Almost anyone keeping current with hot-topic environmental news these days has become familiar the environmental history of the Appalachians: man finds mountains; man logs and mines mountains. Some mountains, in the end, are preserved to recover to the state that we see them in today. But we also know that even with the federal protection of wilderness areas and national forests, the mountains are not immune from environmental threats. Mountaintop removal, for example, is poised to become (if it is not already) one of the leading environmental topics of our generation.

In the mountains of north Georgia's White County, however, there are no coal mines. There are no mountains being lopped off for mining, no fill being dumped in pristine valley heads. Instead, environmental threats at this southernmost end of the Appalachian Mountain chain come on slowly - much unlike the drastic measures taking place farther to the north.

White County lies at the transition between the Appalachians and the South's Piedmont region, home to the sprawling megalopolis of Charlotte, Atlanta, and Birmingham that geographers and economists have deemed "Charlantingham." Specifically, the county is a scant 70 miles north of the Atlanta suburbs, a region which has seen some of the fastest growth in the country over the past decade and now represents a spreading mass of largely unregulated growth. Once-rural farmland and undeveloped forest tracts are rapidly becoming high-density strip malls, residential developments, and office complexes, with little sign of slowing.

(A hiker's view into the rural landscape in question in Georgia's Blue Ridge.)

In 2004, the residents of White County wanted to change that. Taking advantage of existing language in Georgia's environmental planning criteria, the county passed a mountain protection act, effectively regulating growth on steep-sided, environmentally sensitive mountain terrain. Under the act, development is affected in areas above 1700 feet in elevation and/or 25% slope. Land clearing is limited in these areas, along with strict regulations on sewage disposal, light pollution, and the size of development. In the extreme case that a large amount of land is cleared, landowners are even required to present a detailed reforestation plan to remediate environmental effects (see a map of affected areas here).

White County's mountain protection act was largely hailed as a step in the right direction, and several nearby counties quickly followed suit. In 2007, Jackson County, a quickly-growing area straddling the Blue Ridge in nearby North Carolina, issued a moratorium on subdivision development in order to develop guidelines for sustainable future growth. Even more recently, multiple counties and local governments in the southern Appalachians have passed resolutions to curb excessive road construction. 

As with any case involving sprawl, growth itself is not the issue plaguing the southern Appalachians, which are home to one of the most biologically diverse regions on the planet. Instead, it's the nature of this growth that poses the biggest threats to the region. The growth phenomenon of the last 20 years in the South has largely taken place without regulation or, until recently, even comprehensive plans for guiding affected local governments. Although such plans are now in place in many areas, several of these cities and counties in the Piedmont are already fully engulfed in sprawl and are being forced to search for unique solutions to extreme gridlock, overpopulation, and inadequate infrastructure that may be coming much too late.

The expanding front of this growth is just reaching the mountains, however, and watching how the region responds will likely serve as a valuable precedent for future issues revolving around sprawl and sustainable growth. Any form of government regulation, of course, ultimately brings with it debates over political and social philosophy, but the cost of those debates will undoubtedly be more than worth the costs of allowing unregulated growth to persist in one of the nation's most environmentally sensitive areas. The time is now to open ourselves to discussion, if not for the betterment of entire communities, for the betterment of the environment alone.