The Buncombe County Board of Commissioners voted 3-2 on Nov. 19 to restore partial funding to the Asheville-Buncombe Community Relations Council. The CRC is one of many nonprofits whose county funding was cut from the commissioners’ 2002-03 budget last June. Director Bob Smith made his plea before the board for funds to continue long-running programs. […]

Curtis Buchanan was 5 years old when the sea of Christmas trees in his father’s front yard first urged him out on a frosty morning to inhale their balsam fragrance and feel their soft, blue-green needles brush against his face. Today, Buchanan walks among his own crop of organically grown Fraser firs as often as […]

Before I began interviewing piano tuners, I didn’t have the vaguest idea about the profession. The blind piano tuner, I recalled, was a second-string stock character in novels and films about wealthy families in the late 19th century, but sightlessness seemed an unlikely prerequisite for the profession as a whole. At any rate, the tuners […]

Contrary to the claims being spread by “wise-use” corporate-front groups, the U.N.’s Global Biodiversity Assessment characterized as “simple and perhaps over-ambitious” the Project’s “controversial” 1992 proposal to “expand natural habitats and corridors to cover as much as 30% of the U.S. land area.” Far from being the centerpiece of a U.N./environmentalist conspiracy to violate sovereign […]

It’s come down to just $500,000. That appears to be all that’s keeping Asheville and Henderson County from putting an end to their long-running water wars — provided, that is, that the two sides can cut a deal before the new Henderson County commissioners take their oaths of office in early December. At a special […]

“The Constitution does not give the government the right to criminalize speech just because it … makes some of us uncomfortable.” — ACLU attorney Bruce Elmore Jr. “When I was 10 years old, my father died and left my mother with six children under the age of 15 to raise. My mother had, at most, […]

An Asheville-based environmental group has helped persuade America’s biggest office-supply retailer to switch to selling paper products with an average of 30 percent recycled content. Vice Chairman Joe Vassalluzzo of Staples joined the Dogwood Alliance’s Danna Smith and Todd Paglia of the San Francisco-based group ForestEthics in a Nov. 12 press conference to make the […]

It’s a sad day in Buncombe when we celebrate the fact that 48 percent of the registered voters actually made it to the polls. But celebrate we will, especially considering that this was a midterm election with no hotly contested presidential election to bolster the turnout. Despite chilly weather and a steady rain, polling stations […]

In Part 1 of this story (“On the waterfront,” Sept. 25 Xpress), we described how exaggerated fears about property rights sank the French Broad River’s nomination for federal American Heritage Rivers designation. Part 2 takes a broader look at the far-reaching effects of a coordinated campaign of anti-environmental propaganda. How does a giant mining, timber, […]

The Rev. Sally Bingham brings her full spiritual focus to bear on environmental issues, declaring, “If God requires you to love your neighbor, then you shouldn’t pollute your neighbor’s air.” And religious groups, she feels, have a special responsibility to fight things like global warming. “The faith community should lead by example,” she maintains. In […]