Madison County

You can learn more about that in our show notes or at mountaintrue.org. And I can attest that it only takes a few minutes of your time.

Josh is a native of Madison County and a graduate of UNC Asheville.

At Mountain True, he monitors logging and development issues on public lands and provides site-specific scientific information to promote ecological restoration and oppose ecologically damaging management.

In this episode, Josh explains why he opposes repealing the roadless rule and walks us through some of the science around wildfire.

We talk about the connection between roads and wildfire, as well as the challenges of building roads in undeveloped forests.

We also discuss what Josh sees as a larger debate over the role of the Forest Service.

Josh also discusses the National Park Service's hazardous fuel debris removal project along the Blue Ridge Parkway, plans for the Craggy Mountain National Scenic Area, what a healthy southern Appalachian forest actually looks like, and how growing up in Madison County helped shape his relationship with these mountains.

But our conversation begins with the roadless rule and why Josh believes it's worth protecting.

Some questions remain.

In the summer of 1902, a farmer named James Rice was shot and killed in a field in the Middle Fork section of Madison County.

Within days, the story spread far beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Newspapers from North Carolina to Virginia, West Virginia, Tennessee, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, and beyond followed every development.

It was not a famous outlaw tale.

It began with people who knew one another, families whose lives had become tangled long before the shooting.

And when the violence came, it became one of the most widely reported criminal cases ever to emerge for Madison County.

The events unfolded in June of 1902 near the Middle Forks of Little Ivy in what is now Madison County.

Susie Gott-Segre is a...

Chef, fiddler, forager from Madison County, North Carolina, also in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

She's a certified culinary professional and certified specialist of wine who holds a diploma in gastronomy and taste from Cordon Bleu.

She has authored four books on Appalachian cooking, culture, growing up there, truffles, and foraging.