I lost one home – my beloved farm – and I don’t intend to lose another.
NC does not have to look like the northeast. We can see where that led – everyone’s leaving and coming down to NC because, “NC is nice!”
It sure is. Let’s keep it that way. It’s slipping between our fingers, one DOT highway and expensive subdivision after another. Is this really the size of our dream? We can dream bigger!
Our work is ALL connected, and if we get connected, on the land, place to place, neighbor to neighbor we can greatly influence – steer the ship – toward our common goal. The resilience and restoration of NC habitats, the health of our state, is in our hands, every one of us – not in policies or taxes or legislation, though also there, but equally or even more so, in our own yards, neighborhoods and open spaces.
Every Environmental Educator, every school, every open space can participate in habitat restoration, recovery and resilience, building spurs and trails for wildlife and wild neighbors to move across and through the landscape.
Working separately, we cannot save NC from development, highways and destructive economic forces. If we are not all working toward this goal together, we cannot get there. It will take everything we have, and more people after us, to keep the forces of extraction, and capitalization from paving paradise into a parking lot. The song hasn’t changed, just the geography.
I want us all to own this goal, together. There is nothing, nothing, that I can do beyond my own yard. That’s not even mine, but it’s my place, it’s where I live, and I steward it. The rest, your yard, and yours, and yours – is up to you. What will you do? Will you dig into your values, dig into your soil, your “soul”, and become a member of the community of all beings who share that place? What can you do, this Fall, this year, this lifetime?