Imprinting Values - Hope From Another Era of Regression

Only in retrospect am I able to pinpoint when I was imprinted with the value of conservation.

It was during my early years as the scion of five generations of Idaho ranchers.  In the early 1950s, horse and cattle ranchers not only practiced - but were respected - as conservationists.

But it wasn’t until my mid-20s in my second year as the CEO of my first community destination marketing organization that I learned from a sociologist and marketing professor how values are formed.

In 1976, Dr. Morris Massey of the University of Colorado was giving presentations on his theory of values formation entitled, What You Are Is Where You Were When.

Up to the age of 7, I was imprinting values such as conservation from my parents and grandparents, especially my paternal grandfather with whom I spent a part of nearly every day doing light chores on the ranch, until I reached school age.

That’s when we “learn a sense of right and wrong, good and bad,” and in the Mormon culture of my native Rockies, reach the “age of accountability.”

Massey believed that people modeled not only family members but other people between the ages of 8 and 13, including teachers.  There is then a “socialization period” between 13 and 21 when we turn more to peers and the media.

This is why experts note that people rarely change much after age 15 or 16.

Coincidentally, people born after 1976 when Dr. Massey laid down those three periods of value formation, are likely to have imprinted controversial and partisan notions of conservation, especially the now-politicized label of environmentalist.

My first DMO was formed by grants from Spokane Unlimited and the City of Spokane in hopes of leveraging the community’s notoriety from producing Expo 74, a World’s Fair for the Environment.

It is mind-boggling to most people when I explain today that the origins of that theme came from the local business community.

Being concerned about the environment and being business friendly like being an environmentalist and a rancher weren’t considered mutually exclusive values back then.

My very conservative ancestors would seem moderate by today’s standards, not because they would have changed their views but because conservatives in general seem to have moved so far right.

It is probably why, as an Independent, I am called liberal by my friends on the right and conservative by my friends on the left.  I even get holiday cards from both former governor and Republican Presidential hopeful Jeb Bush and President Barack Obama, a somewhat liberal Democrat.

Conservation as a movement long pre-dates President Teddy Roosevelt who gave it prominence when he declared it a national duty in 1908 in a speech delivered on my grandfather’s 10th birthday and well into that second phase of values formation.

By necessity, before and after that time nearly all ranchers considered themselves conservationists, because it was just good business, something that had impressed Roosevelt during the time he spent ranching prior to his political career.

So the value my grandfather imprinted on me prior to turning 10 had been imprinted on him too by that age.

A second era of conservation began in 1948, when eight days before I was born, Congress passed the Federal Water Pollution Control Act which was then broadened in ‘56, ‘65, ‘72 and ‘87 as it was this year by President Obama in implementation.

North Carolina, where I’ve lived most of my life, appears to have dodged a bullet this month when conservatives, moderates and progressives in the General Assembly rejected a proposal by construction special interests and regressives in the Senate to narrow vegetation buffers along streams and creeks.

By the way, the term regressive is not a pejorative.  Today it is most often used to describe those few who, when disguised as conservatives, seek not to merely tap the breaks on progress but roll it back.

But regressives have long existed at both ends of the political spectrum.

This includes a wing of progressives.  While giving regressives power is almost always a mistake, it is important to listen to them because so-called progress in some instances turns out to be problematic when taken to extremes.

This crossed my mind as we took our old runabout for a spin up Mayo Lake this past weekend.  Experts have remarked at how clear that lake is, the clearest in North Carolina, they claim.

Some credit is due to a unique vegetation buffer that is protected between homes and the lake shore.  But even more important is that wetlands at the mouth of the primary stream that fills the lake are fully intact and ecologically functional.

Wetlands such as this scrub the water of pollutants including sediment which is the number one source of pollution in our state, impairing the overwhelming majority of our waterways.

North Carolina passed a law to control sediment in 1973 and defined it as “solid particulate matter, both mineral and organic, that has been or is being transported by water, air, gravity, or ice from its site of origin.”

For the first time, I noticed a pasture of cattle along a stretch of shoreline on spin around the lake last weekend, north of the Triple Springs boat ramp.

It was primarily, but not totally buffered by trees, and was probably grandfathered as an exception when the lake was created in the late 1970s/early 1980s. 

