Support for this program is provided by the Weldon F Osborne Foundation.

The Schillhahn-Huskey Foundation.

And viewers like you.

Thank you.

Today we'll learn about two nonprofits, each committed to conservation o natural resources in our area.

We are stronger together.

Chattanooga.

Stay tuned to learn more.

Welcome to Chattanooga.

Stronger.

Together.

I'm Barbara marder.

Marybeth Sutton is joining us.

She is the executive director and founder of waterways, which is focused on education about and protection of local watersheds.

Marybeth, Thank you so much for coming in today.

I am so excited to learn so much more about waterways.

Thanks for having me.

How how did you start this and why did you start this?

Well, it's a it's kind of a fun story.

story.

I was actually teaching some an environmental science class and one of the, guest lecturers ran a solar and wind farm, and he after the talk, asked me about, you know, we've got this issue in one of our installations and the community, they just don't like to pay for that solar and wind power that we've provided them.

Do you have any ideas?

And so we started talking and he said, I said, you have to do something with your community.

You have to have you have you gone out?

Have you talked to them?

And, no offense to engineers in the crowd, but, no, they had done didn't engage them, you know.

So it was all really Serendipity.

This this, it gentleman opened the door and he said, would you help us?

And so that led to our founding, actuall in Saint Lucia of the Caribbean.

And that was where we did our first programs and where we have our home base even to today.

Will you talk about direct in education, direct improvement to waterways in the watershed Hill.

Tell us talk about the education part of it.

We work with everybody from little bitty kids up to our wisest of in our community.

Ourselves.

So we have, yo know, we work with school kids.

We work.

We do school programs.

If you've never bee with a group of kids, especially our urban kids in the water, where they're first scared and then they get so excited, they catch a crawdad and they're like, oh, I've got one.

I've got one.

And they have never seen a crawdad before, or they've never A bug under the water.

You know, our fishing community, our trout fisher folks.

They all know the importance of the bugs and the life in the water.

Yeah, but.

Most of our kids and a lot o our adults don't realize that.

That's such an important facet of our overall natural resource health.

So we do we have a great partnership with Hamilton County Parks so we can get urban kids ou to Enterprise South Nature Park.

And you talked earlier while we started the show about the honey circles, right?

Which is what you and I grew up on, going out there and eating the honey from the honeysuckle.

That you were sharing with me how these kids were just like the kids didn't realize they thought the stuff in nature is maybe poisonous or you shouldn't eat it And so we had a group from Utah Middle School out, and I was showing them how to get the honey out of the honeysuckle.

They were thrilled.

And the kids at the end were like, thank you so much.

This is the best day ever.

Yeah.

And one of the kids had ha never, never gets to go outside.

And he thanked his teacher later for taking him outside.

I love that.

And so we have stream teams too.

I don't know if you need to go to Redbank Elementary School with us one day because we started a stream, a stream team there with the help of Macy Stubblefield and get kids in the creek to learn about the creek.

They apply to be in the stream team.

Okay.

So there's 20 or so fifth graders that get to do this once a month.

They get all sorts of education about the creek in their backyard at Redbank Elementary.

And then the culminate thing experience is they do somethin good to get back to the creek.

So they might plant native plants.

They might, remove trash.

They might, you know, they have built a rain garden at the school.

The kids did.

So never underestimate the power of kids Let's talk about the community education with the rain smart yards.

So rain smart yards.

We created rai smart yards with that Hamilton County stormwater program and the City of Chattanooga stormwater program.

We all had this idea that w need to get give the homeowners a better way to figure out what's going on in their yard, dealing with the runoff.

a lot of people don't think that if they're away from a creek that they have any impact on the creek or the river, but everything runs downhill.

All of that water runs downhill.

So we created this program to help homeowners, infiltrate the wate that comes down in their yard, mostly by adding native plants and changing the direction of your downspouts and capturing that water and making it go back into the soil.

Because if you get that water back in the soil, then our streams run all year round, even during those droughts like we just had.

