Sierra Club North Carolina‘s Croatan Group has several outreach events planned for this spring.

The environmental organization is to host an Earth Day celebration this week at Carteret Community College, as well as two hikes to see carnivorous plants on nationally protected lands, and a talk on native plants in early May.

Earth Day Learn and Play is scheduled for 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Tuesday in the Bryant Student Center on the Morehead City campus. There will be hands-on activities and information booths, a time to “talk trash,” review native plants, and view the living shoreline.

Talks are scheduled on the hour during the Earth Day program, starting with “Wind Energy in NC” at 11 a.m., “Rooftop Solar 101” at noon, “Solar Users’ Experiences” at 1 p.m. and “Training the Workforce of Tomorrow” will close out the day at 2 p.m. Visit the Sierra Club’s website for a full schedule. The college’s Energy and Conservation Committee is partnering with the Croatan Sierra Club on the event.

The nonprofit group is offering the first of two walks to see carnivorous plants in the Croatan National Forest from 9 a.m. to noon Saturday, April 26. The second walk is from 9 a.m. to noon Saturday, May 24, both starting off N.C. Highway 24 in the Newport area.

“This area is dominated by pocosin bogs and large tracts of well maintained longleaf pine forests and savannas, an ecosystem that once covered millions of acres of the Southeast but has now nearly disappeared because development, logging and fire suppression,” organizers said.

The trip will consist of short, easy walks from various parking sites.

Attendees will be able to see at least 13 species of carnivorous plants, including the Venus flytrap, a variety heaths, orchids and other rare wildflowers, “We are holding two such excursions a month apart, as we expect to find different suites of wildflowers in bloom each time,” such as pitcher plants, organizers continued.

There is no cost to participate but participants must sign a waiver. Participants should wear long pants and substantial footwear. Nonmembers are welcome to join the walks. To register, contact Ralph Tramontano at rrtramon@gmail.com. Specific instructions on how to get to the first site will be given to participants when they sign up.

Gardeners wanting to incorporate native plants will have a chance to learn how from a master gardener starting at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, May 6, at the Unitarian Universalist Church at 2900 Bridges St. in Morehead City.

During “The Power of Native Plants,” Carol Peoples is to talk about how to create a more welcoming habitat for birds, butterflies and bees. in addition to being a master gardener in Carteret County, Peoples is a co-leader of the Central Coastal Plain Chapter of the North Carolina Native Plant Society and serves with the Coastal Landscapes Initiative, a public-private collaboration led by North Carolina Sea Grant.

Dr. Ryan Emanuel does not remember when he first heard the English translation of the word pocosin.

He suspects it came from an authority figure, likely a teacher or professor. No matter. He believed the literal meaning of the Eastern Algonquian word was “swamp on a hill.”

It’s a translation that has been passed from generation to generation, one that Emanuel himself regurgitated in the courses he taught at North Carolina State University before accepting a job at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment.

That changed after the Lumbee and environmental scientist, in preparation for a television interview, took a deep dive into the word’s meaning.

He surfaced with not only the fact there is no evidence to support the longstanding translation, but a broader lesson about humility in accepting the unknown, vigilance in search of the truth, and ethically and responsibly distinguishing between Western academic knowledge and Indigenous knowledge.

Emanuel details the intricacies of why it’s important for scientists to thoroughly vet Indigenous-to-English translations in a paper he authored that was published last fall.

“We all know that, as scientists, we can’t make things up, and we have to cite properly as scholars,” Emanuel said. “And we’re used to doing that with our Western scientific knowledge. Why is it OK to not be careful with something like the translation of an Indigenous term when we’re so careful with other aspects of our science?”

He’s not pointing fingers.

His aim is not to convey a message that scientists, himself included, take the translations of Indigenous words at face value with bad intentions.

“It’s just that we didn’t do due diligence and we were not careful with the use of this word in our science,” he said.

It wasn’t until roughly a decade ago when Emanuel was invited to speak in an episode of “Exploring North Carolina,” a popular PBS program hosted by Tom Earnhardt, that he decided to give in to his own curiosity about the word’s translation.

Indigenous peoples pass along their histories through stories and oral tradition.

“But there’s a conspicuous absence in any of our communities of anything resembling this translation,” Emanuel said.