Cattle can be a source of contamination to waterways too, even when pasture-raised and especially when nitrogen is over applied and then washes into waterways.

But don’t jerk that knee quite so fast.

A technique called holistic management of pastures has shown that cattle grazing actually helps the land store 25% more carbon, and that for “each 1% of carbon stored in the soil, an additional 60,000 acres of water per acre can be retained on the land.”

Click here for an excellent video on why soil is so critical to solving our climate change threat.  Click here for an excellent Washington Post essay on the issue of “grass-fed” cattle and whether they are good for you, the animal and the planet.

Grass-fed is a form of regression, a roll-back from today’s massive feedlots where cattle are “finished” using anything but grass.  When I was coming up in the 1950s it was the predominant way cattle were raised, including our 500 head.

But for anyone dismayed by the havoc regressives have created the last few years in the legislature, it may give hope to look back two hundred years to another era when they held sway in North Carolina.

Following the American Revolution and creation of a new system of government, North Carolina spent the first four or five decades of the 1800s in the control of regressives.

Throughout the nation, as other states perpetuated the progressivism upon which America was founded, North Carolina earned a reputation as the “Rip Van Winkle” state.

As a result, land values plummeted as more than a third of North Carolinians moved away.

Between 1830 and 1840 alone, nearly half of the counties lost population according to a superbly documented book entitled North Carolina Through Four Centuries.

The 1850 census revealed that 31% of all native North Carolinians then living in the United States resided in some other state.”  Backwardness had driven away more than 400,000 Tar Heels, two-thirds of whom were white.

This was equivalent to half the state’s population in that census.

For the first half of the 1800s, the legislature was controlled by less than 10% of the population, including slave-holding planters living down east who were adamantly opposed to public education, roads, government in general and taxes.

Fast forward two hundred years.  Sound familiar?

The thing to remember is that during much of that period of regression, a handful of deeply concerned and resilient North Carolinians were persistently advocating progressive ideas that would put “the state on a totally new course,” following the Civil War.

They were named Yancey, Caldwell, Fisher, Swain, Gaston, Morehead and Graham.  But their architect was Judge Archibald DeBow Murphey who was born in Red House, which is now called Semora, a crossroads just northwest of Hyco Lake, a twin lake just west of Mayo Lake.

It is now a part of Caswell County, but when Murphey was born it was a part of Orange County.  He eventually practiced law down in Hillsborough a few miles west from Durham and established a residence in Hawsfield (southwest of Mebane.)

Here Judge Murphey crafted his plan for North Carolina’s salvation including “establishment of a public education system, construction of canals and turnpike roads, as well as a general public welfare system,” and eventually railroads.

In fact, North Carolinians weren’t paying much attention to succession leading up to the Civil War.

Instead they were focused on constitutional reform and a struggle over ad valorem taxes as a means for wealthy plantation owners to pay their fair share to fund Murphey’s vision.

Many of Durham’s founding generation were heavily influenced by Murphey’s ideas including his close friends the Camerons, who encouraged others in what would become Durham to push for statewide progress such as railroads and a strong banking system.

They were living proof of Dr. Massey’s theory of value development that “what you are is where you were then.”

My value for conservation was obviously imprinted by my family but I am also a product of a twenty-eight year period when conservation, ecology and environmentalism were bipartisan values.

The partisan demonization of those values over the past 40 years has taken a toll, and yet polls today show that 77% of Americans support stricter environmental protections including 58% of Republicans, the party primarily responsible for their demonization.

People who point instead to another recent poll showing that 49% of Americans view government as an immediate threat, need to read more closely the reasons given. 

Too big 19%, gun control 12%, law enforcement 4%, surveillance of citizens 4%, overregulation 3%, taxes 3%, illegal immigration 3%, and environmental regulation just 1%.

You sure wouldn’t know it from the obsessions in news headlines or by partisan statements by lawmakers.

There are even more Americans who are concerned that government isn’t doing its job.  Inconvenient to journalists and reporters and bloggers for that matter is that people can hold contradictions.

In fact, news stories miss an important point.  When people disagree, it usually isn’t about a specific issue, such as being for or against billboards or trees.

They just hold different values.

Cooling Pond Futures - Hyco and Mayo

Along the north shore of Hyco Lake, near the border with Virginia north of Durham where I live is a dock with a roof covered by solar panels.

