Pioneering naturalist John Muir once wrote that “Wildness is a necessity ... mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.”
That was in 1901. Jump to 2022, and this sagely put sentiment seems truer than ever.
For the past 28 years, a private conservation group has been working to make sure that some “wildness” is preserved in the Mountain State for future generations.
This year, West Virginia Land Trust, a nonprofit group founded in 1994, has achieved a long-sought milestone: 20,000 acres of land preserved — “special places protected forever,” as phrased by a card the group sent out thanking supporters.
Executive Director Brent Bailey gave a short history of the endeavor during a recent phone interview. “For our first 17 years, we were mostly a volunteer organization. We conserved about 3,000 acres,” he said.
In 2012, the group got the funding to staff up, and Bailey came on board full time. “I brought in people who understand land acquisition and management. Over the next 10 years, we added 17,000 acres to some form of protected status. We have an outstanding team deeply committed to West Virginia conservation.”
The WVLT staff works to identify properties that can serve multiple purposes, that give the “maximum bang for the buck.”
And Bailey stresses that their preserves are permanent. “When we protect land, it’s in perpetuity. 20,000 acres is a great threshold to cross. In some ways, I feel like we are just getting started.”
While forested lands might be essential for our well-being, Bailey also thinks preservation is a vital concern for other reasons. “We see conservation as part of West Virginia’s new economy,” he said.
“If you can protect land, you can protect water. If you have forests on both sides of a river, there’s going to be reduced sedimentation, there’s not going to be development with leaking chemical storage tanks, like happened in the Elk River. We have protected land that is above several drinking water systems — including Morgantown, Davis, Hinton, and Lewisburg.
“Sometimes people don’t connect a healthy economy with a healthy environment. That connection is critical. Nobody wants to visit a community where you can’t drink water from a tap.”
Another issue is frequent flooding, as seen recently in parts of Kanawha County. “Protecting forests also slows water runoff, so land conservation can help mitigate flooding — one of the biggest problems we have in West Virginia.”
Tourism push
The state’s record when it comes to protecting the environment is mixed, to say the least. West Virginia, after all, is the state that sued the EPA to protect coal-fired power plants.
Not that politicians don’t give lip service to being green. An old story goes that a West Virginia politician is someone who can cut down a tree, then stand on the stump and give a speech about forest conservation.
There are signs these attitudes are changing, driven in large part by the push to promote tourism. Just last week, at a Governor’s Conference on Tourism in Huntington, officials gathered from around the state to focus on new initiatives.
Chelsea Ruby, the secretary of the West Virginia Tourism Department, spoke at the conference on the expectations of out-of-state visitors. “We continue to see a great deal of interest in the outdoors and mountain towns and uncrowded places. All things that we’ve got right here in West Virginia,” she said.
This makes Bailey optimistic. “I think the Legislature is beginning to appreciate that there are opportunities here that we should all be pursuing together. I wish this had been a push many years ago, because, in some cases, we’ve lost opportunities to conserve important places,” he said.
“People used to think that conservation was a nice thing, all about birds, bugs, flowers, and trees. But it’s not just a ‘nice’ thing — it’s an essential thing if we want West Virginia to develop on par with what other states are doing.”
When asked to give examples of those lost opportunities, he brings up his hometown. “Morgantown has had an incredible pace of development. But it has lost open and green spaces. Many of the places where neighborhood kids used to go for recreation are gone. Patches of woods where people could walk beside a stream, gone.”
The problem isn’t limited to urban areas. One rising trend WVLT is seeing is the donation of family farms. “We’ve been surprised by the number of properties that come to us from landowners who simply want to know that it’s going to be protected forever. We hear from people who often say, ‘My kids are grown and gone, the property has been in my family for generations. Nobody is coming back home. I would like to see it protected, and not developed. Can you help me?’
“There’s a need out there. I’m looking right now at a list of 11 projects in the state that we are working on. Ten of these are donations of property.”
Playing recreation catch-up
Bailey said the 20,000 acres is spread out in 20 preserves in various stages of development for public recreation. Public use is another aspect of WVLT’s work. “Our state has fewer public recreation areas then many other states,” he said. “We need to do better. It’s a competitive world out there.”
Most of the group’s property work goes into constructing trails and access points. “Along with our partners, we build trails for low-impact recreation — hiking and mountain biking. No motorized recreation. We also build access points for getting onto a river for kayaking or canoeing.”
