The Western North Carolina Alliance was born in Macon County in 1982 out of one of these battles, the fight over proposed oil and gas drilling in the Nantahala and Pisgah National Forests. It brought together longtime mountain residents with sensitive newcomers to fight for environmentalist causes that appealed to both. Widely recognized as one of the most important grassroots environmental groups in the Appalachian region, WNCA has demonstrated a remarkable ability to bring together unlikely combinations of people to fight for environmentalist causes. It has an impressive record of listening and responding to local concerns, and of mobilizing diverse constituencies around those concerns. Where many environmental organizations in the mountains represent outside interests and find themselves at odds with area citizens, local energy and enthusiasm have fuelled the Alliance.

Since 1982 WNCA has reshaped the political, cultural, and physical terrain of highlands North Carolina. The organization was instrumental in defeating proposals to allow exploratory oil and gas drilling in the Pisgah and Nantahala National Forests, in forcing the Department of Energy to table plans to site a nuclear waste facility in the Southern mountains, and in convincing the U.S. Forest Service to amend its fifteen-year plan for regional forest management, which favored large timber sales and clearcutting. Throughout the 1980s and 90s the Alliance was one of the key players in debates over National Forest usage, and thanks in large part to its efforts North Carolina currently benefits from one of the Forest Service's most environmentally sensitive management plans. The Appalshop film "Ready for Harvest" featured the organization's 1989 "Cut the Clearcutting" campaign, which mobilized broad opposition to the practice and collected over 16,000 individual and 900 business signatures on an anti-clearcutting petition. A leading scholar of Appalachian activism has hailed the Alliance for its "accomplishments, staying power, and creative strategies," and WNCA has earned widespread recognition as one of the most important citizens' groups in the Appalachian region.

How has this regional citizens' organization earned its reputation and achieved such remarkable results? The Alliance has assembled its impressive list of accomplishments largely because it has successfully brought together unlikely combinations of people to fight for environmentalist causes. WNCA has an extraordinary track record of mobilizing broad constituencies--many of whom did not match the typical environmentalist profile" and would not have considered themselves environmentalists--to become active in battles over land use. Often breaking with mainstream national environmental organizations such as the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society, the organization has taken its cues from local citizens. By listening and responding to the concerns of hunters, housewives, foresters, farmers, and other "unlikely environmentalists" the Alliance has tapped into reservoirs of "environmentalist consciousness" largely ignored (or even repressed) by mainstream environmentalist organizations.

Environmentalism in the mountains of the Southeastern United States has often come from outside the region and faced strong opposition from longtime residents. This is particularly true of Western North Carolina, which has seen a huge influx of outdoor recreation enthusiasts and wealthy retirees in the past half-century. These newcomers have brought with them a "wilderness" brand of environmentalism familiar to middle-class urban and suburbanites, but foreign and threatening to many longtime residents of the rural Southern mountains. Yet in recent decades Western North Carolinians, led by the Western North Carolina Alliance, have fought and won a series of battles over land use in the region. Though newcomers to the region played important roles, longtime residents spearheaded many of these struggles and mobilized the broad bases of support that enabled some eventual victories.

Why did longtime mountain residents both reject mainstream environmentalism, on the one hand, and organize and participate in effective environmentalist campaigns, on the other? Oral histories of participants in Alliance battles help explain this apparent paradox. My interviews suggest that rural Western North Carolinians responded to the Alliance's call to environmentalist arms precisely because it was not couched in conventional environmentalist terms. Most longtime mountain residents rejected wilderness preservationists' vision of "pristine" landscapes untouched by human hands. A different land stewardship ethic, one rooted in a very "hands-on" regional land use tradition, emerges from the oral histories. In this tradition uncultivated areas--forests--functioned as effective commons. Though the forests were not legally designated as "commons" (indeed most were privately owned), mountain tradition permitted the public to harvest both their animal resources and some of their plant resources. "Commons" forest lands provided a host of products to forest users, including game, fish, berries, herbs, bark, and honey. Widespread exercise of "commons" rights on public and private lands persisted into the late twentieth century and in some areas continues today.

In the twentieth century many rural residents have used National Forest lands as "commons," and this pattern of use has usually dovetailed well with the U.S. Forest Service's "multiple use" mandate for forest management. The two western North Carolina National Forests, the Pisgah and the Nantahala, together include some 900,000 acres. This makes the USFS the largest landholder in the region. In many counties over a third--and in some counties over half--the land is in National Forests.

