INTR 0 D U CTI ON

The following text was copied from the Plan document so that it could be widely distributed and used.

The document you are about to read has been two years in the making and it is still very much a living and changing work. It is a five-year plan of strategies to meet and beat the challenges to first-rate water quality in Virginia's New River Basin. The New River Watershed Roundtable offers these goals as a framework for all of us so that we may better focus and coordinate our efforts for clean water. It is the first such plan developed by Roundtable workgroups. It does not address all water quality issues but, instead, takes a number of priority concerns and proposes a road map for alleviating them. In many ways, our work has just begun. We hope this strategic plan helps you define and synchronize your own watershed goals with your neighbors.

If you have been a part ofthe Roundtable, THANK YOU! If you have not yet gotten involved, we are eagerly waiting for your input. This is everyone's watershed and we all playa critical role in taking care of it.

The New River Watershed

Size and Location

The New River watershed is about 6,952 square miles, with 3,068 square miles in Virginia. Its watershed comprises about 7.3 percent of the area of the Commonwealth. The headwaters of the New River are in the North Carolina counties of Wautauga, Ashe and Alleghany. In West Virginia, the New River joins the Gauley River to form the Kanawha River, a tributary to the Ohio River. The New River is 250 miles long, with 160 miles in Virginia. Much of the terrain is mountainous and is underlain by Karst topography. Land use is predominantly rural. About 58 percent of the watershed is forested, 37 percent is agricultural, and 5 percent is urban.

Characteristics

The character of the region is defined by the New River, which was recently designated an American Heritage River. This most ancient of American rivers is unique from a number of perspectives, including geologically and biologically. The New River is a focal point for active and passive recreation, as well as heritage- and eco-tourism. As a recreational resource, the river is invaluable, providing a wide range of outdoor experiences and miles of scenic beauty and natural areas.

The 52-mile New River Trail State Park is one of the region's greenway and blueway success stories. Claytor Lake is a 4,500-acre hydroelectric facility on the New River that provides recreational opportunities for residents and increasing numbers of tourists each season.

Historically, the New River has remained one of the cleanest watersheds in Virginia. Virginia DEQ monitoring data indicate that the water quality of the New River is still rated as good, and thus, many its tributaries still support trout fishing. However, the watershed is experiencing influences from increasing urbanization and tourism, and new public utilities. The New River is an important source of drinking water for many municipal water systems and also serves as a receiving stream for treated effluent for several municipal sewage treatment systems. In Virginia, the New River watershed includes all or part of the following counties: Bland, Carroll, Craig, Floyd, Giles, Grayson, Montgomery, Pulaski, Smyth, Tazewell and Wythe. Its 2000 population was estimated at 355,166 people, about 10 percent of which is local university students.

Many of the counties and municipalities within the New River Watershed have experienced significant development in the recent decade. Urban development alters land use patterns, stormwater drainage, stream water quality and water demand. As urbanization continues in the New River Watershed, an increase in water usage is expected. A significant land use change has involved residential, commercial and industrial development, along with the associated infrastructure. Ease of access has contributed to this growth, as 75% of the nation's major markets are within one day's drive of the New River Watershed. Although the effects of development and growth in the watershed do not appear to have exceeded the carrying capacity of the New River and its tributaries, careful management will be critical to maintain the River's status as one of the cleanest in Virginia.

Monitoring data indicate that phosphorus and nitrogen levels in the New River are generally rated as good to excellent. Nitrogen levels are fair to good. A small number of subwatersheds have a significant percentage of samples rated as poor, primarily those traditionally used for straight-piping or industrial discharge. Eighty-five stream miles in the watershed are listed as impaired in the 1998 303(d) Priority List. Of these waters, 79 miles (92 percent) have impairments due to nonpoint and unknown sources. Most of the nitrogen is from nonpoint sources.

The New River watershed also is serviced by two planning districts: the Mount Rogers and the New River Valley Planning District Commissions; four Soil and Water Conservation Districts: Skyline, Big Walker, New and Tazewell; and the New River Highlands Resource Conservation and Development Council.

The New River is a valuable natural resource that helps make Southwest Virginia unique.

The Quilt

We're working on a regional group that will soon beome international. It's called The Quilt which, as a crazy-quilt, symbolizes coverage, linkages at the corners, a world opportunity space, conservation of energy and recycling of materials, but also personal warmth and good feelings. It is for communities struggling for their existence and improved quality of life for their people.

The group will be linked through the Internet. Staff and individuals now explore the potential role of the Internet in forming this new kind of community with groups as well as individuals within each group electronically linked to provide a new form of help, information, and cooperation ... both locally and more broadly. Your comments and advice are requested.

