Who We Are

But he also knows that real believing requires seeing. His favorite quotation, borrowed from the state motto of North Carolina, is “Esse Quam Videri,” — “to be rather than to seem.” He wants to show the evidence to prove his case. And so he is delighted for the chance to show an interested party just what he’s talking about: these Carolina Bays, from above.

The Grand Tour
 “You ready for the Grand Carolina Bays Tour?” Howard grins as the journey begins. The drive from downtown Raleigh to Fayetteville Regional Airport takes about an hour and a half — not nearly enough time for Howard to begin to say all he wants to say about what we’re about to see. His primer begins with a basic refresher course on the evolution of the planet, veers into mythology, geology, ancient cultures, climate science, dinosaurs, botany; sidesteps frequently into humor and pop culture — and ends up deadly serious.
Howard would be aghast at the idea that it could be summed up, but here goes: 13,000 years ago, he says, a “cataclysmic event” happened when a comet hit the earth somewhere in the vicinity of the Great Lakes. It hit an ice sheet, acting like a big kid’s cannon ball in the shallow end of a pool, throwing off a vast airborne splatter of “flying detritus,” including extra-terrestrial particles that landed as far away as North Carolina. It’s also possible that it created a shockwave that rippled across the landscape, dimpling it in the process, or that a little bit of both happened. Howard says it is certain that the comet decimated everything in its path, including the mammoths and the Clovis people, a well-documented Paleo-Indian civilization.
 

Raleigh’s Restoration Systems Banks Mitigation Credits For A Cleaner World
By Liza Roberts

In the loft-like spaces of a renovated 1892 textile mill behind Raleigh’s Seaboard Station, Restoration Systems is banking on a cleaner world.
For a decade now the firm has been restoring wetlands, streams and other ecosystems — then “banking” that acreage in the form of mitigation credits it can sell to developers, which are required by law to offset projects that adversely impact the environment elsewhere. The firm owns or manages 33 sites comprising more than 6000 acres of wetlands and 25 miles of creeks, streams and rivers.
“In the last 10 years we have planted more than a million trees that will never be cut,” says Restoration Systems President George Howard. Most of those trees are in North Carolina, where the firm has concentrated much of its work. But Restoration Systems is looking outside the state to Maryland, Tennessee, Georgia, Texas and Virginia for wetlands and streams to restore. They’re also jumping into the emerging mitigation banking areas of water quality and endangered species.
One reason to diversify is the continuing struggle of competing with the state of North Carolina for wetlands mitigation work here. The state has built-in advantages over its private competitors, namely the ability to collect payment from developers (much of the time its own Department of Transportation) before restoring any wetlands. For Restoration Systems, it’s the other way around. Not until it has restored a wetland can it sell credits.
“The state has as much business building its own ecosystems as it does growing its own corn,” Howard says. He claims the private sector — “someone with skin in the game” — does the work faster, better and more efficiently than the government can manage.
State government headaches aside, Howard says he’s bullish about his company’s future. He and his partners John Preyer and John Skvarla are planning to grow the company, possibly adding five more “dirt chasers” to the current staff of 15. They’re excited about the new terrain they’re exploring in places such as the prairie land of Texas. “It’s absolutely fascinating for any of us to get into a different state, in a different landscape,” he says.
And they’re eager to do more in the area of water quality mitigation, where they’re reducing phosphorous and nitrogen in the Neuse River and selling credits to developers who put down impervious surfaces from Cary to New Bern. Also new is endangered species mitigation, whereby the red-cockaded woodpecker, for instance, can be protected via credits preserving its habitat of old-growth, longleaf pines in the Sandhills of North Carolina.
“In a new industry like this,” Howard says, “we’d be selling ourselves short if we didn’t take advantage of opportunities wherever they occurred.”

George was recently informed that the picture of “Haw River Mitigation Site” was selected as a winner.  Visit the following website to view the winners as well as all submitted photos.

www.sws.org/regional/SouthAtlantic/fundraisers.html#calendar_contest