“In Pisgah [National Forest] or the Smokies, it’s very difficult to know exactly who owned the land before it became public. With DuPont, it’s not,” explains author Danny Bernstein. “You can trace all of the land to somebody who sold it or gave it away to the state.”
Commission Chair Laura Hudson argued that the rules placed too much emphasis on tree protection and could become an untenable burden for developers. “If you jam too many requirements onto one small parcel, I think you’re going to kill the development altogether,” she said.
“My whole world seems to be closing,” says Danny Bernstein, an Asheville-based outdoors writer who regularly leads hikes for the Carolina Mountain Club and Friends of the Smokies. “Staying 6 feet apart is easy on the trail. But how can we have outdoor activity if almost every piece of public land is closed?”
As people flock to Western North Carolina to take advantage of the region’s abundant outdoor recreational opportunities, they also bring a human impact to wild places.
Despite their great variety, every one of the 71 national park units local author Danny Bernstein visited for her new book, Forests, Alligators, Battlefields: My Journey through the National Parks of the South, proved itself worthy of preservation and interesting for a wide range of visitors.
It was a hard, cold spring rain. My husband, Lenny, and I had been walking on the Appalachian Trail since 8 that morning. When we finally got to the shelter as it was getting dark, we saw that someone had hung a tarp to prevent rain from getting in. Inside, an old man was sitting […]