That’s seemingly incongruous only because Hyco is one of a pair of lakes created on each side of the small town of Roxboro to serve as gigantic cooling ponds for coal-fired steam generation power plants.

In fact, an astonishing 38% of the nation’s fresh water goes to cooling power plants.

Recreation on Hyco and Mayo lakes, including cabins, lake houses, as well as houses on the two lakes (there is a difference) have become byproducts from the water needed for their respective power plants.

But as I will note, changes are underway that may soon elevate these to the primary purpose of these lakes.

Of personal interest is Mayo, the lake on the east side of the 8,000 person town.  The lakes differ greatly and so do the steam plants for which they were created.

Mayo Lake not only has 25% less surface, it has 52% of the shoreline of Hyco Lake.  On Mayo, the northern third around the plant is undeveloped, making it rarely, if ever, in view.

Technically, Duke Energy owns up to the 420’ mark around each lake, but while on Hyco there are little or no restrictions, Mayo reflects the concern for the environment that later emerged in the 1970s.

Around Mayo Lake, according to observers this buffer is protected natural vegetation as habitat for “black bear, white-tailed deer, red fox, opossum, skunk, beaver, and bobcat as well as hundreds of bird species such as grebes, herons, ospreys, red-tailed hawks and owls.”

Motorized watercraft are permitted on both but Hyco Lake seems more “recreational” in nature, as in amusements.  Kind of like “camp” vs. nature preserve.

Mayo does not permit “permanent” docks, while Hyco has elaborate docks and boat houses that cost as much as some lake houses.  Both have public parks to launch boats and swim.

The power plants are much different, too.  The one for which Hyco, known as the Roxboro Steam Plant was created is a couple of decades older and is more than three times larger than the Mayo Plant shown in the image in this essay.

Both are now equipped with “scrubbers” required by the EPA to cut down on air pollution and first mandated by Congress in 1977.

They each burn a lot of coal including about 5.5 million tons annually at Hyco and 1.8 million tons at Mayo.

To put that in perspective, the Hyco plant burns between a 100-car train and a half to two and a half trains of coal a day, each coal car carrying about a 100 tons. A 45-60 day supply or so is kept in reserve.

Mayo uses a third as much.

Occasionally, some coal supply may come from as far away as northeastern Wyoming, but primarily, both plants are supplied from mines in Southern West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky via routes through Virginia.

Remember the haunting song You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive?

Both lakes have coal ash stored on site, Mayo’s stretching up toward South Boston, Virginia, while Hyco’s stretches toward Roxboro.

The Mayo plant sells about a quarter of its 160,000 tons of annual coal ash for use in road and building construction.

The Hyco plant generates around 500,000 tons of coal ash.  It is one of the largest in the country and for the past six years, the remaining coal ash from Mayo has been trucked over there.

A year ago, a state of the art, special landfill with groundwater monitoring was opened downstream from the Mayo Plant which will eventually grow to 100 acres.

The solution, though, is more than tougher limits on emissions and conversion of the plants to natural gas.  Natural gas is now used to generate more than 30% of electricity compared to less than 37% generated by coal.

But while natural gas generation uses four times less water for cooling than coal, a savings of nearly 20 trillion gallons of water since 2005, fracking, the technology used to source the natural gas uses 28 times more water than it did 15 years ago.

An even better alternative is a new patented closed-loop process pioneered here in Durham by NetPower called the Allam Cycle which eliminates all air emissions including carbon dioxide from fossil fuels.

NetPower’s technology is not equipment to control pollution but an entirely new combustion process called oxy-combustion.  It has turned a major problem into a recyclable solution, in part, utilizing carbon capture.

In effect, it eliminates the entire steam process, which wastes 30% to 40% of its energy, and all of the associated equipment.

Ironically, it very well may be this Durham-inspired innovation that will finally bring Republican skeptics onboard regarding climate change, turning their pejorative “Whatever else they do in Durham,” into an accolade.

As noted by local journalist Alex Dixon, it is a phenomenon of behavioral change identified in a recent study conducted here at Duke entitled, “Solution Aversion: On the Relation Between Ideology and Motivated Disbelief.”

