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Yesterday evening, I returned home from TVA’s Connected Community conference in Franklin, Tennessee. The conference was held at the Embassy Suites in Cool Springs. If you are familiar with that area, you know it is, like many suburban areas, filled with homes, townhomes, condos, and just about any type of shop, boutique, furniture store, car dealership, or restaurant you could imagine. I drove by the mall where, in high school, I worked at Sam Goody. I drove by the gas station my cousin used to work at. And I drove down Liberty Pike, the road where my parents lived when I was born. The small blue house was no longer there; instead sat a large townhome community with meticulous lawns and street light cul de sacs. Forty years ago, Cool Springs was rolling green farmland and meadows with large trees and streams meandering across the fields. It provided a home for wildlife and when it rained (like it did yesterday) the soils and the streams would capture the runoff.
Because I remember what it used to be like, and because I’ve been away for some time, I couldn’t help but notice all of the development- all of the growth- and all of the man-made interventions that have drastically changed the landscape. The wildness has long gone, and people dominate. They now experience the land in very different ways today- and they have access to many more choices on where to eat, where to shop, and how to live each day as part of their community.
Admittedly, it was a great place to convene a conference, and it was a great conference. TVA brought communities from across the valley together in a testament to our shared vision for a better future. It underscored the importance of collaboration in creating thriving communities with access to economic development opportunities, digital connectivity and literacy, and resilient energy and environmental justice. It reminded us that these are not conflicting interests, but rather different aspects of a shared goal. We can build a robust economy without compromising the health of our natural environment.
That is what we are setting out to teach with our second campus. As we build an education center that (like our communities) feeds and houses people, we will do so in a way that also improves the ecosystem of which we are a part. We will preserve the vitality of our environment and create a place where we understand that we are a part of nature- not separate from it.
For now, we are still working on the funding needed to begin construction. It’ll take some time. I had someone ask recently if, in the meantime, the land was “just sitting there.” I smiled a bit and responded that, “no, the land was just living there.” The land and how we preserve it, how we restore it, and in some cases how we build on it, is an integral part of our vision for the future. When we are successful in our development, we will protect its function. Yes, like Cool Springs, we will still have man-made interventions; we will have growth. But we know that the land will not be as unrecognizable as driving along Liberty Pike was for me yesterday.
With that in mind, we are focusing a lot of time and effort on our vision for the land, most recently by creating a new job position, the Land Manager. It’s an exciting step in the right direction, and we have the right person for the job. Read more about this development here. And continue to follow along as we continue this journey toward building a better future.
Catey McClary
President & CEO
Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont
