In this second of four postings about Tropical Storm Helene in western North Carolina, which further describes the region’s rise and its unpreparedness for the augmented havoc of climate change, Asheville resident Taylor Seidler suggests nonprofits worthy of cash gifts to help the community achieve its next new normal.
“BeLoved Asheville does great community work and supports those who need it most. Many people, businesses, and organizations have also started fundraisers at GoFundMe.com through a link that filters to our specific area.” Give what you can.]
I’m postponing my plan to write about destination marketing organizations (DMOs) that talk directly about global warming and climate action on their home pages.
Instead, I want to write about granular shifts in how people are relocating where they live that should make places more willing to address the issue, which brings me back to Asheville and western North Carolina (WNC). I also teed up this subject in my last posting, which in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, leaves it inconceivable that Asheville, Buncombe County, and WNC will not join other DMOs wanting to raise climate issues directly.
Newcomers will want those that follow them, who also choose to become residents, to help show the way.
Relocating northward to the South from Florida
Friends and family have been relocating from Florida to states between Georgia and Tennessee, which have situated the Carolinas as one of the 10 most moved-to regions of the U.S., replacing the Sunshine State in the topmost rank among destinations with the highest percentage of net population gain.
North Carolina in particular claims the highest ratio of newcomers to outgoers, while the western part of the state argues the most compelling
reasons that make Asheville and Buncombe County its hub.
At first, WNC gained from this Florida exodus because of a strong crafts movement quarried out of Appalachian clay that also supplied the rural independence that potters and basket makers craved.
At the turn of the 20th century, New York Times writer Suzanne Carmichael observed “ the whooping cranes of the craft world [as] a seriously endangered species in a changing environment with few protectors.” Moves toward regional self-marketing had started in the 1970s, then climaxed when the 24 counties north and south of Buncombe in 2003 gained congressional designation as one of 62 National Heritage Areas today.
Visitors began arriving from everywhere to travel the Blue Ridge Parkway, the grand Biltmore Estate in Asheville (as my parents did with 10-year-old me along) to discover the region’s natural and heritage architectural grace, some themselves enrolling in the numerous regional crafts schools, (see NYT link above), and many more that slippered themselves into the creative hub of master storytellers like Asheville’s Thomas Wolfe, who authored Look Homeward Angel, and Zelda Fitzgerald, in and out with her husband F. Scott.
While the crafts-makers valued markets of pass-through visitor-buyers more than permanent crowding residents, whoops of crafts reviews led to the hip new market of cyclists that began to reclaim roads that Henry Ford’s Model Ts had pushed off in the early 1900s.
Bicycling, trails and wildflowers
North Carolina followed in the Seventies when it emerged as the national leader in developing networks of paved off-road bicycling trails.
Landscape architects expressed their creativity in seeding state roads and byways with spring and fall wildflower panoramas.
People who came for the crafts and trails discovered a temperate climate where year-round picnics far outnumbered winter snowmen. That climate had long favored mountainous North Carolina for second-home buyers. Ecotourism flourished.
My own cycling experiences through the state led years later to my coinage of The Climate Traveler and Travel To the Deep Nearby.
The first of those I knew who relocated was the Yugoslav comrade of Tito in his breakaway from Stalin’s USSR hegemony, later the resident Florida macrobiotic counselor Lino Stanchich. Harriet Netsky, reimagined as the jeweler Erica Rand, and from who I rented a downstairs waterfront apartment in Coconut Grove, was among those who soon followed,
A prominent Miami couple, Terence and Julie Connor, discovered Cashiers in sparsely settled Jackson County, an hour southwest of Asheville, where they bought their summer home. Their restaurateur son Brendan would follow when appointed head chef at the Biltmore Estate in Asheville.
I admired Terry, who worked in the Miami office of a Richmond law firm and rode his two-wheeler weekdays from his home in Coral Gables to his downtown office in daily rain-or-shine traffic. He became more Carolinian by riding his adopted state trails.
Regrets that I haven’t been able to check in with either Lino or Terry. Lino died a year ago; Terry, only last month while Helene was trashing NC’s west.
Linda Crider
Most influential in my cycling and trails career who made her way north was Linda Crider, Ph.D., who appears in many of my earlier Climate Traveler postings and forthcoming memoir. Linda reached Asheville circuitously.
She worked for two Florida governors in the years before Florida turned from blue to solid red. Both sought the Democratic nomination for president in successive cycles. Linda is also a singer-songwriter, who often appeared with her divorced husband and still best friend, Dale.
As a notable competitor in regional swimming raised and trained at the International Swimming Hall of Fame complex in Fort Lauderdale, Linda would move on to the state capital in Tallahassee, where while responsible for Graham’s programs in physical fitness, she invited me to meet about bicycling policy that led to Graham’s appointment of Dan Burden’s transformational role in multimodal transportation, first through cycling and then through walking, today director of innovation and inspiration with Blue Zones.
Linda and a beau would build a summer home in Cordova, Alaska, where
for a decade she consulted on cycling affairs, before selling and relocating to be nearer family in Gainesville, Florida and before starting to camp summers with her bike and guitar in Buncombe.
My own move north from Florida was part of an outpouring driven by climate change that flooding and heat made dangerous, and the resident Florida crazies of Trump and Ron DeSantis, although in our case it was our younger daughter’s finding her heartthrob online in Cobb County, Georgia. Magda chose to move. We moved with her.