Timber harvesting was not part of the "commons" tradition (though it was a central component of the USFS "multiple use" mandate), but it did fit mountain residents' view of the forest as resource provider rather than pristine "wilderness." It was the specific practice of clearcutting rather than the general practice of harvesting timber that drew Western North Carolinians' ire in the "Cut the Clearcutting" campaign of 1989. Because it took entire stands and caused massive soil erosion, clearcutting effectively destroyed the forest "commons" wherever it was practiced. Anger over clearcutting's destruction of traditional public resources combined with offense at the jarring aesthetic effect of large clearcut scars on mountain slopes and fired mountain residents' determination to end what they saw as pointless and irresponsible forest slaughter. The local residents who founded WNCA, hatched "Cut the Clearcutting," and mobilized to make the campaign a success found the "no-use" wilderness ethic of mainstream environmentalists unrealistic and off-putting. They resented outsider attempts to impose this ethic and its limited-access policy consequences on their familiar working landscapes. Rejecting wilderness environmentalism did not mean accepting exploitative land-use practices, however. Rather, mountain residents argued for a middle way in which selective harvesting of renewable resources, and the familiarity with local landscapes it enabled--a familiarity of long use and ongoing relationship--would be honored and embraced by environmentalists.

I believe that studying past relationships between mountain communities and their environments can provide important insights into current problems facing Western North Carolina residents. Hunting offers an illuminating case in point. It has been a major source of outdoor experience for many mountain men--the vast majority of boys who have grown up in the region have spent some time out in the woods with hunting parties. The culture of hunting thrives in the region to this day-there is at least one gun and gear shop in every mountain town (I did an early Asheville Watershed interview in one of these); sportsmen's clubs abound (there is one just down the road from my home), and many mountain families' schedules revolve around hunting season (some of my interviewees have declined to interview during the season--no spare time!). Hunting is also a piece of local rural culture that urban and suburban newcomers often condemn as cruel and uncivilized. To these people, hunters are a rude and uneducated lot, destroyers of nature who value blood over beauty. Rural people, in their turn, resent what they see as patronizing and misinformed attitudes on the part of wilderness-loving recent arrivals. It's unrealistic to argue that renewable resources should not be harvested, they say, and hypocritical if one does so while sitting in a wooden chair wearing leather shoes and eating tuna salad.

References to oldtimer/newcomer tensions are a stock in trade of ordinary mountain conversations. Disputes between longtime residents and newcomers, often centered on seemingly trivial issues-including hunting--that are actually symptomatic of larger divides over questions of land use and definitions of community, provide local mediators with a significant portion of their business. A look at Alliance history can facilitate scrutiny of these issues, both by focusing attention on times when commonalities overrode differences, and by exposing the complexities behind these differences, complexities that resist easy stereotyping.

One key goal of this project is to heighten awareness, particularly among wilderness-brand environmentalists, of the environmentalist history and potential for environmentalist strength that mountain land-use traditions provide. It is my belief that if mainstream environmentalism is to shed its elitist biases and become a truly grassroots movement, it must mobilize strands of environmentalist consciousness that it has previously ignored or even repressed. My hope is that this project can "Listen for a Change" in contemporary environmentalists' attitudes toward rural cultures and rural people. I would like to pursue this goal through a series of profiles of past WNCA activists in current editions of the Alliance newsletter, "Accents." The WNCA staff is enthusiastic about this idea. I would also like to do a series of "Highlighting History" presentation and discussion sessions with local WNCA chapters, modeled on the lines of the Macon County presentation I did in September 99. Here I would work together with my interviewees to do a retrospective and analysis of a successful WNCA campaign--probably "Cut the Clearcutting," and would ask current activists to reflect on any resonances this history might have for ongoing campaigns. I feel confident of a warm reception in Macon and Buncombe Counties, where my research thus far has centered. Madison and Jackson Counties are also likely prospects for such a forum. I think these sessions could prove helpful to contemporary activists as they hammer out new directions for the organization. Another possibility would be to do presentations at local libraries (e.g. Upper Hominy and the National Forests) or hunt clubs (e.g. Hunters and Environmentalism).

This project can make a difference in the Western North Carolina environmentalist community by highlighting the key roles that longtime residents have played in the Alliance, and to illuminate some of the sources of their commitment to environmental projects. I hope that it will underscore for mainstream environmentalists the powerful love of land and landscape that local citizens often feel, and that environmentalists too often discount. A second, and related, way this project can "Listen for A Change" will be to provide examples of local citizens voicing and acting on their concerns, and having a significant effect on key decisions affecting their communities. One of the challenges that local environmental leaders repeatedly stress is overcoming citizen self-doubt. Even where people have grave concerns about threats to their environment, they are often convinced that they can't make a difference. I hope that these examples will help budding activists overcome these doubts. Finally, this project can remind both grassroots citizens and mainstream environmentalists that they can make common cause, and that they can become a force to be reckoned with when they do.

-Kathy Newfont