I feel like saying: "From the folks who brought you Roan Mountain, here's a perspective on sustaining paradise." That's essentially the message of this "organically" beautiful book, created as the lead in a fund-raising campaign seeking $4 million to preserve vital watersheds and other significant properties in land trusts and conservancies.
Without 30 years of enormously dedicated work by the SAHC, Roan Mountain certainly would not be the magnificent wilderness area it currently is. The idea is to keep development from swarming its great flanks and to protect it and other wondrous places far into the future.
The strategy in this case held to a simple mission: To tell the conservancy's story with integrity and authority and to speak with reverence of the areas it protects.
Some of the language:
There is no place like Roan. Home to rare and endangered plants and animals that cannot survive elsewhere, it is one of the world's most important sanctuaries of biological diversity.
Its grassy balds, its thrown-down boulders, its firs and lilies and rhododendron, its stepping-stone mile-high mountains-Round Bald, Jane Bald, Grassy Ridge, Yellow Mountain, Little Hump and Hump Mountain-these precious notations on a map or in a walker's journal represent an ageless landscape crucial to save for future generations.
All in all, a passionate effort, a completely successful effort, and one that continues to work on me. In my life, Roan Mountain, which I've climbed, cleared and sketched, remains a sacred place like no other.
Many thanks to Jim Julien, designer, and Carolyn Novak, friend.
No comments:
Post a Comment