Land Conservation in the Appalachians | Joel Houser | TEDxChattanooga Salon

All right, thanks so much. Um it is such a pleasure to be here. So greetings. Thank you all for coming. Um I appreciate you all showing up. As Sky said, we're here for a common purpose. I am honored to be here. I'm excited to be here. I'm honored to share the stage with the people that we're going to have

later. And I'm excited to hear what they have to say and to see what comes out of this. So I want to start um as we're looking, I want to think about a journey through the Appalachians and what that that looks like. Where we are in Chattanooga is Well, the the image isn't working right.

We're right here in the tri-state area of Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama. We're at the base of a mountain chain that extends throughout the east, far north through Maine into Canada. It's one of the world's oldest mountain chains. That's pretty That's pretty amazing. It has rich soils. It has giant trees. It has ancient species. It has species

that exist nowhere else on Earth except for right here in our backyard. The Appalachians are an area of extreme biodiversity, meaning there are an extraordinary number of plants and animals that call the place home. They've evolved over massive time spans to be there, to exist with each other, to create stable ecosystems. As we go and we think about the

Appalachians, we we have these grand vistas. We have intact forests that stretch thousands of miles. We have streams that turn into creeks that turn into rivers as they go towards the sea. There birds that live here year round. There birds that use it as a migratory flyway. In their annual migrations between here,

Central America, South America. There ancient trees that are standing guard along our waterways, shading and cooling the waters, keeping pollutants out of the streams, keeping soil where it needs to be. It's a amazing landscape. It's It's so beautiful. It's all inspiring. It's majestic. As Sky said, it's probably the reason most of us are in this room right