NetPower’s new technology also means that power plants such as Hyco and Mayo can be greatly downsized as they convert, while also lowering the cost of the power generated.

They also probably won’t be needing those “cooling ponds,” leaving Hyco and Mayo lakes as a lifestyle legacy.

Lakeside Context

If it clears due diligence, I may be writing some of these essays at a retreat on Mayo Lake which, as I will describe, is very unique.

By the way, being drawn to lakeside getaways, like being a morning person, is probably one of those contexts that researchers have found to be predictors of relationship longevity.

Even if you didn’t grow up along lakes, as each of us did, like being a morning person or a night owl, it is just something in your nature.

Mayo Lake lies 35 miles and change north of our house in Durham.  The most scenic route, for me, will often be astride the Harley Crossbones up and over Mt. Tirza.

That will add a couple of miles to the route but will be well worth it after cutting up Moores Mill Road from Quail Roost in Durham.

Mt. Tirza is the location and namesake of a church where good friends of mine, Eddie and Nita Hill, were first posted after he graduated from Duke Divinity.

Nita helped us jumpstart Durham’s community destination marketing organization 26 years ago.

But the crossroads there predates the church by three or four decades, when it was established by a Revolutionary War veteran, Lt. Colonel Stephen Moore, in 1777 and 1778, two years before he famously led the Caswell County Regiment at the Battle of Camden in a losing cause.

The rest of Moore’s family had sided with the British so after the war he inherited the family’s estate at West Point overlooking the Hudson in New York, which he negotiated to sell to the newly created U.S. government beginning in the late 1780s for use as a military academy.

The Battle of Camden has significance to me because along with Moore, my fourth great grandfather, James McCrory, was captured there after seeing earlier combat at Brandywine and Germantown and serving a stint in General Washington’s select guard.

At Camden, he and Moore along with 1,000 other American soldiers were captured during the battle.  Moore was imprisoned on a prison ship in Charleston Bay while my fourth great grandfather was imprisoned on a ship near Wilmington.

Moore was held until a prisoner exchange in late summer 1781, but after only four months as a POW, my great (x4) grandfather was earlier released in only his underwear and without shoes upon taking a vow that he would never again take up arms against the British Crown.

Moore returned to a noncombatant commission in Hillsborough, a 20 mile ride from his home on Mt. Tirza and retook his seat in the North Carolina legislature there, then the capital.

But instead, just four months after his release, my fourth great grandfather McCrory rejoined the war in combat at the Battle of Cowpens where his British captor Tarleton was thoroughly routed, marking a turning point in the war.

A few months later he was fighting in the Battle of Guilford Courthouse, a place to which he had immigrated from Northern Ireland just as the Revolutionary War began.

The British Army retreated to the Virginia coast and seven months later surrendered to American General Washington bringing the Revolutionary War to an end.

While Moore was settled back on Mt. Tirza, my fourth great grandparents McCrory headed up and over the Appalachians, eventually settling on the frontier along the Tombigbee River southwest of Tuscaloosa.

The old soldier lived until 1840 at which time his daughter and son-in-law, whose grandparents had migrated from North to South Carolina before ending up on the Tombigbee, headed into the Rockies.

James McCrory’s great grandaughter, my great grandmother was claimed by the Great Influenza Epidemic in 1919 while visiting the ancestral Idaho ranch where I would be born three decades later and spend my early years.

It is from her parents and two other lines of ancestors that I derive my 5th generation Idaho roots.

Moore, who had been in the lumber trade in Canada before the war, was proud that his home on Mt. Tirza was “where the ax had never been laid to a tree.”

He would be greatly dismayed today by clear-cut timbering now laying waste along Mt. Tirza’s northern slopes not far from his home.  It is a lazy way to timber, fueled by technology, compared to the equally lucrative but more sustainably way of selective cutting.

Moore had a grist mill on the Flat River, just over what would become the Durham County line, thus the name Moores Mill Road, which I will take past Hill Forest and Mt. Tirza.

He died in 1799 while visiting friends in Durham at Stagville Plantation, now a state historic site, and is buried up on Mt. Tirza in a family cemetery along the route to Mayo Lake that bears his name.

Like the lakes that dot northern Durham - two to provide the city’s water and one to provide for Raleigh’s further to the south and east -Mayo is a reservoir, but not just for drinking.