He started going through a chain of citations back through time. They all converged on a linguistics paper written in the late 1800s, the text of which is in a volume carefully filed at N.C. State’s Hunt Library.

Emanuel opened the old, dusty cover to the volume, read and reread its contents, realizing the paper says nothing about pocosin meaning “swamp on a hill.”

“That’s when the lessons of this paper started to hit home,” he said.

The first lesson? His own irresponsibility at taking the translation at face value and perpetuating “this myth of a translation.”

“I felt bad about doing that, especially as an Indigenous person who had learned the translation through nonIndigenous sources and didn’t even think to put it through our own kind of knowledge verification processes,” he said.

What also struck him as “uncomfortable,” he said, was that “nobody else had either.”

“I do think that this speaks to the humility aspect of the lesson,” Emanuel said. “As scientists who want to know everything, we have to be OK with the fact that there are some things we can’t know and this is one of those things.”

That’s a fact Indigenous communities live with every day. Their ancient languages were taken away, erased in different ways throughout colonial records and government documents.

The frustration or incompleteness someone may feel because they wish they knew the meaning of the word is certainly not lost on Emanuel.

“I’ve got an entire world view that I can’t truly know because all of that language has been taken away. We have to accept the fact that there is nobody around who can tell us any deeper meaning of that word that is used to describe the place that it is,” he said.

By and large, Indigenous communities do not dwell on this fact, he said. It’s not productive, nor healthy.

Instead, they think about what they have been able to preserve. Their strong sense of kinship, their responsibilities to their community, their relationship to the places from which they come, which include pocosin-filled landscapes.

But even those are a fraction of what they once were.

Once extensive in North Carolina, the freshwater wetlands of the Southeastern coastal plain have been destroyed or degraded by logging and ditching and draining for conversion to agricultural land.

Pocosins are sometimes referred to as “carbon sinks” because of their ability to sequester and store carbon dioxide, or CO2.

But even as efforts have in recent years been made to restore some of these areas to their original form, a North Carolina law passed in 2023 strips protections for pocosins, undermining not only their ecological and hydrological value, but their cultural significance to Indigenous communities.

“When you look across Indigenous communities in this part of North America, these landscapes are incredibly important culturally to us, yet that’s not part of the conversation when it comes to whether and how to protect and preserve these places,” Emanuel said.

He doesn’t want the mistranslation to be a distraction to the work that’s occurring in restoring pocosins.

“It’s just a reminder that the words that we use matter and that words that come from Indigenous languages remind us that these names were used for these geographies and other things for centuries, if not millennia, before we took them up and starting using them for our purposes,” he said. “They’re special and unique places and one of my favorite things to do is to take students out into the pocosins and have them tromp around on those organic soils and dig down into the muck and get that sticky soil all over their hands.”

There’s almost something deceptive about walking through the newest addition to Holly Shelter Game Land.

Trees rising from sandy ground largely blanketed by a thick cover of pine needles and wind-rippling wiregrass deafen any sense you’re just a short way from U.S. Highway 17.

Ben Jones summed up the experience during a recent hike through a small slice of the tract referred to as the Sleepy Creek property, a 1,616-acre parcel where baby longleaf pine trees sprout in savannas, carnivorous plants thrive and dense brush coats the surface of pocosin wetlands.

“It feels like we are miles from civilization,” he said.

That’s the idea behind rerouting a stretch of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail from the side of U.S. 17 in Pender County near Surf City and tucking it on land safely away from the four-lane blacktop.

Jones is the Friends of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail’s Coastal Crescent project manager and architect of the future section of trail, one that will link with nearly 20 miles of existing North Carolina trail snaking through the vast game land.

On a blustery cold day last week, Jones, Friends of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail Associate Director Betsy Brown and North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission officials offered a tour of the portion of game land where the new trail is anticipated.

This is a particularly unique project, one where the plan is to steer hikers away from the gravel roadways that cut through the game land and onto natural surface defined by upland sand ridges, longleaf habitat and pocosin wetlands.

“We want to keep it wild,” Jones said.

The exception will be a boardwalk structure planned through a little more than a mile of pocosin. The walkway will be constructed of some type of fireproof material, perhaps precast concrete that can withstand fire from prescribed burns state wildlife officials will administer to manage the land.

