The Alabama Experience; Natural Assets

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We have everything from the bottom of the Appalachian Mountains in Northern Alabama to every kind of marine wetlands. We have the Gulf Coast and some of the prettiest beaches in the world. As a matter of fact the tragedy over there is that we don't all realize what we have here in the state and we don't do a very good job of promoting it. We obviously need jobs, we obviously need economic progress but we need to relate our economics to the foundation of our being which is related to planet Earth. We've got a wonderful world to live in. It's the best place yet. And I'd love to keep it that way, you know. Alabama has richly blessed with natural resources, fertile soils, dense forests, hundreds of miles of rivers, a sparking sea coast.

These assets have made possible a multitude of economic opportunities from tourism to shipping, from cotton to steel production. But our natural resources represent more than just the raw materials for economic development. The generations, Alabamians from all walks of life have relied on nature's boundary for pleasure and reflection. I was born in Jacksonville and my family had a business in Jacksonville. It was a small town, small university town. But within a stone's throw of our house were really deep woods. And my father was an avid hunter and outdoors and we hunt night hunt, stay out all night longs and days. And I continued to hunt. We lost them. I always enjoyed getting out.

And I found that the most important experience to me was just being out in nature and enjoying all of it. I came up the hard way. If we didn't work, we didn't need. The whole work is all I knew. The only thing I got, and I loved so well, if I worked awful hard, if I had a task, it looked like it would number in. I would promise myself I would take a championship to some beautiful water. And it was a paycheck. 30 years ago, Guy Sparks' love of nature inspired him to begin creating a botanical garden on his farm near the bankhead National Forest. You will see some golden seal over there, in that role, and I took cap lily. This is called the root of course, it's bell boy. And we're going to move on. Those sparks never had the luxury of much formal schooling.

He has assembled a living textbook of regional plant line, a testimony to Alabama's natural riches. The states' very geological regions have made it home to a dizzying array of plant and animal species. In fact, Alabama ranks in the top five states for biological diversity. I can remember you might say, while Alabama, whether it's no compassion of the difference of today and what it was there. The timbers are being cut. The owls are hungry. The hawks are hungry and they're moving out. Over half of our native wetlands and virgin forests have been lost to development. The nature conservancy estimates that more plant and animal species have been lost here than in any other state but Hawaii. We realize that there's need of lumber and so many other materials that we have to have in daily life,

but taking all of anything and leaving nothing just don't make sense to me. Alabama has a significant number of people living below the poverty level. It's hard sometimes to reconcile or to explain why it's important that we put so much emphasis and so much concern and efforts into preserving the natural components of our world, our state. If we basically use up our resources, then we're going to lose jobs. We can have and even create jobs by being conscious of conservation issues. Carol Ikelberger and Jean Mills are working to reduce the environmental impact of agriculture, one of Alabama's oldest industries. On a small farm in Tuscaloosa County, they raise organic vegetables of about 115 local households.

Mostly when people think about organic farming, they think of it as not using chemicals, but it's way more than that. The most important thing we do is working with the soil. The soil has life and we try to keep that life going and build upon that healthy soil, makes healthy plants and helps the plants are less likely to attract past and they're more likely to produce a good crop. But we also do other things like making sure that we keep things out there that are attracting beneficial insects at all times. We pretty much figure that nature's got a really good system going and if we can not interfere with that too much, we should be able to grow vegetables. This farm is part of a growing movement known as Community Supported Agriculture or CSA, which supplies consumers with fresh local produce and provides secure markets for small family farms. This is a family farm. This is the farm that I grew up on.

The way it works is that the consumers purchase a share of the garden's production in advance of even planting that production so that if they have a really good year of crops that year, then everybody benefits. But if it's not such a good year, then it doesn't just wallet the farmer, they all get one or two less lettuces than they had expected to get or something like that. Each week, CSA shareholders take turns coming to the farm to help salt and wash the week's harvest and deliver it to other members. Over the eight month growing season, shareholders receive dozens of varieties of chemical free produce delivered to their dollars within a few hours of harvest. By eliminating long distance shipping, this system has the added benefit of reducing energy use and pollution. The conventional farming is degrading the environment. I have no doubt of that. There is a lot of top soil lost in Alabama. There are wells in Alabama that are too contaminated to drink from and that's the main reason that we're not willing to grow that way.

The more you hear in the news these days about all the chemicals that are put on fruits and vegetables throughout the country and everything you buy in the store, the more you appreciate it, source of food like this. It's become a lot more than that for us. It's a community that we belong to that really cares about here. This group of people together as a community are taking a tangible step to protect one family farm. Preserve one little piece of the environment. At least this one little piece they can take care of. In Bowen County near the Gulf Coast, Carol and Fred Sals have been working since 1989 to establish the biofini of nature center. Through the center they are determined to demonstrate how humans can live comfortably in harmony with nature.

