By Paul Kingsbury

The Nature Conservancy and the state of Tennessee have completed the largest conservation transaction in the state since the creation of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in the 1930s — to protect nearly 130,000 acres of majestic hardwood forests, mountains and streams on the Cumberland Plateau:

• The area saved — three times the size of the District of Columbia — also links to 66,000 acres of existing public lands.
• The result is a wildlife corridor amounting to 300 square miles of protected forestland for black bear, elk, white-tailed deer, turkey and numerous migratory songbirds such as the cerulean warbler and the wood thrush.
• All 193,000 acres of these lands are now also open to the public for recreation, including hunting, hiking and fishing.

“This is as good an example of 21st century conservation as there is,” says Scott Davis, state director for The Nature Conservancy in Tennessee, referring to the sophisticated methods and multiple stakeholders involved in the deal. "Because of its scale, this project required a different approach from the old model of buying land to lock it up as a preserve."

“These kinds of opportunities are becoming increasingly rare," he adds. "The fragmentation of the landscape is making it increasingly difficult to do conservation on this scale. If we don’t protect lands like this now while we can, we won’t get to do it in the future.”

Tremendous Biodiversity — But Threatened by Development

The Cumberland Plateau — which cuts a broad, diagonal, 450-mile-long swath through Tennessee between Nashville and Knoxville — is the world’s longest hardwood-forested plateau and is widely considered one of the most biologically rich regions on Earth, rivaling the biodiversity of tropical rainforests.

A vast tableland rising more than 1,000 feet above the Tennessee Valley, the Plateau sequesters numerous animals and plants found nowhere else. The region has long been a remote and rugged wilderness: For generations much of the Cumberland Plateau remained undeveloped or maintained as timber company lands.

In recent years, however, many timber companies have divested themselves of their forest holdings. Because of its scenic beauty and its largely undeveloped character, the Cumberland Plateau has become increasingly attractive to developers of second homes and vacation getaways. The result is fragmentation and degradation of the area’s rich forests and pure streams.