A community of folks within or interested in the New River or others, is hard to define. You just know it when you are within it. Until then, a tentative definition is:

all of those people having a spiritual or cultural relationship with an area or a concept, concern for quality of life within an area, or significant common physical or economic interests. A community may be a neighborhood, an apartment complex, people in a multi-county area, people affected by a project, people in a river watershed, or people very interested in a limited topic such as controlling soil erosion.

The Quilt is a proposed international community unified by the Internet.

The Collaborative is designed to present options

• for a developing and improving a lasting enterprise working locally, then regionally and internationally, that has significant influence on the conservation, preservation, restoration, and management of natural resources and the people dependent upon them
• for a system of modern, sophisticated, computer-aided natural resource management that helps them do the above and clearly benefits the people over the longrun where it is used .

The Collaborative provides the Pivotal Strategy and a more refined Business Plan for a similar organization which attempts to address:

• a very local problem, i.e., activity on 400 acres of The Trust
• activity related to the people of Clearfork Valley of Tennessee and Kentucky (about 6000 people within 12 communities)
• activity regionally and nationally to achieve economic viability and improved total land and resource management
• and then, following the discussions mentioned above, may be developing an Internet group, an "e-organization" for helping, sharing, cooperating and pleasantly achieving economies of scale for effective and efficient work.

Join me, my mountain sisters and brothers, as we dance through our journey and move toward our future.

Links to related organizations and groups:

• Marie Hatfield's web site
• Federation of Appalachian Housing
• Christian Appalachian Project
• In Praise of Mountain Women
• National Congress of Neighborhood Women (Advocates women's and community development), 249 Manhattan Ave., Brooklyn, NY 11211, (718) 388-6666
• GROOTS,Grassroots Organizations Operating Together in Sisterhood
• Appalachian-based Community Development Education, ABCDE
• Glenmary
• Lasting Forests within which Rural System.com is developed
• Stories from an Appalachian Community by Marie Cirillo
• The Jellico Rock Obstacle Challenge Course
• The Eastern Rock Crawling Contest
• The Conservation Management Institute at Virginia Tech (fwiexchg@vt.edu)
• Managing Wholes
• The Watershed Management Council
• The Native Fish Conservancy
• Institute for Local Self-Reliance

An additional powerful set of links is now available.

As we try "to get it all together" we test a systems approach to our work individually and within groups within the area. As part of such an approach, we know we have to go after information. That topic is addressed and how the Internet now offers an alternative for getting information to do good work to people who have difficulties getting to major libraries.

We seek to work with advocates of community-based research,

• suggesting a systems approach
• suggesting highly applied studies
• suggesting developing a forestry (rural-land) cooperative
• suggesting a "rationally-robust strategy" as described in Agroforestry Systems (Giles, R. H., R. G. Oderwald, and A. U. Ezealor. 1993. Toward a rationally robust paradigm for agroforestry systems. Agroforestry Systems 24:21-37.)
• striving for high accountability and rapid adaptations when objectives are poorly achieved by following research-results conclusions.

A large number of issues are faced by the people of the Clearfork, particularly in terms of community participation, team work, gaining funds for studies, and making any research that is done highly relevant to the community. Social and economic disparities and problems, such as poor housing, health problems and health care, high unemployment, low attainment of educational qualifications, low socio-economic levels, even some drug-use, are at work in the area. Key environmental issues include high intensity rainstorms and flooding, erosion, groundwater (and thus well-water) affected by mining, and shifting employment in mining and natural resource fields. Surface mining has declined with the decline in market for high sulfur coal in the area. Open surface mines remain. Health problems along with unemployment and limited education create other related problems affected by the limited, difficult road system. Fossil fuel shortages for transportation to schools and employment loom as a old but increasing problem.

Efforts are underway to develop an Institute, one aspect of which will be to develop a local history and local knowledge base. This action may include: seminars-workshops, an art competition, interviews, field visits/discussion, participatory field work with students, newsletters, radio station activity, maps, posters, house visits and personal discussion, and presentations at schools. Using regional resources (not necessarily site specific) such as using archives, historic photographs, manuscripts, home photographs, and museums will be encouraged Special email contributions will be arranged. This knowledge will be made available to the elements of the Clearfork Collaborative as it is gained. This will be possible via the Internet as at no time previously. Knowledge and will be gained from and made available to the community, stakeholders, and future generations. Cultural benefits accruing from such a knowledge base include the formation of a Clearfork archive on environmental, cultural, social and economic knowledge. Information will ultimately be used to build models, prioritise rehabilitation work, and to develop management scenarios, using a balance of environmental, economic, social and cultural factors.

Check out the developing and changing Contents of The Collaborative.