The Lawson Trek
  • Home
    • About
    • Interactive Map
    • The Trek
  • Along the Path: Blog
  • John Lawson
    • "A New Voyage to Carolina"
    • The Carolina Colony
  • Talk to us!
  • Store
  • Press

Along the Path

Updates as we learned about Lawson's journey and times -- and reports from the trail as we progressed along it. Plus tales of the process of publishing the result.

Up the Creeks Indeed

6/19/2015

1 Comment

 
So, anyhow, rant ahead -- be warned.

On my most recent walk, north of Charlotte to Concord and Kannapolis, as Lawson and I pass the halfway point in this journey and begin turning back east toward the coast, I got to spend some time with the delightful Mary Newsom, of the University of North Carolina-Charlotte Urban Institute, which applies its  time and study to the social, economic and environmental challenges facing communities. She's just been all involved in a project called City of Creeks, which documents the troubled treatment of the creeks that drain Charlotte. 
Picture
Click and link to keepingwatch.org's excellent "Up the Creeks." It quotes Lawson!
I was looking forward to talking to her. Lawson talks constantly about creeks and rivers. "Abounding in many pleasant and delightsome rivulets," is one way Lawson describes the country around Charlotte.  Elsewhere he calls the same territory full of "curious bold Creeks, (navigable for small Craft) disgorging themselves into the main Rivers, that vent themselves into the Ocean. These Creeks are well stor'd with sundry sorts of Fifth, and Fowl, and are very convenient for the Transportation of what Commodities this Place may produce." He encounters the Haw, which he calls "most pleasant," and later a river he calls the Rocky, which he also describes as "very pretty."
To these descriptions may I now add a couple images of modern creeks in the Charlotte area.
Picture
This is the Little Sugar Creek in its current status. It got its name from the Indian word "sugaw," which means "group of huts." Image taken by Nancy Pierce and provided by Mary Newsom. (http://www.cmstory.org/content/sugar-creek-or-sugaw-creek)
Picture
And here's a glimpse of the Little Sugar right up close and personal. I was standing on asphalt when I took this. This is no way to treat a river.
Not exactly "very pretty," huh.

These creeks have, you might say, industrial disease. Until the Clean Water Act of 1972, that's just how things went. Even then, the CWA focused initially mostly on point sources like factories or wastewater treatment plants. 

But in recent years, the worst sources of pollution are nonpoint sources: farms and stormwater runoff. So to address the flow of silt, pollutants, and nutrients that cause algae blooms and fish kills, many places -- including the state of North Carolina -- have adopted the common-sense technique of riparian buffers. That is, they leave a strip of land along creeks and streams undisturbed, allowing the natural plants to flourish. Those plants clean water flowing through, absorbing pollutants, with the added benefits of providing wildlife habitat, sequestering carbon, and offering recreational space for kids, hikers, explorers. In North Carolina the buffer is 50 feet. Wetlands have flourished, as have rain and water gardens. Waters have improved. 

So, everybody wins: planet, streams, citizens, animals. You had to figure legislators couldn't leave way better than well-enough alone, and in North Carolina you'd be right. 

This week they passed a bill allowing developers to dig right up to the waterside, as long as they eventually planted something back on the 30 feet closest to the river.

So think this through. Silt and fertilizer are the two scourges of modern waterways, and this change allows developers to silt up the creek while they build and then plant new stuff and fertilize it afterwards. "And that's planting stuff," said Newsom, noting that the plantings would come long after invasive plants had established footholds in the scarred creekside. Add in what any gardener worth her or his soil knows -- half of what you plant will probably die no matter what you do; establishing a garden takes years -- and you've got an unconscionable assault on the state's waterways. Given the enormous amount of development taking place in North Carolina, no sane person could claim that developers are having a tough time here due to our stringent environmental regulations. So this law looks like something between pure greed and vandalism -- stomping over the environment just because they can. And by "they" I mean the legislators who approved this offense, and you may guess for yourself which party dominates when the bill removes regulation that protects citizens and the earth, and not corporations.

Oh, by the way. The bill also makes it harder for places to add bike lanes to their streets. 

Worse for pedestrians, worse for bicyclists, worse for the creeks, worse for the planet. Better for developers. 

Over the last several decades North Carolina has worked hard to try to return to the "pleasant and delightsome rivulets" that Lawson saw. Looks like the current legislators don't know their Lawson. Or their history.

