Georgia's Green Team
Our annual tribute to those who made our air easier to breate, our water cleaner to drink and our state a better place to live
- Jim Stawniak
- Steve Nygren's fear of sprawl led to Chattahoochee Hill Country, a visionary development that would split 65,000 acres between greenspace and eco-friendly hamlets.
Nygren was jogging near his country home in south Fulton County five years ago when he saw a clump of woods clear-cut on his neighbor's land. The neighbor was building an airstrip, but for a while, Nygren feared a strip mall was moving next door.
The well-known restaurateur (he co-founded the Peasant group of restaurants) set out to make sure south Fulton would avoid the unsightly, inconvenient sprawl that plagues north Fulton. He was determined to figure out a way to guide development without being overrun by it.
The result is Chattahoochee Hill Country, nearly 40,000 acres where landowner-friendly development tools are being merged with environmentally sensitive planning. A publicly inclusive process to create new vision for the area got the enthusiastic backing of almost all its businesses and landowners for traditional, compact "hamlets" and lots of open space.
Nygren also is the driving force behind (and chairman of) the Chattahoochee Hill Country Alliance, which is guiding development of the first hamlet. The alliance is working to bring another 25,000 acres in surrounding counties aboard the smart-growth bandwagon.
Chattahoochee Hill Country already has garnered national attention as a trend-setting way to counter sprawl. Metro Atlanta -- usually a poster child for dumb growth -- has Nygren to thank for flipping the reputation.
Jason Rooks
Since taking over Georgia Conservation Voters two years ago, Jason Rooks has made the state's leading environmental political action committee more effective than ever. An attorney and one-time Silicon Valley entrepreneur, Rooks is comfortable as an inside player. He sits down with his adversaries and talks to them over lunch, and his professional style has moved environmental groups closer to the Gold Dome's power circles.
During this year's legislative session, Rooks led the fight against a bill that would have allowed developers to pipe, fill and pave over streams (see Sen. Casey Cagle in the "Dirty Dozen" section). The bill passed, but not before it was stripped of its unpleasantness. Rooks also helped block a bill that would have allowed metro Atlanta to suck water out of distant river systems.
He championed good legislation as well. For the first time, a group of Georgia agencies will work together to create a statewide water plan to guide water use for decades. Another bill Rooks pushed makes it a crime for grease haulers to dump their loads into manholes, a common practice that leads to clogged pipes and overflows of raw sewage.
Debbie Royston
A year ago, Royston filled the big hiking boots of Brent Martin, who left Georgia Forestwatch to run a land trust in Tennessee. She's continuing Martin's work, tenaciously fighting to protect North Georgia's Chattahoochee National Forest from the shaky stewardship of the U.S. Forest Service.
Royston hired Larry Sanders of the Turner Environmental Law Clinic to file a lawsuit against the Forest Service for allowing off-roaders to shred sections of Rich Mountain. The lawsuit was a big success, forcing the Forest Service to close Rich Mountain Road for one year while biologists perform an environmental assessment.
But Royston and her staff face a bigger challenge this year. Under pressure from the Bush administration, the Forest Service is putting the finishing touches on a plan that would allow half the forest to be clear-cut or used as an obstacle course for four-wheelers. Royston vows that Georgia Forestwatch will sue the service once the horrendous plan is finalized.
Jane Hubert, Evelyn Kendrick and Charles Ware
Since 2002, when the state ordered Waste Management Inc. to shut the Live Oak landfill near Atlanta, trash companies have been scrambling to fill the void -- and to make piles of money in the process. City officials want to hire a company that would ship Atlanta's trash to outlying counties, where the stench of a landfill would plague somebody else's citizens.
Three Taliaferro County commissioners -- Hubert, Kendrick and Ware -- went the distance in an attempt to ensure their constituents won't be the unlucky ones. They headed to jail instead of signing documents that would grant Atlanta developer David Aldridge permission to build an 820-acre landfill in the poor, east Georgia county.
All Aldridge now needs to open the landfill is a state Environmental Protection Division permit, which may come by year's end. Hubert, Kendrick, Ware and others in Taliaferro County have started a legal fund to pay for the lawsuits they plan to file to stop the landfill.
Brooke Brandenburg, Natalie Foster, Colleen Kiernan and Kate Smolski
Beer. It's so delicious. And what better bait to lure environmentally conscious hipsters into the aging Sierra Club? Four environmentally conscious and (kinda) hip Sierra Club employees thought they'd do just that by starting gatherings at Teaspace, a hip little restaurant in hip Little Five Points.
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