And the soil filters, it it.

And the great benefit is we're planning native plants and that's good for pollinators.

And we all like to eat.

We do.

We do.

And you talked about that I have rain barrels.

I cut out my downspouts and rain barrels on one little breaks.

And I use that when it's, you know dry outside and everything right in to keep the mosquitoes down.

I put a little bit of Clorox in the rain barrels and that kills the mysterious mosquitoes and everything.

And now I've got this water supply for my plants and things like that.

So when we talk about, can I.

Can I tell you a secret about rain smart yards?

Yeah.

So if you're in the city o Chattanooga, County, I'm sorry.

Maybe one day with the county.

But for our viewers that are in the city, if you get certified as a rain smart yard by waterways, you can get a reduction in your stormwater fee.

And now that folks, stormwater fees are getting higher.

Every little bit helps.

So you know like my mother in law got a quarter reduction.

But you can get up to 75% off of your stormwater fee.

That's awesome.

Yeah.

That's awesome.

So earlier you mentioned the little bit.

Let's talk about that.

What is that?

Yeah.

When you when you think of a litter boom you think, oh it's blowing up.

Right.

But this is actually a trap.

So it's imagine pull noodles stretching across a creek with a little net under the bottom.

Okay.

So when the water flows from upstream, those pool noodle stop anything that's floating.

And so that's what a litter boom is.

So we're catching all of this floating trash.

And guess what.

We are also analyzing it and finding that it's all plastic and styrofoam.

90% of it.

So that gives us the chance to go back and say okay, so what do we do about all of this plastic and styrofoam?

Maybe, you know, maybe we can stop using as much single use plastic, since we know that that the plastic burden in our world is so high.

So it's really cool that we have collected in the first year and a half of the Chattanooga Creek litter boom, over two tons of very lightweight plastic and styrofoam trash.

So now we have a partnership with Hamilton County and the parks to put in one at City Creek, and then with Baylor School to put into on Mountain Creek and Stringer's Branch.

So to keep thos containers, that contamination to get into the water strea and people just throwing it away should we have more trash barrel setting around?

Should we have maybe make companies talk to companies about making these biodegradable, instead of plastic containers or styrofoam can make it?

Or how about a how about a returnable plastic bottle?

Yeah.

You remember those Coke bottle we used to take back for $0.05?

Yeah.

What about having a returnable.

That's how I bought my first bike.

I saved up my money.

I collected that, collected all your nickels.

I lived in Bristol, Tennesse way back then, and I collected bottles on the side of the road.

And when I would g and return them.

And I kept it.

And that's how I bought my first bike.

And a lot of people will say to that oh we recycle all of those.

But less than 4% I think I read lately of the plastic is recycled.

So it's really hard to, there are fewer places to take recycled plastic or take plastic.

So what do we do instead.

Can we get rid of the plastic bags at the grocery store?

That would be huge.

Yeah.

Or at least charge for them.

Well all day.

So you don't get if you have to bring your own when we talk abou the protection of the watershed, you know what we're putting what we're the water how we're contaminating, like, okay so I'm going to give an example.

My backyard.

I have some invasive plants.

And I'm going to use rounded ground.

Or I' going to do all this chemical.

Well that gets into the soil and then that rains and then that gets into the water.

And then that ends up in a river or a like or and kill all the life in the stream and the stream is that the the stream life is kind of magical.

It can clean up a lot of the things that happen in the stream, but not if you kill all the life in the stream.

That's true.

The microorganisms that's doing all the work and everything.

And that's why it's so important for just even homeowners like me to be careful of what I'm planning like.

Absolutely.

We do have a problem with kudzu, which, you know, I mean, you can grind that.

You can dry, grind it up, make flour out of it.

But people don't realize that because I remember the kudzu ball that we had many, many years ago.

I think we need to bring it.

Bring it back.

I think so too.

I'll help you with it.

So, we're actually doing an invasive removal project on Stringer' branch, and and are working on the kudzu in Redbank on that section.

