A unit of Lasting Forests
Sustained forests; sustained profits
evolving since March 30, 1999

The Pivotal Project
developing opportunities within Craig County, Virginia

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About the Author

The Pivotal Strategy is a concept of Professor Bob Giles who taught at Virginia Tech for 30 years. It is a set of ideas that he wrote about and discussed with students and has decided to implement in various ways.

Bob was educated as a forester and biologist and worked as a state wildlife biologist for years, got a Ph.D. in zoology at Ohio State University, then taught at the University of Idaho. Feeling that education and agencies have failed at teaching how to achieve sophisticated natural resource and rural system management, he has struggled with the concept of an advanced rural system enterprise. He claims that there is not much new here in The Strategy, only new arrangements and uses of well-tested ideas.

The concept is especially relevant to Craig County. Bob was born in Lynchburg and has travel throughout the state and developed geographic information systems for the state. His wildlife management area, when he was a game biologist, came to the edge of Craig County and included all of Alleghany County. He's done projects on Peters Mountain and owned a cabin on Bradshaw Road, in the valley south of Catawba Mt. His Grandfather died with TB in the Catawba hospital many years ago.

Most of his work has been near Blacksburg and westward in the coalfield but he contends the ideas herein are relevant where large segments of a county are in government ownership (as he experienced in Idaho), where land use pressures are especially great, and various agency services are declining for budgetary or other reasons. Some of this thoughts come from experiences as chairman of the Blacksburg Planning Commission. He thinks there is a need to protect landowners from poor developments (e.g., poorly located powerlines) but also to encourage developments that have low risks and low capital investments, that use research results, and that tend to improve the county for its people.

At times, Bob seems to have an anti-science attitude, pressing to use what we now know, to use experience before doing more studies. He talks of mining the rich, unused banks of research results. He's sympathetic to Wolfram's "A New Way for Science." Bob promotes the Pivotal concept and works toward moving into practice what he preaches ... computer-aided decision making for total land and resource systems. He invites you to consider the following ideas, use them, help others develop and use them, and profit from them. He presents in a few places concepts for a single landowner and large tract of land but he is really describing a set of such areas, all different and all profiting together. The large integrated corporation working throughout a county is only a few steps away for the creative investor with a love of the wildlands and rural areas and what they mean to people.

Healthy at age 69 (in 2002), nevertheless, he seem acutely aware that he's running out of time in which to "promote", argue for, or in other ways encourage people to start the Pivotal-Rig, Inc. enterprise and all that it can mean to Craig County citizens, Virginians, and others and their resources. He'll welcome your advice and involvement.

He says he's "an environmentalist" if that means that he cares for the Earth and the health and well-being of later generations.

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This Web site is maintained by R. H. Giles, Jr.
Last revision August 26, 2002.