While gun hunting is usually not allowed on the preserves, they do encourage bow hunters, depending on the property. “We’ve found that hunters can be great allies for conservation,” Bailey said. “Most of our preserves are not large enough for gun hunters to be away from other users, such as hikers. But bowhunting, especially for deer, is compatible.
“We encourage bow hunters who want to hunt on our property to sign up with us for a permit. Deer populations have exploded, and deer are often predators of many species of plants that need to be protected.”
Living in Morgantown, Bailey makes frequent use of Tom’s Run Preserve. He goes there to hike with his dog, Moxie, an English Shepherd pup. “Tom’s Run is really wonderful,” he said. “It’s 325 acres, with about three miles of trails.”
Nearby in Canaan Valley in Tucker County is the 860-acre Yellow Creek Natural Area. This includes the Moon Rocks Trails system, a nationally known mountain biking destination. “Yellow Creek offers high-elevation hikes. You’ll see huckleberries, wild cranberries and a great landscape,” he said.
Yellow Creek is a good example of working together. Last November, WVLT teamed up with Friends of Blackwater for a successful grant application to AmeriCorps program for a trail crew to come work in the preserve. The crew came and constructed new trails at Yellow Creek with help from The Heart of the Highlands trail group. WVLT also oversaw stream restoration work to improve Yellow Creek’s water quality.
Moving south, one of WVLT’s most ambitious projects is the Mammoth Preserve in eastern Kanawha County — a part of the Upper Kanawha Valley regional recreation plan being coordinated by the Kanawha County Commission.
“Mammoth Preserve is exciting,” Bailey said. “Our goal is to make Mammoth Preserve into a destination site that will include hiking, mountain biking and equestrian trails.”
It’s all in the planning stages, thanks to $2.8 million in federal funding facilitated by Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va. “This is a good example of our politicians seeing the opportunities that are out there, and supporting them,” Bailey said.
Mammoth Preserve is 5,000 acres — half still forested, half of it mined and leveled.
“We are working with our partner, Appalachian Headwaters, and are looking at innovative ways to speed up reforestation of the mined portion,” Bailey said. “People don’t want to come to a hot, baking, rock-covered surface. They want a cool, green forest. Some of our restoration techniques are experimental. If it works here, it will work other places.”
The wild card
According to WVLT’s annual report, the nonprofit group raised $1,765,289 in 2021. Of that amount, 53% was from grants. Another 33% was from awards and fines — settlement money from lawsuits for an industrial environmental violation. They got $400,000 for the settlement of the Elk River chemical spill. Others have been from coal companies for violating the Clean Water Act.
WVLT is not a party to these lawsuits. “Some of the environmental groups who bring the lawsuits are our allies, and will direct that funds from the settlement go to WVLT,” Bailey said. “They see us as an antidote to environmental damage.”
Of the rest of the group’s income last year, only 6% was from annual giving.
“Fundraising is the key to the success of any nonprofit organization, and, in West Virginia, it’s a wild card,” Bailey said. “We don’t have the level of philanthropy that other states have. Individual contributions can make a huge difference.”
WVLT’s biggest fundraising period is usually the last quarter of the calendar year, so the jury is still out for this year.
“Many grant opportunities come from the federal government, but those grants require a match that we have to provide, and that can’t come from other governmental sources. If we are looking at a project that costs $500,000, and there’s a 10% match required, we need $50,000 to access those grant funds.”
Yellow Creek, for example, was a success because of private donations. “When we were raising money for the Yellow Creek property, we decided to do a targeted campaign to get the private match money we needed. We had donations from 142 individuals in 19 states. It blew us away. People knew about this property, and did not want it sold off for development. It shows that if we can get the word out that we are protecting iconic places, people will respond.”
WVLT also gets some corporate donations. “Not as many as I would like. I think there’s room for us to grow in that area,” Bailey said.
Conservation efforts are ongoing, and Bailey is already looking beyond their 20,000-acre milestone.
“We can’t talk specifically about pending projects, but we are looking at possibly 1,200 acres in Wood, Ritchie and Wirt counties. We’re looking at another 200 acres in Lincoln County. We have properties in the pipeline in Putnam and Fayette counties. We’ve already conserved land in 23 counties. By the end of this year, I think we will have passed the halfway mark of West Virginia’s 55 counties.”
Outreach efforts will also continue. “We’ve tried to create a broader awareness at the grass roots level about what can be done. We want to be a catalyst for an active conservation movement in the state.”