Yeah.

We've had a whole bunch of volunteers out.

Anybody wants to volunteer their.

Okay Do you need a lot of volunteers?

Yes, we always use volunteers.

Are one of our best volunteers.

Recently has been Don McKenzie from city of Red Bank.

I mean, from Red Bank, because he knows how to.

He's been studying how to get rid of kudzu.

So we're working on it.

Wow.

So many people came over and helped us a little, too.

So that was great.

But what our goal is, if you can get rid of those invasive species like kudz and bittersweet and English ivy and those kind of things and plant native species, those roots are longer.

And the water goes into the soil better.

Kudzu has this massive root system but it doesn't go way down.

So we need these roots that go down and filter the water into the soil and into the ground water.

So that's our goal is to restore these stream banks with native plants.

Marybeth, thank you so much.

This has been so much fun and it's been so educational.

And I hope our viewers learn a lot about waterways.

Thanks.

And come out and volunteer, please.

Great.

Thank you.

Up next, we'll have Cody Roney, executive director of Lula Lake Land Trust.

So stay with us.

We want to know how you serve your community.

Send us photos or videos of you or your family volunteering, and we may feature it on a future episode.

Email stronger@wtcitv.org or use the hashtag STRONGERWTCI on social media.

Welcome back.

Cody Roney is joining us.

She is the executive director of Lula Lake Land Trust.

Their mission is to protect th natural and historic landscapes within the Rock Creek watershed on Lookout Mountain by fostering research, conservation, and stewardship of the land.

Welcome, Cody.

I'm so glad you're here with me today.

So let's talk about how Lula, like land trust actually got started.

Sure.

Lula Land Trust began in 1994, upon the death of Mr. Robert Davenport.

He owned the land, what we now call our core preserve.

It was a piece of family land.

He had four children.

And, upon his death, they were just kind of like, what are we going to do with this beautiful piece of land?

We need to protect this and, you know, save it for future generations to enjoy.

So they started the land trust.

Since then, the Lake Land Trust has grown to own about 4000 acres of land.

And we've helped protect over 12,000 acres of land on Lookout Mountai along the Rock Creek watershed.

So when you say protect the land, what does that actually mean?

Well, there's a few different ways that we've done that in the past.

So we protect it by purchasing and owning it.

And what you call in fee, which just means we own the land.

And by nature of the organization, it's protected.

We also have, worked with what are called conservation easements.

And that's where a private landowner can maintain ownership of their land.

But they put an easement on the land t protect the natural resources.

So the timber, the water, they have they limit their ability to develop or to do, building and things like that but they get to keep the land.

So we've in the past worked with we we used to host conservation easements.

We don't anymore.

But we worked with about seven different landowners on the lookout.

Those easements are no held by a different land trust.

So those are the main two ways we've, done protection.

We've also purchased land, and then donated i or given it to the state park, Cloudland Canyon State Park system.

Oh, wow.

So you really built up the the park up there?

Yeah.

We helped, you know, there's kind of one of those situations where if we were in had the ability to purchase it and the park didn't, we could we could step in.

And, that's kind of what we did with.

It's an area called Five Points.

It's now a really popular mountain biking area.

Probably one of the most popular ones in the area.

But we owned that originally.

We helped build all the trails.

And then we transferred that over to the state park system, and it almost doubled the size of Cloudland Canyon.

And that was just a really unique partnership where we were able to protect that land.

We didn't need to own it.

We could have, but it made more sense for the state parks to own, because we were reall small organization at the time, and that was a big piece of land for us.

So over the last 20, 30 years now, we've built what we call a conservation corrido from Cloudland Canyon State Park all the way to our core preserve, and almos all the way to Covenant College.

Oh, wow.

That's amazing.

So when we talk about, you know, conservation because I know you do conservation, recreation and education.

So let's talk about conservation.

And what how are you working in that area?

So we are still always kind of looking for, to build that corridor.

They Lookout Mountain in particular.

The eastern side of Lookout Mountain is considere a highly climate resilient area.

