June 17, 2010
North Carolina Coastal Federal Federation
has a travel guide with a conscience
Leave
the crowds on the beaches this summer to visit some of the wildest
wildlife refuges in the country or to watch artists in a town along the
Scuppernong River work their traditional crafts.
The North Carolina Coastal Federation’s annual State of the Coast
Report makes it easy for tourists who are visiting the state’s
northeast coast this summer and for the residents who live there to
visit some special natural places where they can hike, launch a canoe
or kayak, look for birds and wildflowers, or learn about the region’s
heritage.
This State of the Coast Report is different from the others the
federation has published over the years. The reports usually tackle
weighty subjects, such as stormwater pollution, global warming, and
beach development. The 2010 edition, though, takes on a lighter subject
-- travel. But it’s not like the many tourist guides available each
summer from Corolla to Calabash, said Frank Tursi, an assistant
director of the federation and the report’s editor and lead writer.
“We’re calling it a travel guide with a conscience,” he said.
Unlike those other guides, the State of the Coast Report features
places that were once threatened by development and are now protected
because people fought for them. The report details the fight that the
federation led in the early 1980s against strip miners who wanted to
extract the thick brown hash of mud, muck, and decaying plants and
trees—organic peat – found along the shores of Albemarle and Pamlico
sounds and burn it for fuel. Many commercial fishermen, fearing what
mining would do to water quality, joined the effort.
The state eventually denied the permits, and 93,000 acres of the
proposed strip mine now forms the core of the Pocosin Lakes National
Wildlife Refuge, home to endangered red wolves and a host of birds,
reptiles and mammals. The refuge headquarters has helped transform the
rural town of Columbia in Tyrrell County into a center for ecotourism.
Pocosin Arts, a nonprofit arts cooperative in downtown Columbia, has a
gallery with local arts and crafts, many for sale. It offers workshops,
classes, and retreats and brings in visiting artists for demonstrations.
This is eastern North Carolina’s premier handcrafts education center.
Browse through the gallery, make a clay tile or watch visiting artist
Marlene True (at the cooperative this fall) craft pairs of earrings
from recycled aluminum cans.
The State of the Coast Report also features now-protected places like
Nags Head Woods. If developers had gotten their way in the late 1970s,
the forest would have been clear-cut and the dunes leveled for a
residential subdivision. The development process was well underway when
area resident Henrietta List formed a grassroots group to save the
woods.
Even North Carolina’s most famous sand dune, Jockey’s Ridge, owes its
existence as a natural area to another Outer Banks conservation
heroine, Carolista Fletcher Baum Golden. In 1973 when the ridge was
slated for development, Golden took that most radical of conservation
steps: She stood in front of a bulldozer that was preparing to carve a
chunk out of the dune. The state subsequently obtained 426 acres
through purchase and land donations and established Jockey’s Ridge
State Park in 1975.
The stories behind the places in the State of the Coast Report provide a valuable lesson in conservation, Tursi said.
“People of goodwill and good sense can win,” he said. “If they band
together and fight hard enough and long enough, they overcome powerful
economic and political forces to protect the places they treasure.”
CLICK HERE FOR THE NORTH CAROLINA COASTAL FEDERAL TRAVEL GUIDE
