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REGIONAL UPDATES
Interview with Longleaf Partnership Council Chair
Easement monitoring. Bluff Plantation, Berkeley County, South Carolina.
Colette DeGarady, The Nature Conservancy By America’s Longleaf Restoration Initiative Communications Team
Earlier this year, The America’s Longleaf Restoration Initiative (ALRI) welcomed Colette DeGarady as the 2022 Chair of the Longleaf Partnership Council. Colette is the Longleaf Pine Whole System Director for The Nature Conservancy (TNC), overseeing a regional conservation program that provides leadership and support for longleaf pine restoration work occurring across the 9-state historic range. The ALRI Communications Team recently caught up with Colette to discuss her background and thoughts on longleaf pine.
From a personal perspective, what has been your most rewarding experience so far? During my career, I’ve worked with several college students and interns who volunteered with me to learn what my job was all about and gain experience in the environmental career field. I remember being that inexperienced kid who had no idea what job to pursue or how to interview. I appreciated being able to share my story and career insights with them. Now it’s fun to see many of them on Facebook or elsewhere. Two of these interns have fulltime careers at TNC; one opened an organic farm, another opened a local climbing gym, and another works for a local environmental consulting firm.
What drew you to working longleaf? When I graduated from undergrad at Clemson, my first job was working on TNC’s Sandy Island preserve in SC, where I helped monitor and band Red-cockaded Woodpeckers. I fell in love with the island and didn’t mind going to sleep each night sticky with sap from climbing trees and checking cavities. Sandy Island had that feel of being mysterious and isolated, but with open sweeping mature longleaf trees as far as you could see. It’s still one of my favorite places 25 years later.
What is the greatest challenge facing longleaf forests in the Southeast? The immense fragmentation of our current longleaf forests is pretty sad when we think about what once covered the Southeast. Now there are so many different land-use interests competing for forests as a whole. We need housing to live in, cities to work, farms for food, and space for wind and solar [ 28 ]