The modern method for maintain longleaf pine forests is through controlled burns, which reduce hardwood growth and manage grasses and forbs in the understory. Fires are essential to longleaf habitats for a number of reasons, one being that longleaf pine seeds germinate on bare ground.

This habitat is essential to a variety of plants and animals, including federally threatened red-cockaded woodpeckers.

The Nature Conservancy acquired the Sleepy Creek property about two years ago, permanently conserving land that would have most likely been developed. The Nature Conservancy transferred ownership to the state Wildlife Resources Commission.

Growth along the U.S. 17 corridor between Wilmington and Jacksonville has exploded in the last couple of decades as demand for property along the coast has skyrocketed.

The roughly 64,000-acre game land sits almost half way between the two cities – 25 minutes from Wilmington and 30 minutes from Jacksonville.

While Holly Shelter is a draw for hunters of game ranging from whitetail deer to rabbit to turkey, it’s also a formidable hiking spot.

The new, natural trail will extend a little more than 3.5 miles through the game land addition, which will also be made available for public hunting.

Negotiations are underway to purchase an additional 45-acre tract surrounded by the game land. If plans go accordingly, that property will be the site of a primitive camp ground.

Brown said kiosks and signage explaining trail and hunting etiquette to help educate those groups on how to coexist will be installed at the trail head.

Hikers are urged to plan ahead, make sure they have sufficient supplies, including water, and check for hunting seasons before heading into the game land. Wildlife officials ask hikers to wear something blaze orange, whether it be a hat, vest or other attire, if traversing Holly Shelter during a hunting season.

The Mountains-to-Sea Trail stretches more than 1,100 miles from the Great Smoky Mountains to the Outer Banks.

The Coastal Crescent Trail gives its guests the opportunity to experience a portion of the Cape Fear Arch, an area tapped as having the greatest biological diversity on the East Coast north of Florida.

The Arch spans between Cape Lookout National Seashore, a barrier island system in Carteret County, and Cape Romain in South Carolina, and inland beyond Fayetteville to the Carolina Sandhills.

The Coastal Crescent Trail runs through Johnston, Sampson, Cumberland, Bladen, Pender and Onslow counties.

The segment (there are 18 total) of Mountains-to-Sea Trail included in Holly Shelter Game Land spans a little more than 90 miles. It includes 3.5 miles of trail, just over 9 miles of beach, about 5.5 miles of multi-use path, 19 miles of forest roads and a little more than 53 miles of paved road.

Jones said he did not have an exact timeframe on when the new rerouted trail will be open for hiking, though it is expected to be complete in fewer than five years.

There are wild cranberries along the highway, U.S. 264, as it passes Stumpy Point in Dare County heading west to Engelhard. 

It is a small patch, according to Bob Glennon, retired Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge planner, and largely inaccessible without hip boots and a guide to find them.

“The cranberries are on the part of the refuge with the deepest muck soil,” he wrote in an email. “The site has very deep organic soil that will not support a person’s weight.”

The cranberries that exist in the pocosin are Vaccinium macrocarpon, the same botanical name given to the cranberry that has become a part of Thanksgiving and holiday traditions. They’re smaller than their cultivar cousins, but it’s the same cranberry. 

The first European settlers did not mention cranberries, but Glennon is confident the plants were there.

“Because they are present where there is very deep organic soil, I would guess that they have been there for centuries, just as other plant communities in extreme environmental conditions … have existed for centuries,” he wrote.

What may be one of the most remarkable features of where the cranberries are found is that the area does not seem to have changed much at all.

“Stumpy Pointers on Excursion” the headline reads in the Nov. 13, 1914, Elizabeth City Advance. The excursion — a cranberry picking expedition that included crossing open water and hiking through pocosin — is described in detail.

“After a twenty minute row across the lake and a hundreds yard hike through dense woods, the party came to an open savanna which must needs be crossed before the cranberries were reached,” the paper reported.

That description is remarkably similar to how Michael Schafale, North Carolina Natural Heritage Program terrestrial ecologist, got to the site.

“That 1914 description really fits,” he wrote in an email. “Lake Wirth, near Stumpy Point, is on the edge of that low pocosin. I went in that way once, walking around the lake rather than rowing across it.  It is not too far to low pocosin that way, though the ‘hike through dense woods’ and ‘savanna’ is understated.”

It does not appear as though the earliest Colonists left a record of the fruit, but North Carolina newspapers’ reporting on the crop dates back to the 19th century. 

