Asheville Dowsers Help Support Sustainable Development

I was invited to give a talk a couple of weekends ago  to the Appalachian Chapter of the American Society of Dowsers . about sustainable development in the Western North Carolina mountain region. Dowsers are folks who among other things find places on land where wells can be dug to access water. There are way too many links to pick from so just Google dowsing and see what comes up. Many well drillers use dowsers to help them find sites before they start drilling. If fact the first speaker of the day was Lee Barnes, a real estate agent in Waynesville who does water dowsing.

The Appalachian Chapter was interested in letting its members know what was happening in regards to the rapid development going on in Asheville and the surrounding  mountains as well as some ways they might be able to get involved in the effort to influence how development will occur over the next several years. My talk to about 40 folks focused on some of the positive things that had occurred in the past year like the implementation of the steep slope ordinancein both Buncombe County and Asheville as well as a storm water management ordinance for Buncombe County.

The primary negative aspect concerning these ordinances was that 23 developments were allowed to be grandfathered before the deadline, in some cases with just a note a single piece of paper indicating that a developer planned on doing a project at some point in the future.  Right now many of the environmental groups that have organized in the recent years are rightfully concerned about the scope of some of these developments.  I did hand out a list of some of the more active groups in the Asheville area that included: Stop the Cliffs Coalition, , Mountain Voices Alliance,  Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy, , People Advocating Real Conservancy (PARC),  The Western North Carolina Alliance,  The Canary Coalition,  and the WNC Green Building Council, .

I urged those that were interested to check out what each of these groups had to offer and get involved with the ones that they liked. I did give my usual caveat though that trying to stop development and growth was like standing on a train track trying to stop a locomotive, it aint going to happen. A much better idea is trying to influence how growth occurs by supporting sustainable development . I gave a brief overview of this concept and then discussed other aspects of dowsing that I was involved.

The audience seemed to enjoy my presentation and I stayed a while longer to participate in a panel discussion with the other two speakers of the day.  What was really neat though about the whole experience was that the audience came up with the idea of having a ceremony honoring all the work the different community groups were doing to help protect the mountain environment.  I thought that was a cool idea since many of the groups do not network enough with each other. So the idea that they would all get together because of an outside group wanting to honor them could really help out both the environment and the groups working to protect it.