And so there's a lot of science behind that.

But the slopes of the mountains, the ability for migration, and wildlife to, to move throughout the of the properties, ar certain factors that they look at when determining a climate resilience.

And because the factors are so high there, we are always looking for new land to protect, especially on the slopes of the mountain.

So we recently, this yea purchased and property 63 acres, that were in that climate resilient zone in 2022, we purchased an area that goes down the slope of the mountain, that all is contiguous with the properties we already own and there's a few private landowners in between there.

But that kind of shows the work that we're doing.

Not that we're, you know, anti people building homes.

People need to have homes, people, you know, do.

But there's also just parts of the mountain that are are really extremely important to protect.

And that's kind of what we look to do.

I mean I know homeownership is very important for people and everything, but if we don't conserve the beauty of the land, we're really corrupting the land because we're losing the migration.

We're losing the the fowl and And also part of that, you were working on the preserving the hemlock.

Yeah.

So we have a few different conservation efforts.

The hemlocks are our biggest effort right now, something we've we and probably many other land trust along the East Coast have been working on.

But currently we have I think at this point we've determined we have over 15,000 hemlock trees on just our property on lookout.

That doesn't include all the, you know, neighboring landowners and, there is a for people who don't know about the hemlocks.

They're a tree that you find all along the East Coast.

We're about as far sout as you find the hemlock trees.

We've they have, like, in Fort Payne, Alabama area, but you just don't see them beyond that.

So they're mostly north, northeast.

We have a lot and they generally are found along our creek.

So we have most of our hemlocks here along the creek.

And there's a little bug called the wooly adelgid that is destroying the hemlock population.

The bug was brought over from Japan.

And there's no natural predators here for this little animal.

And they're just destroying hemlocks.

You can see, you know, if you go to the Smokies or to different areas, just massive groves of hemlocks that are gone.

So we've been working ove the last decade to protect ours.

And for initially I think nine years ago we did, we do chemical treatment to, you know, treat the trees.

And we did that.

We, contracted that out.

A great, hemlock expert kind of did tha treatment for us nine years ago.

It was very expensive.

It cost us over $120,000 to treat those trees.

So as we needed, you have to retreat every five to 5 to 9 years.

We made it nine years.

It was time to retreat.

And we thought, you know, could we save some money and do it ourselves?

So we had our stewardship director and our land manager trained and have learned how to treat hemlocks.

And we were able to treat so far we're doing it over three years.

We have treated over 14,000 trees already, in the last two years.

And we've probably spent $15,000 on, chemicals.

So we're working with some saved Georgia Hemlocks and some other that are donating a lot to us.

But, just the labor of it.

I mean, it's a lot of work, but we're able to do it in-house and then on the other side of that, we are working with the, Georgia Forestry Commission and a few different universities around.

They've found a beetle that is a natural or a is a predator to the hemlock wooly adelgid.

And they're kind of farming this farming.

Yeah.

And in labs, I mean, it's the best way to put it.

And we've been working we'v created these little pockets of, research zones where we didn't treat our hemlocks or one acre parcels, where we have a lot of hemlocks.

We did not treat them chemically.

And we released these beetles to see.

Are they reproducing or are we seeing them take care of the wooly adelgid in that area?

And are they moving insects active?

Yeah.

Is it effective?

And, we've been finding that was 5 to 7 years ago that we released the Beatles, and now we're coming back and and seeing where they are.

And we found beetles almost half a mile away from where we originally released them, which is a great sign.

So they it is working.

Why is it important to save the hemlock?

There's a lot of reasons.

We have a lot of them.

They're beautiful trees.

They're, For us again, most of the trees are found along our creek, along Rock Creek.

And if those trees die, the whole ecosystem in the creek changes.

The the the sun will then get to the creek.

The water's going to warm and all the little micro invertebrates and fish tha live in there will probably die.

I gotcha that that makes sense.

Now it all comes together and everything.