The headline on page two of the Oct. 30, 1883, Elizabeth City Economist simply reads “Cranberries” and tells readers that the Massachusetts cranberry harvest was not very good in 1883 and “that the price will probably be higher than any time in recent years.” 

The observation was followed by advice for Dare County residents.

“We hope it will be appreciated by our friends at East Lake and other cranberry sections of Dare County. The dwellers in Dare County by the side of the wild cranberry ponds have no idea of the mine of wealth around them, and which they can so easily gather,” the paper noted.

Knowledge of the potential wealth of the bogs seemed to come and go. If the East Lake cranberries were well enough known in Elizabeth City in 1883 to note their abundance, by the 1930s they seem to have been forgotten.

A July 1, 1938, Dare County Times full page spread extolling the wonders of Dare County as the first show of the second year of “The Lost Colony” theatrical production neared, seems to indicate the existence of the cranberries has just been discovered.

The article describes the bogs with what may be hyperbole, writing that what exists between Alligator River and Stumpy Point “surprisingly enough, constitute the greatest cranberry bog in America.”

The next paragraph then describes how the cranberries had just been discovered.

“Nobody knew very much about the cranberry bog until they began to excavate a road through the unexplored jungle … that lie between the Croatan (Sound) and Alligator (River).”

That road today is U.S. Highway 264, but according to a History of Stumpy Point published in NCGenWeb Project, that road was created in the 1920s. The NCGenWeb Project is part of the national USGenWeb Project and a volunteer-collected genealogical and historical content repository for each of state’s 100 counties.

“One of the biggest milestones in the history of Stumpy Point was the creation of the roads connecting the town to Engelhard and Manns Harbor. The first was the road to Engelhard in 1926, built for Dare County by the H. C. Lawrence Dredging Company,” Harold Lee Wise, the story’s author wrote.

The cranberries seem to have been a good quality crop. Theodore Meekins, a Dare County resident, entered the cranberries in a statewide horticulture competition in 1908 and took home a bronze medal. In November 1939, according to the Dare County Times, Theodore Meekins “suggested that cranberries be cultivated on the Dare County Mainland.”

What is not clear is the extent of the commercial cultivation of the cranberries.

Alan Weakley, director of the University of North Carolina Herbarium at the North Carolina Botanical Garden, responded in an email that if a commercial harvest did exist, it was probably taking advantage of natural conditions. 

“I’m quite strongly inclined to think this was at most commercial exploitation of a natural local population,” he noted. “Maybe they manipulated the habitat some. But I find it really hard to believe that Dare County folks would have the idea of planting cranberries in pocosin habitats in Dare County, where they actually grow naturally and natively, and acquired plants or seeds and set them out.”

Newspaper accounts would seem to confirm Weakley’s opinion. By 1952, according to a Coastland Times article from Dec. 12 of that year, there was no commercial harvest of cranberries in Dare County.

“There was a time when gathering wild cranberries was a profitable venture for persons living in the bogland of the Dare Coast,” the paper reported.

In that same article, the harvest of the cranberries is then described in detail.

“Thomas Hunter Midgett is one person who still gathers wild cranberries in the same method as his parents and grandparents harvested them from the boglands many years ago,” the article noted. “The wooden scoop he uses is one his grandfather used.”

Charles Brantley “Aycock” Brown (1904-1984) was an Outer Banks resident and journalist.

Coastal Review will not publish Thursday and Friday in observance of the Thanksgiving holiday.

First of two parts.

BELHAVEN — Fourteen years separate two lightning strikes that sparked wildfires in nearly the same spot of private land near Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge.

The first blaze in 2008 consumed about 50,000 acres and took more than six months to extinguish. The second, in June 2022, burned just under 2,000 acres and was out in 10 days.

To Angie Tooley, manager of Carolina Ranch, the 10,000-acre site where both fires ignited, those contrasts illustrate the critical difference between toasty dry pocosin and spongy wet pocosin. Tooley credits the ranch’s work that rewetted the pocosin by raising water levels in the canals for suppressing the June fire.

But moist pocosin can also translate to income, she is quick to add. When peatlands are restored to their naturally boggy health, their thick mats of decayed plants sequester many tons of carbon. Carbon dioxide is the greenhouse gas that is threatening to destroy our planet. 