It has 85 miles of shoreline that encompass its 2,800 acres lined with homes on the southern half that are very secluded compared to other lakes.

The shoreline while accessible for boating and swimming has been uniquely set aside as a wildlife habitat dating back to the late 1970s when Mayo Lake was created to cool a steam power plant on the far northern end near the Virginia border.

It finished filling in the 1980s, a few years before I arrived in Durham.

Mayo, both the lake and the stream that was dammed to create it, are named for Major William Mayo, an Englishman who immigrated first to Barbados in the early 1700s and then Virginia.

He led the survey teams that mapped the gaps in the Blue Ridge Mountains through which my Messersmith ancestors traveled soon after immigrating to settle along a creek feeding the South Fork of the Holston River.

It is where the southern and northern tips of the Jefferson and Cherokee national forests, respectively, nearly touch today.

In 1728, Mayo also led one of the teams jointly surveying along each side to map the border between Virginia and North Carolina, guided, in part, through the area north of what is now Mayo Lake.

It was a prequel to officially dividing North and South Carolina the following year.  Mayo was guided by Native Americans in that area known as the Sappony (aka Sapponi) who had migrated down from the foothills to avoid Iroquoian raiders.

Sappony is derived from Monasusapanough, one of three villages they inhabited.

They were thought to be eastern Siouan cousins to the Eno and Shoccoree in what is now Durham and the nearby Occaneechi who had also migrated down from Virginia.

All of these tribes traded with the Catawba nation down the “Great Trading Path” remnants of which can still be seen where it cut diagonally across northern Durham near Stagville.

It is actually a spine or mainline for a network of countless other tributary trading paths along its route.  It was created first by buffalo, then by Indians following game, then for trade.  Then came pack horses and settlers, followed by wagons.

Signaling the road building savvy of buffalo, today, it is roughly the route of Interstate 85.

However, it appears the Sappony didn’t really migrate permanently across into North Carolina around Mayo Lake until after the Revolutionary War, in which they had fought on behalf of the colonists against the British Crown.

Their slow migration down into North Carolina had begun after the 1676 Bacon’s Rebellion.

At the time, only coastal counties in Virginia had been organized along with only a handful in the very northeast corner of North Carolina, including Bath near where my eighth great grandmother had been born twenty-six years before.

Yes, my Tar Heel bonafides stretch back to when there were fewer than 1,000 settlers in all of what became North Carolina, long before there were counties.

But a line of my ancestors, the Sheltons, had already moved into the interior along the border northwest of what is now Mayo Lake.

The migration of the Sappony had hastened by 1746: nine years after Mayo had laid out the city of Richmond and two years after his death, when Lunenburg County was created along the Virginia side.

At the time Granville spanned along the North Carolina side.

Their flow had quickened even more by 1752, when Halifax was carved from Lunenburg in Virginia across from Mayo Lake, while Orange County spanned North Carolina side by then.

At the time, there were fewer than 53,000 white settlers in all of North Carolina and another 19,000 enslaved African Americans.

In 1761, my fifth great grandmother Miller was born in Orange County before relocating with her family to a point in South Carolina along the Old Trading Path.

It was her grandson, my third great grandfather Graham who had later married a McCrory on the Tombigbee before heading westward to the Rockies.

The crossover by the Sappony into North Carolina had begun in earnest six years later just as western Halifax in Virginia was divided to create Pittsylvania.

It had become a steady stream by 1776 when my ancestors, the Shelton’s, petitioned to carve off Henry County further west along the border of Pittsylvania.

The next year Caswell County was carved from Orange on the North Carolina side which is why Lt. Col. Moore led a regiment from that county.

Person County, where both Mayo Lake and Mt. Tirza are located today wasn’t carved from Caswell until 1791; the year after Moore had sold West Point to the government.

It was five years later that the town of South Boston, Virginia was created in Halifax County just across the border from Mayo Lake. 

As with other nations of Native Americans across the country, we didn’t keep our agreements with the Sappony regarding land.

By the time Mayo Lake was created, the bottom land for the reservoir, which averages 30 feet in depth as well as the surrounding embankments were purchased from subsequent settlers.

There will be a lot to contemplate from lakeside and a lot to learn, but all of this is to say that it will seem like coming home.