I know we have a lot of peopl that are moving to Chattanooga, and they love the hiking and biking in the rivers and all of that.

Tell me about all of the trails that you have.

Yeah we have a lot.

And people don't.

People don't know.

I think a lot of people think of Lula Lak and they think of our waterfall, which is something to remember.

It is special.

It is actually beautiful.

But, you know, one of our things we like to say is a lo is we're more than a waterfall.

And we have our core preserve which is where the waterfall is.

That property is not open all the time.

We open up four days a month, to the public.

We open all the time for education.

School groups have a lot going on throughout the week, but we have we are.

So Lula Lake has 4 plus miles of trails just along.

Look out.

And then a few include Cloudland Canyon and some of the other trails.

There's 80 miles of trails on Lookout Mountain.

Wow.

So we have our new Durham Mine trails, the Cloudland Connector Trail, and our moonshine trail systems, all that are open every day to the public.

Just recently, I think this is very exciting for us.

And, a great collaborative project we worked on.

We just opened the River to Cloud Trail, which is a route that goes from Lookout Mountain Conservancy's property in Saint Elmo all the way to Cloudland Canyon State Park.

So we collaborate with, in total, five landowners the National Park System, Covenant College, Look Up mount Conservancy, Lula Lake, and, Cloudland Canyon State Park to build this route.

It's kind of like the Appalachian Trail.

It's it uses existing trails.

None of our trail changed our names or anything.

We just connected them via this route that people can now do.

It's almost 40 miles one way.

So you could do a 36 mile, you know, or 72 mile route if you'd want to.

You can start at Cloudland and go downtown, or you can start downtown and go to Cloudland.

And it's really exciting.

We have a permit system to use, the core preserve section of the trail when so you can come through when we're closed.

And we've probably sold over 200 permits this year for that trail.

So it's really exciting to see people using it.

People are coming from out of town.

We're getting a lot of phone calls.

About hey how do we do this trail.

So it's, it's really exciting to bring that to the community and to offer, offer that.

I think all the partners involved are really thrilled with how the River to Cloud's trail turned out.

But aside from that, we have day use trails all over the mountain.

So, before we wrap up, I want to talk a little bit about your education.

I know that you have the schools come in and you have homeschool in the public schools and everything, but you also work with Covenant College on that hemlock project, don't you?

Yeah we've got actually relationships with quite a few universities, covenant and UTC being, you know, the most because they're local.

But yeah, covenant.

We've got a professor right now that we're working with who's bringing thei they're doing our Bible studies.

So they're coming out, I don't know if they're coming weekly or monthly, bi weekly.

To look at those.

They're the ones helping u find those beetles in the data for you and everything.

We have a lot of interns and from the biology departments, and we've got just a lot of really unique projects.

Our Chesnut project, we started that with Doctor Hill, Craddick and I think the late 90s saving the chestnut.

Yeah, we planted a bunch of chestnuts on our property, we have a lot of really unique research style opportunities as well as field trips and, all kinds of little groups of kids that, you know, from kindergarten to high school that come out.

Yeah.

So, as we close out, what kind of volunteer opportunities are there?

It's varied throughout the year.

We, have a lot of, like, trail working opportunities We'll do cleanups every now and then.

We have a significant amount of events every year, about five, what we call flagship events.

We often have voluntee opportunities there with parking and just talking to people, docents, things like that.

Yeah, I think this is Cody.

Thank you so much for coming.

Thanks for educating me and our viewers on, how Lula Lake Land Trust got started and all the wonderful things that you're doing right now, and all those hiking and bikin trails that they have to offer.

So thank you so much, though, and thank you for joining us today.

We hope Chattanooga Stronger Together offers a fresh viewpoint for viewers like yo who want to make a difference.

So let us know what you think.

Email us at stronger at Sky tv.org or use the hashtag stronger WTC on social media.

I'm Barbara Marder and we'll see you next time.

Support for this program is provided by the Weldon F Osborne Foundation.

The Schillhahn-Huskey Foundation.

And viewers like you.

Thank you.