So we'll come in here and see the butterflies as adults. There's a monarch right up there, right here, coming to us. We bought 28 years of old farmland and a swamp that was overrun with invasive plants and hardly any wildlife in it. We wanted to see if we could restore that whole 28 years to a native of the way it was originally. We planted a long leaf pines in this area about 500 long leaf pines and we're trying to recreate that accurately with all the right wildflowers and trees and grasses. We've got a picture plant bog area and we're starting to restore and I can show you the plants that I've grown from seed for that. At this point we've just got this kind of a workshop, greenhouse, butterfly house building. But there are plans for museum and an assembly teaching room and for offices, reds and architect and so he'll be able to work here at the nature center. And several cottages that people can rent and get away.

This is a private endeavor, nobody's helping us financing us or anything. We do have a non-profit organization to buy a few nature association and we have 150 members. And we live very modestly ourselves, we just want to get this thing going and it means much to us very much. We've gone to a point now where the beaches fairly developed. Traps have put out for various wildlife that live along the beach because they consider them a nuisance, for example. I hear a lot of negative about the beach mass. What do we need a beach mass? I mean how important is he? I mean we don't need the beach mass. Well the beach mass builds the dunes. Without the beach mass there are no sea oats. The beach mass just like a squirrel finds the seed and buries it at a certain depth. Only the beach mass can do that and the roots from the sea oats hold the sand in place. The beach mass is one of nearly a hundred animal and plant species in Alabama whose survival is endangered by a loss of native habitat. At the biofillion nature center the sources show visitors how to preserve natural ecosystems around their own homes and businesses.

A small nursery offers native plants for landscaping and gardening. We're going to make twenty acres of people living and working and playing in natural environment. Because we are human beings we need our space too but why not share some of the space with wildlife? The sources moved to Alabama in 1983 after sailing from California on the day of us. A fifty foot sailboat they built them sails. I grew up in California but I guess my fondest memories in life are summers in Alabama in Prattville in the country. At my grandmother's house in the woods and that was my Disneyland and so this is one place we wanted to visit once we were traveling. One day we decided to sail to the Virgin Islands and we stopped here in Alabama to visit Carol's folks and so here we are. Now we take the boat out as a charter business and most of the money that doesn't go back into the charter boat actually goes toward the nature center.

Okay, here we go. All that land on the right way over there past that last house over here is undeveloped. It's 15 miles of undeveloped shoreline only in Alabama and it's full of bobcat deer, coyote, bee, vaturky, alligators. What we're doing with the nature center is trying to promote preservation of our native wildlife and we think that one way to do that is to get people involved and excited about an enjoying what Alabama nature has to offer. The word biofilia means the love that human beings feel for other living things. I think two of the main characteristics about being human are our ability to love beyond ourselves, beyond our own little genetic family, beyond our own species and the ability to reason and to think about the impact of things we do in the future. And it's something that should be considered when we decide how to make a living or how we're going to go about the way we are already making a living.

Three decades of missionary work in developing countries convinced can and seer a cause that environmental neglect can be a major cause of human suffering. Often they solve short-sighted economic development schemes, damage the natural resources on which people depend for their survival. In 1979 the cause and founded servants in faith and technology are seafat to promote more humane development strategies. At seafatch rural campus in Randolph County, Alabama, people from around the world learn ways to help the poor improve that standard of living without complicated and polluting technologies. We have chosen to not throw the baby out or the bath water. We've chosen to say that technology is valuable.

That technology should be used for good. It should be an instrument of blessing. But we need to see technology connected to planet earth connected to nature. Fuel shortages caused by deforestation create hardships for many of the world's poor. This play stole captures the maximum heat from precious firewood. While an inexpensive solar oven uses the free non-voluting energy of the sun. These human powered tools are made primarily from bicycle parts which are readily available in most developing countries. Organic gardening techniques help families improve their food supply without costly agricultural chemicals and machinery. We call this our soda straw pump because almost every youngster who's had a soda and drank out of a straw has put his finger over the end of the straw and pumped the coke up to the top of the straw. Well, this pump operates on exactly the same principle.

The purpose of this approach is not to deny people the benefits of more sophisticated technologies. Instead, it allows them to control their own course of development through technologies that they can immediately afford and understand and which address their most urgent needs. The values that we hold makes the difference of the choices of the technologies we choose to accept and whether they're technologies that are polluting or whether they're technologies that are destructive of the spirit of human beings. C.Fat draws inspiration from the late British economist E.F. Schumacher and his 1973 book, Small is Beautiful, Economics as if People mattered. Schumacher argued that economic development can only be sustainable in a long time if it is based on technologies that are appropriate to the culture, but it's a natural environment of those who use that.