Or their own best interest.
1 Comment

    Archives

    January 2020
    October 2019
    May 2019
    February 2019
    November 2018
    October 2018
    May 2018
    March 2018
    August 2017
    May 2017
    August 2016
    June 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014

    Categories

    All
    Adventure
    African American
    Angie Clemmons
    Anthropocene
    Apothecary
    Appalachian
    Archaeologists
    Archaeology
    Army-navy
    Art
    Artifacts
    Atlanta
    Backpack
    Banking
    Barbecue
    Barry Beasley
    Bath
    Beaufort
    Beckee Garris
    Beetle
    Beginning
    Ben Franklin
    Berm
    Bill
    Birds
    Blister
    Book
    Bookstore
    Boston
    Botanical
    Boykin
    Breach
    Brent Burgin
    Brownlee
    Buck
    Buffer
    Cabelas
    Cambridge
    Camden
    Camera
    Canoe
    Canty
    Catawba
    Chain
    Charleston
    Charlotte
    Chelsea
    Chocolate
    Chris Judge
    Church
    Cincinnati
    City Of Raleigh Museum
    Civilization
    Coe
    Comment
    Community
    Concord
    Confederate
    Contentnea
    Cornwallis
    Country Music
    Couture
    Crawford
    Creek
    Croatoan
    Cutler
    Cypress
    Danger
    Davis
    Death
    Delightsome
    Delk's
    Denton
    Devices
    Drake
    Drawing
    Drunk
    Duck
    Durham
    Eagle
    Earnhardt
    Earth Day
    East
    Ecologist
    Effron
    Embankment
    End
    Error
    Evans
    Exhibit
    Expeditions
    Facebook
    Feather
    Fern
    Finish
    Fire
    Flag
    Flintlock
    Flood
    Francis
    French
    Gaillard
    Gander Mountain
    Garden
    Geology
    Gimpy
    GIS
    Google
    Great Wagon Road
    Green
    Greenville
    Grifton
    Guerry
    Gun
    Guns
    Haigler
    Hallenbeck
    Hampton
    Hanging
    Hannah Smith
    Harris
    Hartford
    Harvest
    Heat
    Hempton
    Highway
    Hillsborough
    Hips
    Historic Bath
    Hollow Rocks
    Home
    Homeness
    Hortus Siccus
    Hospitality
    Huguenots
    Huntley
    Indians
    Instagram
    Interstate
    Island
    Ivy
    Ivy Place
    Jamaica
    Jarvis
    Jennifer Landin
    Jered
    Jimmy White
    John Jeffries
    John White
    Journalism
    Kadaupau
    Kannapolis
    Katawba Valley Land Trust
    Katie Winsett
    Kayak
    Kershaw
    Keyauwee
    King
    Knife
    Lame
    Land
    Language
    Lawson
    Lawsonians
    Lecture
    Legacy
    Legare
    Legislators
    Leigh Swain
    Lenoir
    Lenoir Store
    Lenses
    Library
    Lichen
    Lies
    Loberger
    Locke
    London
    Longleaf
    Lost Colony
    Lynch
    Lynching
    Magnuson
    Mansplaining
    Maps
    Mass Shooting
    Match-coat
    Mathematical
    Meerkat
    Memorial
    Mental Floss
    Mill
    Millstone
    Miniature
    Monkeyshine
    Moonshine
    Museum
    Museum Day Live
    Musings
    Nancy
    Nascar
    Native American Studies Center
    Natural History Museum
    Nature
    Nesbit
    Netherton
    Neuse
    Newspaper
    Nonfiction
    Notebooks
    Occaneechi
    Orlando
    Pack's Landing
    Palmetto
    Pamlico
    Park
    Patent Leather
    Pedestrian
    Peggy Scott
    Periscope
    Petiver
    Photography
    Physic
    Pig
    Pig Man
    Pittsburgh
    Pocket
    Poinsett
    Polo
    Potsherd
    Pottery
    Preparation
    Presentation
    Press
    Process
    Proofreading
    Property
    Publishing
    Raccoon
    Racing
    Racism
    Racist
    Raleigh
    Rape
    Ray
    Readings
    Reconsideration
    Records
    Revolution
    Richard Smith
    Richardson
    Rights
    Riparian
    Rivulet
    Road
    Roadness
    Roanoke
    Robert Off
    Roland Kays
    Rolling Stone
    Roombox
    Rules
    Salisbury
    Santee
    Sapona
    Sassafras
    Scan
    Sconc
    Seneca
    Seth
    Shakespeare
    Sir Walter Raleigh
    Slavery
    Slime Mold
    Sloane
    Slope
    Small Town
    Smith
    Smithsonian
    Snow
    Sore
    Sounds
    Spanish Moss
    Specimens
    Speedway
    Spencer
    State Fair
    Steve Grant
    Stewart
    St. Mark's
    Suburban
    Sumter County
    Surveying
    Swamp
    Tar River
    Technology
    Textile
    Tide
    Tobacco
    Toms River
    Tool
    Towel
    Trade
    Trading Ford
    Trading Girls
    Trail
    Trap
    Traunter
    Tree
    Tree Farming
    Trek
    Trilobite
    Troi Perkins
    Truth
    Tryon
    Tupelo
    Turkey
    Tuscarora
    Twitter
    Ugly
    Unc
    Val
    Val Green
    Virginia
    Virginia Dare
    Virginia Historical Society
    Walking
    Washington
    Waxhaw
    Weather
    Website
    White
    Writing
    Wrong
    Yadkin
    Yoga

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly