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State healthcare, education, and budget cuts make up just some of the main headline-grabbers of Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen’s time in office.
Conserving state land, not so much – but it’s likely one of the lasting hallmarks of Bredesen’s legacy.
Plot a line a mile wide across the state from Memphis to Johnson City. That’s how much land Bredesen has protected in his eight years as governor.
Or think of it this way: It’s more land than Tennessee’s portion of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
One place where the state’s gained several thousand acres is South Cumberland State Park, roughly halfway between Murfreesboro and Chattanooga. It’s the kind of place with gurgling creeks, roaring waterfalls, and scenic overlooks, where it’s almost weirdly quiet, and peaceful.
View from Raven’s Point
From a cliff-top vantage point, you can see rocks and trees for miles, without so much as a gravel road on the horizon. John Christof manages the park:
“I’ve been here since 1981, and ever since that time it’s been our dream to protect a lot of these places that, through the good graces of our neighbors we could hike here, but they weren’t really part of the park.”
Christof says nature fans couldn’t rely on such benevolent neighbors forever. He credits Bredesen for having foresight “to see the opportunity, and this may be the last opportunity, to protect this large tract of land before it was potentially purchased and broken up for development.”
Christof calls that the Humpty-Dumpty effect: when big landscape properties like this get broken up, they’re impossible to reassemble. So once they’re gone, they’re gone.
Leverage
Land like this isn’t cheap. But Christof says a silver lining of the economic downturn is it got somewhat easier for the state to snap up land developers grew skittish about.
And Bredesen brought in outside help from conservation-minded non-profits. He put millions of state dollars on the table so those groups would pony up matching funds.
Environment and Conservation Commissioner Jim Fyke says in total the state put $30 million in, and got back $115 million worth of land.
“In a simplified fashion, that’s roughly about 25 cents on the dollar. So for every 25 cents the state has invested in conservation, the non-profits have raised dollars, whatever their mechanism is, through foundations and so forth.”
The state doesn’t own all of the land – some of it is protected from development through easements, which give the state perpetual control over rights like mining and timber.
Fiery Gizzard Creek
Bredesen says being outdoors was important to him as a kid. He wanted to be a forest ranger. He figures the state’s natural beauty is one of its selling points. And there’s another motive:
“So many of the things that we do in public office are the problem of the week or the problem of the month, many of the things you do are not going to last forever, they’re solving some problem. The thing that I love about preserving land is a hundred years from now, and two hundred and three hundred years from now, that land is still going to be there, it’s still going to be preserved, there will be people not even imagined today who will be enjoying it.”
But, Bredesen hasn’t always been able to put land conservation at the top of his list. Facing difficult budgets at the beginning and end of his time as governor, he pulled money out of dedicated conservation funds.
And he acknowledges before he could save any land he had to build up some political capital with voters, and the legislature.
“I mean I had to do things like get the TennCare situation straightened out. I certainly have had the last couple years to focus on budgets and trying to preserve as many jobs or bring jobs to the state. What I think is if people see you concentrating on the stuff that counts for them first, they will give you a little elbow room to work on some other things that may be longer run.”
Lasting Legacy
The non-profit Nature Conservancy’s Gina Hancock says the results will outlast Bredesen, the next governor, and more after that.
“What happens to Pre-K programs and anything else that he’s done in the last eight years can be undone, but you can’t take away permanent conservation of a place.”
And ultimately, it’s not just Bredesen’s legacy that’s intact, says John Christof, the park manager.
“I think we would’ve lost out on our huge investment in this park if lovers of wilderness and nature would walk out here on a backpacking trip and look across at somebody mowing their grass, rather than enjoying this beautiful wilderness scenery.”
Christof says he hopes the next governor will pick up where Bredesen’s leaving off.
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