by Roy Exum
posted April 21, 2007
It’s safe to say I’ll use four-wheel drive more times in one week than most people will use it in a year. I sell land for a living and I love it. Nothing is more fun than standing on a cliff somewhere and selling a man a dream.
But when word came this week that five developers in East Tennessee were being fined $4.5 million by the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation, it smacked of all that is wrong with government because … well, I’ve got “before” and “after” pictures.
I don’t guess there is anybody who loves this part of the world more than I do. I can stand on a golf course, with big trees all around and the sun in my face, and pretend to be in heaven.
I love the woods, with a dog running, and I like walking through a pasture with a herd of angus giving way. You give me the mountains, the streams, the hollows and the lakes, and you can have all the sand and the snow and the desert you want.
Further, I love to tell out-of-town buyers how they cleaned up the air in our town, how we’re trying so hard to restore industrial wrongs of long ago, why nuclear power beats burning coal, and so forth.
But for TDEC to impose terribly harsh fines on people like Tommy Dobson and Danny Dancy and the Rarity Bay boys is as wrong as it can be, and while I’ll admit I don’t know anything other than what some woman named Tisha Calabrese-hyphen-Benton said in the newspaper, let me tell you what I do know.
About three years ago, I started selling land. Up until then I’d just peddled houses, but being outside and catering to a huge influx of hurricane-swept Floridians was heady stuff, and it was also great fun dashing through mud puddles, watching a view develop and even walking a mile in the rain when you were stuck to the axles..
Tommy Dobson, with his son Josh and soon to be son-in-law Travis Shields, bought about a 6,000-acre parcel of old timber land on top of South Pittsburg Mountain and the idea was to carve it up, put in some roads, and sell off some chunks.
What TDEC doesn’t know is that the place looked like a bomb had gone off. The land had been cut (timbered) time and time again and, if you want to see land that has been raped and left for dead, I’ll show you some clear cuts that will make you cry.
This isn’t the time for classroom discussion but all around here these huge paper companies, like Bowater, own literally thousands of acres of mountain land where they grow trees to make paper. They grow a stand of trees just like a farmer grows a crop of corn but, up until recently, a pine tree took 25 years to mature. Then the loggers and the skidders and the pulp trucks come in and the forest, as you know it, is quite literally torn to pieces.
Now I’m not against loggers, not at all. It is an honest business by people who work hard, but, done the wrong way, like clear-cutting, it ravages the earth in a way that leaves it ruined, that takes years and years to heal if it ever does.
So here comes Tommy and Josh and Travis and they buy up all this land that looks for all the world like somebody tested a nuclear device on it and everybody laughed because they were so stupid to buy such garbage.
But the ones who laughed overlooked the fact that for the last 40 years Tommy has been the premier surveyor in four states and, for almost as long, has taught Josh and Travis to love the land like he does.
Tommy understands land and soil and trees and grass and what happens when you take some horses and put ‘em around a pond with a vista where a man can see halfway to China.
So they hocked themselves to the gills, got some bulldozers, and went to work. Sure, they built the roads and cut the views but – believe me on this – they restored the land. Oh, you wouldn’t believe how much top soil they replaced that had been washed away.
I don’t know as much about Danny Dancy except that he’s as fine a person as you’ll ever meet, and the Rarity Bay people talk pretty slick until you learn where they came from and what they dream about, and I can promise these people would do no more to hurt our environment than you would. I’ll swear to that under oath.
Now, once these people reclaim the land, and make it pretty, with gurgling streams and heart-pounding views and wildlife everywhere, that’s where I come in, but what I want you to know is that if I tried to sell clear-cut land, stuff these places once looked like, you’d laugh at me too.
TDEC is clearly so out of focus, so terribly wrong on this one, it is embarrassing. They talk about silt in a stream being a contaminant, but I’m telling you without trees and grass and topsoil you’ll have much worse.
They are even demanding that one guy dismantle a dam to help the watershed, but what do these Einsteins think happens once the pond fills up – the stream resumes its natural course. This isn’t that hard.
What Tommy Dobson has done to a forsaken piece of property over the last four years should earn him a medal, not a fine.
Finally, if TDEC makes its preposterous fine of $1 million really stick against the Dobsons, I have an easy but terribly bitter solution.
A couple of years ago the Dobsons and my buddy Thunder Thornton gave the state of Tennessee almost 400 acres of land in a public trust because it nestled up against the Franklin State Forest. They did it because it was a good thing to do, and it fit, and it was part of being a good neighbor.
So if TDEC wants to really flex its muscle, I’d simply climb that hill in Nashville to the governor’s office, show him that picture of him grinning the day the state was given the land, and tell him we needed it back so we could sell it off to a bunch from Saudi Arabia and pay off his idiotic fine.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m for the environment. I don’t like global warming and I wonder why it is colder here on Easter morning than it is on Christmas Day.
But somebody at TDEC needs to learn how to hold hands instead of slapping at people who do more for the environment in a week than….well, they’ll do in a whole year.
Roy Exum
royexum@aol.com
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