Pictured above: WNCA members collected more than 15,000 petition signatures to stop the practice of clearcutting in Nantahala and Pisgah National Forests. When all the petition pages were taped together, they were the length of three football fields.

By Bob Gale, MountainTrue Ecologist and Public Lands Director

In 1976, Congress passed the National Forest Management Act (NFMA) requiring the U.S. Forest Service to produce management plans for all national forests. The combined force of the NFMA and the Multiple Use Sustained Yield Act of 1960 required the agency to adopt a multi-focus management approach that equally prioritized timber production, water, wildlife, and recreation in our national forests. 

Issued in 1987, the first Nantahala-Pisgah Management Plan was considered by many to simply be a 50-year blueprint for logging. Prior to the oil and gas drilling threat, the Forest Service had been ramping up timber sales in national forests around the U.S. The logging was occurring at an unstainable rate and it was employing the most damaging method of logging — clearcutting. This clearcutting was causing extensive damage to Western North Carolina’s (WNC) forest ecosystems. From erosion on mountain slopes to the severe sedimentation of streams and rivers, as well as the negative impacts on native plant and wildlife communities, this clearcutting harmfully manipulated and altered thriving forest stands throughout Nantahala and Pisgah National Forests. Clearcutting also allowed for the Forest Service’s repeated entry into the stands to thin the resulting overcrowded and unhealthy trees with more cutting and/or herbicides.

The rampant and highly visible clearcutting that was taking place all over the WNC mountains angered the public. The passion and organizing capacity of WNC Alliance (WNCA) members channeled the wider public’s outcry into an effective, people-powered grassroots campaign, which gained the Forest Service’s attention and ultimately brought an end to clearcutting.

WNCA founders Esther Cunningham and David Liden enlisted the help of the organization’s Forest Management Task Force (FMTF) to address the clearcutting issue. The FMTF was comprised of an elite group of forest-savvy members from all over WNC and it received major credibility and inspiration from Walton Smith, a retired and well-respected Forest Service silviculturist. Smith and another retired forester and FMTF member, Bob Padgett, strongly believed that clearcutting — or even-aged management, as it was euphemistically known in the profession — was damaging mountain forest ecosystems. They also believed that more sustainable timber harvesting methods existed. Smith, Padgett, and another clearcutting critic and WNCA supporter, Clemson Emeritus Forestry Professor Bob Zahner, gave WNCA tremendous credibility on this issue. The FMTF cleverly attached the title, Cut The Clearcutting, to their crusade. FMTF members provided energy for the region-wide effort, which included local appeals, protests, letter-writing campaigns, and other activities.

Smith led WNCA members through timber sale stands to demonstrate how clearcutting was causing harm and explain how sustainable forestry should be accomplished. He re-designed the famous Biltmore Stick used to measure the potential value of a timber stand by adding other important measurements and renaming it the WalDee Stick — a combination of his own name and that of his wife, Dee. Smith taught WNCA members how to gather on-the-ground data by using the WalDee Stick, which the organization then used to document errors in Forest Service’s timber sale proposals. He also demonstrated how the agency’s removal of the diverse hardwood species in rich coves left them vulnerable to a tulip tree monoculture that suppressed oaks and other native species. 

Pictured above: MountainTrue’s Public Lands Field Biologist, Josh Kelly, counts the rings on a tree in Nantahala National Forest.

As Esther, David, and early WNCA members were wrestling with this problem, a young activist named Monroe Gilmour was fighting to protect an ill-thought-out proposal to begin logging in the Asheville Watershed — the source of the pristine drinking water supply for the city and its surrounding communities. Gilmour knew the water supply would be severely impacted if the forest canopy protecting the drainage system’s soils and headwaters were cleared. 

Gilmour rallied local concerned citizens and founded a group named Citizens Against Clearcutting the Asheville Watershed, with its jeering acronym “CACAW.” His campaign was successful in raising public concern and opposition to the proposal. Gilmour’s efforts ultimately led to the prohibition of logging in the watershed’s higher elevations through the creation of a conservation easement held by the city and the Conservation Trust of North Carolina.

