WNC Climate Action Coalition’s screening of David Weintraub’s new documentary “Guardians of our Troubled Waters” is both a history lesson and a call to action. 

The film, made in collaboration with the Wilma Dykeman Legacy Foundation, Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, Conserving Carolina, Mountain True, Clean Water Expected in East Tennessee, Friends of the Everglades and Haywood Waterways Association, will be aired at 6:30 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 21, at the Lake Junaluska Assembly Terrace Auditorium at 689 North Lakeshore Drive. There will be a panel discussion following the film. The panel will include filmmaker David Weintraub, Eric Romaniszyn of Haywood Waterways, Callie Moore of Mountain True and more.