Articles About Environment and Planning

Mecklenburg County’s population of white-tailed deer has ballooned in recent years, as residents of Charlotte and other towns can verify with frequent sightings of deer gamboling and grazing in backyards, gardens, parks and greenways. At the same time, deer hunting in North Carolina’s most urbanized county has also expanded, in part through specialized hunts. The […]

[highlightrule] Learn more about KEEPING WATCH on HABITAT for 2017[/highlightrule] Walk into Ernie McLaney’s backyard in southeast Charlotte and for a moment, you may forget you are in a neighborhood of more than 6,000 residents. It’s a serene and private place, enclosed by trees, shrubs and a fence and lined with a curlicue paver path. […]

Charlotte for years has had a love-hate view of Atlanta, with civic leaders envying their fellow southeastern metro for its big-city status, achieved decades earlier than Charlotte’s. But sprawling growth and traffic congestion in the Georgia capital city fuel a We Don’t Want To Become Like Atlanta counterpoint. Last year a Charlottean became Atlanta’s planning […]

[highlightrule]Can lower South End survive the large-scale cookie-cutter development now ravaging South End and NoDa? Charlotte can learn some lessons from another Millennial magnet city, Des Moines. Yes, Des Moines. [/highlightrule] In post-election America, consensus seems as unreachable as the lost land of Atlantis. Republican “Middle America” has triumphed over the Democratic coastal regions, and […]

My husband’s cousin lives on a farm abutting Dartmoor National Park in Devon, England. (As my friend Sam says, everyone should have family so well placed.) Like the Uwharries, it’s a landscape of rolling topography punctuated with rocky outcrops, and the park is fragmented by villages and farms. Trails traverse a patchwork of public and […]

Imagine: Charlotte neighborhoods with their own master plans to care for their trees. A citywide initiative to pinpoint neighborhoods with few trees and then help get trees planted there. A dependable, dedicated source of public money to care for Charlotte’s street trees. Assistance for low-income homeowners who can’t afford to give proper care to large […]

[highlightrule]Choices made decades ago ruled out the preservation of large-scale green belts or farmlands in Mecklenburg. This is the story of how that came about. [/highlightrule] You can drive south down Dixie River Road beyond the venerable Dixie Grill & Grocery and for 2 miles you’ll see only woods, a few driveways and the scattered […]

One interesting and beautiful plant you may have seen along a river or creek, sometimes in great number, is spotted jewelweed (Impatiens capensis). You may be more familiar with another of its names – touch-me-not. It is also called common jewelweed, orange jewelweed or orange balsam. Spotted jewelweed grows predominantly in wetlands and can grow […]

I wanted to know more about the rarest butterfly in North Carolina, so I caught up recently with Nick Haddad, the William Neal Reynolds Professor of Applied Ecology at N.C. State University to ask about the St. Francis’ satyr and its conservation status. First, I wanted to know, what exactly is the St. Francis’ satyr, […]

Myth and legend surround willow trees, as well as facts. The graceful weeping willows have long narrow leaves and limbs drooping from the tree trunk, an appearance sometimes associated with death and dying. Shakespeare uses willow trees in several of his plays, including the “Willow Song” in Othello, and in Hamlet Ophelia breaks willow branches […]

The UNC Charlotte Urban Institute is cosponsoring the fifth annual Urban Forestry Summit by the nonprofit group TreesCharlotte on Sept. 20 at UNC Charlotte Center City. The aim of the event is to share information and discussion about topics relevant to Charlotte’s urban forest. The event is free and open to the public but registration […]

Although Charlotte is rapidly growing, the area just south of the city is growing even faster. From 2000 to 2014, Charlotte’s population grew 43 percent while that of unincorporated Indian Land more than tripled. Lancaster County Planning Director Penelope G. Karagounis. Photo: Mary Newsom Indian Land is in the Lancaster County, S.C., panhandle – a […]