It’s an opportunity for ecosystem restoration that kills two birds with one stone — wildfire prevention and climate change mitigation — and Tooley intends to seize the ring. In recent years, she has reached out to environmental nonprofit group The Nature Conservancy, or TNC, and Charlottesville, Virginia, consulting firm TerraCarbon for expertise to help Carolina Ranch — and possibly neighboring properties — meet strict criteria to qualify for the burgeoning carbon credit market.

Carbon credits, or offsets, refer to the amount of greenhouse gas removed from the atmosphere, or the reduction of carbon emissions. Carbon farming creates credits based on the carbon dioxide, or CO2, held or drawn down into the soil.

“We are all looking for ways to work together in showcasing the private landowner use of the pocosin carbon offsets methodology funded by TNC and written in part by TerraCarbon,” she said in a text message after representatives of the groups had visited the site Jan. 11.

Wetland research

The Duke University Wetland Center, which is led by founding director Curtis J. Richardson, had conducted a three-year research project on pocosin in Carolina Ranch and, earlier, at the Pocosin Lakes refuge. In a paper released in September, the research data showed that rewetting and restoring 250,000 acres of previously drained peatlands could prevent 4.3 million tons of CO2 from being released into the atmosphere – equaling 2.4% of the total annual reductions in carbon dioxide emissions needed for the U.S. to be carbon neutral by 2050.

“Thus, management of hydrology and fire intensity in natural and degraded shrub/tree peatlands will be principal to maintaining peat/litter quality (phenolic/black carbon), enhancing long-term carbon accumulation, and preventing downstream (dissolved organic carbon) losses to coastal waters,” according to the paper.

In September, Richardson told Coastal Review that the Duke center is no longer working with anyone at Carolina Ranch. Although he noted “there’s a million steps that have to be done,” he hopes they move forward with carbon farming.

“I wish the project to be a success,” he said.

‘Hottest of the hot’

During a mid-September tour of the canal system within the project site, Tooley and ranch assistant Bill Ogburn of Ponser showed how the dark water sat just under the top edge of the canals that crisscrossed miles of flat grassy and wooded land.

“This is the worst part of the fire,” Tooley said, nodding towards charred vegetation off the access road on the property. “This was the hottest of the hot.”

Abutting the refuge and situated among vast farms of Hyde County’s coastal plain, Carolina Ranch totals 15,000 acres, some of which is still farmed or used for other purposes. Bumping along in an open all-terrain vehicle, views off the unpaved road showed off nature at its lovely best, mostly untouched by fire. The air had an earthy scent, with an occasional whiff of charred wood. Off the road, palm pine, wild asters, Carolina bay trees, maple, wild dogwood, wax myrtle, fern, scrub bushes and white pines grew with abandon. Wild blackberries, blueberries, gall berry, and wild Scuppernong grapes dotted the landscape in their late summer version. When the vehicle was stopped, it was quiet enough for black bear families to amble across the road. In one large section, there were patches of blackened earth and numerous downed trees.

We arrived at the fire scar.

“Look at the pine – it’s coming back,” Tooley exclaimed, pleased with the signs of recovery.

The property, today owned by Gus Schad of Albemarle, had once been part of the sprawling First Colony Farms, established in 1973 and comprised of 376,000 acres in Washington, Tyrrell, Hyde, and Dare counties. At the time, plans included clearing land for farming, forestry, raising livestock and peat mining. Much of the land was ditched and drained.

But concerns about loss of wetlands and harm to water quality, combined with economic questions, led to the project being dropped. A conservation group eventually bought much of the land at a bankruptcy proceeding, and a large portion became part of Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge.

After Schad, as Hyde County Partners LLC, purchased the 15,000 acres, he asked Tooley, an old friend, to help manage it and find a way to make a return on the investment. Tooley, an Elizabeth City native whose previous work includes serving as Hyde County planner and county manager, researched options for the land and realized it was a perfect fit for carbon farming. Much work, she knew, would be required to restore the pocosin, which had been dried out by the ditching and draining and periods of drought.

‘What we’re doing is working’

Ambitions for Carolina Ranch, which was incorporated in Sept. 2020, are big, according to its website: “Dedicated 10,000 acres to carbon offsets development in order to strengthen upland conservation, manage rainwater runoff using the peat to absorb and protect adjacent landowners, and enhance the natural environment for new biodiversity industrial job creation all while protecting the land from future peat fires.”

