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OUR MISSION:
We
include our basic mission statement on every page
of our website (see left). It's that important to
us. The ideas of promoting awareness and
appreciation are not just words to us. Without
sounding too preachy, they ought to be important to
you too. We're all just visitors on the planet, and
if you're reading this, you're one of the most
destructive and self-serving species the planet has
produced lately. It is our responsibility to live
lives with as much care and cautiousness as
possible.
We don't talk about preserving
and protecting wildlife and ecosystems because we're all saintly
liberal do-gooders. Most of us have jobs or have had jobs that causes
us to question the value of the work in the largest sense, to the
greatest good of humanity. Preserving wild places and wildlife isn't
just for our children to appreciate, but may actually be the linchpin
to our survival.
OUR HISTORY:
The
Elisha Mitchell chapter of the Audubon Society was
formed in 1986. After contacting the Southeast
regional office, then located in Charleston, SC a
representative met in Asheville to evaluate the
need and to determine the willingness to form a
chapter. After organizing an exploratory committee
comprised of about a dozen NAS local members, a
meeting was held with the SE regional
vice-president to discuss formation of the chapter.
To form a chapter, we had to to recruit fifty new
members, publish a newsletter, hold public meetings
and form a Board of Directors. The initial board
was made up of retirees, government employees,
private business people and students. All with the
common goal of forming a local conservation
group.
After
four months we were officially chartered as the
Elisha Mitchell chapter of the National Audubon
Society, taking our name from Dr. Elisha Mitchell.
Dr. Mitchell was a North Carolina native, a doctor
of Divinity and an early conservationist. Our
membership grew and included both Buncombe and
Henderson counties.
One
stipulation for forming a chapter was the
participation in a "major conservation project".
Shortly after receiving our charter, we were asked
to participate in the preservation of a parcel of
land adjacent to Beaver Lake in Asheville, North
Carolina. The land was scheduled to be developed as
a strip mall. The chapter spearheaded the effort to
preserve the property and now own and manage it as
the Beaver Lake Bird Sanctuary.
The focus and willingness
of that original group of organizers to bring a credible, activist-oriented
conservation group to Asheville has been instrumental to the ongoing
success of the chapter.
ELISHA MITCHELL:
We take
our name from a great educator, scientist, and
minister. In the days of his life, 1793 to 1857,
there wasn't the great contradiction between being
a scientist and a minister as there is today.
That's because today people tend to be specialists,
and in his day, Elisha Mitchell was a generalist.
He knew a great deal because he read and taught and
those readings were in a wide field of research. He
most probably understood science to be an extension
of learning about God's great universe. His
interest in geology and mineralogy led him to
several trips to Western North Carolina, where he
additionally used barometric measurements and
trigonometric calculations to first suspect that
the Black Mountain Range may contain peaks that are
higher than Grandfather Mountain - at the time
assumed to be the highest peak in the Carolinas. As
it turned out, one of these peaks, now named Mount
Mitchell in his honor, is the highest peak east of
the Mississippi.
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