Blue Ridge Country May/June 2022 - 20

COUNTRY ROADS
BOOK NOTE
Smokies' Group Seeks Visitor Help with Species Identification
G
reat Smoky Mountains National Park is partnering with the
Discover Life in America to allow park visitors to help conserve
park species by recording sightings of plants, animals
and other organizations on their smartphones, via the
nature app iNaturalist.
The program, called Smokies Most Wanted,
allows users to post images of flora and
fauna on iNaturalist, which engages a vast
community of users-including scientists and
knowledgeable amateurs-to help identify the
species found.
The Smokies, home to 60,000-80,000 species and thus among
the richest wildlife regions on the planet, has a list of 112 mostsought
after species, including 42 plants, 17 butterflies and
moths, 11 birds and six lichens/fungi.
The black bear is
the 12th mostsighted
Smokies
species on the
iNaturalist app.
Smokies Most Wanted is an extension of the All Taxa Biodiversity
Inventory, DLiA's ongoing project to catalog all life in the Smokies.
For more information: dlia.org/smokiesmmostwanted.
To view the list of most wanted: inaturalist.org/9115. -KR
All This Marvelous Potential: Robert
Kennedy's 1968 Tour of Appalachia,
by Matthew Algeo. Chicago Review
Press, 2020. 264 pp.
es, this book is nonfiction, tracing
Robert Kennedy's brief visit to eastern
Kentucky in February, 1968. But Algeo's
book reads in many ways like the best
fiction. He ends chapters with anticipation
of the next one; he draws real-life
portraits of dozens of people with an
unerring eye and ear; he shows us the
mountains and towns and
buildings with telling detail.
Promise: It's a book you'll
want to keep reading.
The purpose of Kennedy's
trip was to weigh the success
of Lyndon Johnson's War on
Poverty in eastern Kentucky
This stream
is part of the
3,680-acre
Pond Mountain
Game Land, a
North Carolina
protected area
that recently
grew by 217
acres.
North Carolina's Blue Ridge Conservancy Gets Busy
he Blue Ridge Conservancy is having a busy season in North Carolina's Ashe County
working toward realizing its mission of land conservation. The group purchased 90 acres
on Three Top Mountain, which in combination with another 450 acres it owns will eventually
be added to the state's Three Top Mountain Game Land. The new tract features a mature
hemlock forest and headwaters of the New River.
" Forests support biodiversity, help stabilize the climate, and provide recreational opportunities
for the community, " says the conservancy's Eric Hiegl. The group also recently transferred
217 acres to the state to add to the 3,680-acre Pond Mountain Game Land. The tract
is the source of Big Laurel Creek, a classified " outstanding " water resource, and is designated
for recreation such as horseback riding, hunting, fishing and cross country skiing. Funding
for both projects was provided by North Carolina philanthropists and conservationists Fred
and Alice Stanback. blueridgeconservancy.org -CAT MCCUE
T
20 BLUERIDGECOUNTRY.COM
(which was said to have 20 of the 30
poorest counties in America). His unspoken
agenda was to evaluate his chances of
wrestling the 1968 presidential nomination
from Lyndon Johnson, Algeo writes,
and to gauge whether his anti-poverty
and antiwar stands would be supported
by the miners, impoverished farmers and
unemployed of Appalachia.
His visit lasted just two days, and
included remote cabins, crumbling
one-room schoolhouses, strip mines,
an African-American neighborhood in
Hazard, a forum with Alice Lloyd College
students in Pippa Passes, and a convened
hearing of the Subcommittee on Employment,
Manpower, and Poverty in the
Neon, Kentucky, high school gym.
Algeo covers not only the recorded
facts of Kennedy's visit-he also interviewed
those who accompanied Kennedy
on his road trip and those with whom Kennedy
spoke. It's a wide cast of characters,
and their remembering is vital to the story.
Because that's what Algeo's All This
Marvelous Potential is-a story of a time
and a place and its people, told with rich
detail and well-researched facts. And
although Kennedy's visit to eastern Kentucky
happened over half a century ago,
much of it will sound curiously familiar to
us now. -JOAN VANNORSDALL
Y

http://www.blueridgeconservancy.org http://www.BLUERIDGECOUNTRY.COM

Blue Ridge Country May/June 2022

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Blue Ridge Country May/June 2022