Making Bank on the Banks: Finding Value in Appalachia’s Riparian Buffers

Like many other parts of the Appalachian region, the New River watershed is a land made to serve conflicting uses. The conflicts between these uses can be cultural flashpoints, as when environmentalists or downstream residents want more forested riparian buffers, but landowners don’t want to lose the cropland, the pastureland, or the money and time it takes to install fencing. These perceived conflicts evaporate on long-enough timescales – when the cropland gets inundated through a flash flood – and, more importantly, they can be dissolved through ideological reframing. The Appalachian Program of Future Generations University has developed a series of primers and videos which showcase a handful of crops grown in the riparian buffer area under a healthy forest canopy. These tools initiate a practical paradigm shift – any costs associated with maintaining its health have become investments in the farm, rather than external impositions from meddling environmentalists. They emphasize and integrate the economic, cultural, and environmental values associated with these crops, with an eye towards the contemporary emergence of these values in increasingly popular practices for farmers and products for consumers. To complete this project, we needed to build a transdisciplinary team – natural scientists, social scientists, humanists, and practicing forest farmers – and develop best practice sites where good management can be exhibited to landowners, technical service providers, and policy makers. This presentation summaries and showcases the primers and videos, and explains the unique manner in which community development and conservation come together in the work of the Appalachian Program.