Impressed with this success, WNCA hired Gilmour to help run its new Cut The Clearcutting campaign. He coordinated the diverse parts, including developing a schedule of events, getting the campaign covered in the media, printing petitions, and collecting signatures throughout WNC counties. A peak of the campaign occurred with a well-organized demonstration in Asheville involving a variety of knowledgeable speakers. The petitions were securely taped together by members of the Unity of the Blue Ridge Church in Henderson County and combined onto a giant roll. Another roll of petitions was compiled from businesses across the mountain counties. 

The collective expertise and action by WNCA’s members got the attention of the Forest Service Supervisor and after countless meetings over several years with the agency, the agency’s management plan for Nantahala and Pisgah National Forests was significantly amended in 1994. WNCA was influential in getting clearcutting dropped as a harvesting method, establishing buffers from logging within stream corridors, and designating protected old-growth tracts within timber management areas. These protections were innovative and the Nantahala-Pisgah National Forest Management Plan became a national model. 

Thanks to the hard work of WNCA founders, staff, forestry experts, and volunteers, the organization successfully went to bat (and hit a home run) for the continued wellbeing of Nantahala and Pisgah National Forests in its early years. And that work continues today as our Public Lands Team remains dedicated to the protection of these two beloved national forests through sound, science-backed management that perpetuates the unique biodiversity and honors the cultural and spiritual importance of these ancient mountain forests. 

MountainTrue: an organization born in the forest, rooted in the mountains, and strengthened by our communities. 

By Bob Gale, MountainTrue Ecologist and Public Lands Director

The year was 1982. Esther Cunningham — a retired school teacher from a rural area of Macon County known as the Carson Community — first heard rumors of a plan by major oil companies to build roads and drill test wells across Nantahala and Pisgah National Forests in search of oil deposits. The plan was being proposed by the U.S. Forest Service in the form of leases to the big oil companies at a ridiculously cheap price. Esther undertook extensive research into the proposal and unearthed the surprisingly massive scale of the drilling plans. She also discovered that one of the major lessors behind the proposal’s corporate shield was, in fact, the government of Kuwait. So, Esther sounded the alarm within her extensive network comprised of many folks in North Carolina’s far western counties. 

Esther chaired the Carson Community Club and she and her husband, Jim, were active in other community clubs across the mountain counties that were part of the Western North Carolina (WNC) Associated Communities. Because of their work with Associated Communities, the Cunninghams had been invited to a regional meeting of the Appalachian Alliance (AA), a multi-state network of community clubs, and it was here that Esther met Bill Horton, AA’s Executive Director. 

Horton was presenting on the AA sponsorship of a six-state project called the Appalachian Land Ownership Study. When Esther told him about the oil and gas leasing threat, he put her in touch with former AA staff member, David Liden, who had dealt with this issue in West Virginia but recently moved to his wife’s family area of Cherokee County, NC. It was a serendipitous meeting — David helped Esther develop a grassroots campaign to educate WNC residents about the oil leasing plans and the naivete of the Forest Service offices regarding the source of the proposal and its potential impacts on our mountain forests. Together, Esther and David decided to formally establish a nonprofit organization to address this threat and they named it the Western North Carolina Alliance (WNCA). 

The WNCA founders gave a lot of thought to their branding of the organization. David notes that they avoided characterizing themselves as an environmental organization because of the distortion, ambiguity, and divisiveness inherent in that label at the time. Instead, Esther and David wanted to engage and activate fellow WNC locals, so they brought a variety of community members together to collaboratively define the issues that were important to them. This early focus on community participation and outreach to a diverse public proved to be an innovative and astonishing formula for success. 

They developed WNCA’s membership model, which grew to include folks of all ages from local families that went back generations, as well as transplanted newcomers from around the country. Hunters, anglers, university professors, retired Forest Service foresters, community club leaders, craftspeople and artists, school teachers, real estate professionals, and farmers joined WNCA and added to its capacity as a membership organization by representing many different interest areas. 

This broad coalition with local roots was a new phenomenon for this region and gave WNCA unique credibility. It also confused the Forest Service, as the agency had not expected such united opposition to their plans in Nantahala and Pisgah National Forests. Under Esther and David’s leadership, the fledgling nonprofit and its devoted members created a powerful grassroots force that halted the oil leasing proposal in its tracks. 

In their initial attempt to protect this region’s natural ecosystems, WNCA’s founders achieved the organization’s first success and set the stage for its evolution into MountainTrue. 40 years later, MountainTrue continues to champion resilient forests, including Nantahala and Pisgah National Forests.