It would be one of the largest coastal resiliency projects in the U.S, continues the writeup on the site. TerraCarbon, which designed the American Carbon Registry methodology for restoration of pocosin wetlands, is directing development of the carbon project, along with East Carolina University and assistance from engineering firm Quible and Associates.

In addition to the prospect for carbon farming, Tooley said that scientists have discovered “never seen before” fungi deep in the peat. The ranch operation is working to continue onsite research into the find, with a goal of developing small business incubators for biodiversity jobs. At the same time, the operation is working to expand use of the property, which has 52 miles of roads, frontage on New Lake and diverse populations of flora and fauna, as a nature-tourism destination.

But without rewetting and restoring the pocosin, the biodiversity and health of the ecosystem would be at risk, Tooley noted, and it would lose any chance of qualifying as a carbon farm. That’s why it is important for the canals to hold the 9 feet of water. As Tooley described it, it was like creating a tub and putting a plug in it. Consequently, the natural sponginess of the peat was absorbed, in turn making it much less of a wildfire hazard.

“I know what we’re doing is working,” she said.

The Algonquin name for “swamp on a hill,” pocosin is the regional version of peat, known for its ability to hold water, and conversely, to burn hot and long. Fifty percent of peat – the remains of dead plants preserved over millennia – is composed of carbon. Despite being only 3% of the Earth’s surface, healthy peatlands store more than twice the carbon of all the planet’s combined forests. Desiccated or burned peat, however, releases carbon into the atmosphere.

Peat fires burn deep into the ground and are notoriously difficult to extinguish because they can spread horizontally and create hot spots that are difficult to find until they flare up. With their carbon-rich material – peat is still mined throughout the world for fuel – peat fires are some of the worst carbon polluters. Paradoxically, it is also one of the best natural solutions to keeping carbon in the ground.

John Cook, District 13 forester with the North Carolina Forest Service, told Coastal Review that the Evans Fire in 2008 happened after two years of severe drought, making the underground organic soil, which lacks sand or clay, exceptionally dry. Then once the topsoil is on fire, the heat keeps drying the soil deeper and deeper.

Even though there was a shorter-term drought going on when lightning ignited the recent wildfire, dubbed the Ferebee Road fire, the strategy at the ranch to dam canals with stacks of cement bags to sustain optimal water levels throughout the 10,000 acres is currently incomplete. The agency has a right to go on private land to stop a fire so it won’t affect somebody else, he added.

“They just don’t have the structures yet to hold water,” he said. “The ditching got ahead of the reality.”

Roads and ditches tend to eventually work like dikes, Cook said. And the problem with pocosin is that when flooded from above, the top of the “swamp on a hill” ends up becoming the center of a doughnut. Firefighters learned from the Evans Fire, which spread underground, and pumped water into canals from nearby lakes to flood the fire from below. Firefighters also cut firebreaks through the land and around the perimeter of the fire, and doused the sides and edges of the fire to keep it from spreading.

Cook said that holding the 9 feet of water Tooley had done at Carolina Ranch did help slow the progress of the Ferebee Road fire, but the more expensive water-control structures used nextdoor at the refuge are able to more efficiently pump water off and on a site as needed to move it around the network of canals.

“She’s doing what she can with what she has, until she can get structures in place,” he said.

Although Tooley wants the Fire Service to fix canal gates and remove cut trees and piles of brush left after the fire, Cook said that is not the agency’s responsibility, comparing it to expecting a fire department to repair your house after it burns. It’s not just because it’s private land, he said.

“I didn’t start the fire,” he said. “I came and put the fire out.”

But he said the service will remove sediments in wetland streams and restore access on paths and roads. Otherwise, the downed growth will be left to nature.

“Those trees are going to rot,” Cook added. “We don’t go back and landscape.”

Spurred by new urgency to mitigate climate change impacts and buoyed by a flood of federal funds, carbon offset projects are gaining momentum nationwide. Tooley remains determined to not only be one of them, but to help use pocosin as an asset to create an innovative business model for the community, while helping to stem the effects of climate change.

“That’s what makes coastal resiliency happen, because it naturally holds water,” Tooley said of northeastern North Carolina’s peatlands. “If everybody doesn’t work together – and I mean public and private – we will never have coastal resiliency.”