The types of appropriate technology in an advanced so-called first world setting would be different than an appropriate technology from point of view of the third world. It's not any one technology, but it is a way of thinking. In the background, I can see clothes on a clothesline. We have kind of a rule of thumb. Yes, we have an electric clothes dryer, but when the sun is shining, let's use the clothesline. The principles of sustainable development and appropriate technology are gaining increasing recognition in the developed world. Chattanooga, Tennessee, has made sustainable development a constant with its planning process, leading to a dramatic improvement in both the city's economy and its once badly polluted environment. It's a sustainable development, not only for third world countries, it's a sustainable development for New York City or for Birmingham, Alabama or for Randolph County, Alabama. The appropriate technology to be appropriate for Alabama has to take into account the specific assets that we have.

This state's abundance of natural assets is encouraging some Alabamians to consider a relatively new industry. Ecotourism caters to the public's growing interest in nature and outdoor recreation. And Alabama is in a position probably better than any other state to really excel in this area of ecotourism because we have just been blessed with resources like no other state. People want to come and see this. In Northeast Alabama, several communities are cooperating to build a basketling and walking trail from Aniston through Weaver, Jacksonville and Piedmont to the Georgia Line. The chief Ladiga trail named in honor of a 19th century Cherokee leader is part of a growing national network of trails built on abandoned railroad beds. This rail trail's project goes through some of the most beautiful country in this part of the state.

Just scenic vistas, glorious views, and there's a group in Atlanta that's looking to link Atlanta to the Georgia Line. So it's very conceivable that at some point we'll have a hiking, biking, rollerblading trail that will go from Jacksonville or from Aniston to Atlanta. It's going to be a great benefit to the entire area. This rail trail project, no doubt, is drawing people from all over the southeast and the country already for a new set of reasons that has to do with the environment and ecology and that's why the term ecotourism comes into play. One smaller town, I believe it was in Florida, they have found an extra, it was almost $300,000 in new money injected into the local economy directly as a result of a trail like this. The first section of a trail, a nine mile stretch, the repeat mark, opened in a rainy but joyous celebration in September 1996. This trail has not been opened that long but there have been substantial economic benefits to the area.

The sales have increased not dramatically but markedly in some of the local stores and there's talk about bed and breakfasts opening up. I understand that there's a new campground that will be opening. I'm here from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, flew down for the weekend. We got interested in it in Pennsylvania where we have a lot of rail trails and I go with my family all over the place to find new ones. It's been biking, it's a family event, it's good with kids, it's not too hard because the grade of rail trails can only be about three or four percent. So it's easy for kids to do and usually there's a lot of interesting things to see. Clearly our resources have value and sometimes they have more value when we don't use them. Project like this, if the area remains pretty and undisturbed, this is a sustainable industry that will continue to bring in money forever. Although I'm here alone today, well we'll be back, it's a good trail, it's fun. I've really enjoyed it.

I've lost 15 pound of weight and that's the best thing that's happened to me. I can breathe better and I walk better and I can even run now. I could not even run the start with it. I came to become involved in cycling because I found that it relaxed me. There's a lawyer, you spend all day in courtrooms and dealing with other people's problems and you don't leave them at the office when you take it home with it when you come home. People are coming out for a lot of reasons but one of the reasons which is something that we need to develop more undoubtedly is just a transportation. By providing an alternative to the automobile, rail trails save people money and reduce pollution. And by changing transportation patterns, rail trails can actually strengthen the sense of community. There have been studies that have shown in other towns, storefronts that have been vacant for years, are now 100% occupied just because people are being injected into these old dams. These old downtown areas primarily because the rail beds used to go through those old downtown areas.

Now we hope that people will, as they're riding through or walking or jogging through, they'll stop and get something to eat and rediscover how nice some of these old smaller towns are. This trail has this both brought the whole community together. I've saw the neighbors that I hadn't saw in five or six years right here in the community out on this trail. And it's just one of the grandest things I think that ever happened to me. I'm just proud to rail road quiet. Many communities are longing to have industry come in, but not industry at any price, industry that is sensitive to the environment and industry that is sensitive to people. It's often our value system has centered in on the dollar equation alone. One of the aims that we have for a sustainable development is a balance of factors. We've been able to make an okay living farming this way, but we are so much doing what we want to do.

That it's worth a lot of cash to us, not to have to be doing a whole lot of other things for a living. Our friends in California said, you're living in a shack and a value I send in pictures, you know, in Alabama. I'm thinking, oh yeah, like they're living down here in Orange County, you know, driving two hours to work, you know. There's great pleasure in preserving nature and it has a lot to give back to us besides keeping us alive. Alabama is like the idea of independence and self-reliance and I think Alabama is view preserving the environment as also preserving a way of life that we all treasure and we all aspire to. This garden is part of me nature, you know, and I feel sorry and a family with the garden and the good Earth. I should say maybe sacred to my feet, but I want my children to have a little to what I enjoy.

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