The Roaring River Chapter draws members from Putnam, Jackson, and Overton counties on the Highland Rim of the Cumberland Plateau.  We meet monthly on the third Monday at 7:00 p.m., usually at the Putnam County Library in the upstairs meeting room.  (Traditionally our December gathering is a fund-raising holiday party rather than a meeting.)

Most meetings have a guest speaker or other program on a local or state environmental issue.  We have learned about modern, environmentally friendly systems for handling stormwater and reducing runoff and flooding, how to evaluate the claims that more roads are needed, how the state legislature works, the impacts of reducing TennCare, the problems of voting suppression, the local effects of climate change and ways to reduce its impacts, how the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation permitting processes work, how citizens can contest permits which would allow our wetlands and waterways to be polluted and destroyed, and how to affect TDOT’s Long Range Plans.

We focus on improving quality of life in order to make safer, healthier, and more sustainable communities.  We also help local communities fend off environmental threats.  Letters to the editor, opinion pieces, radio interviews, and public testimony before local governing bodies and boards are all things we have learned how to do and teach others.

In 2007 and 2008, we stopped a four-lane, divided by-pass around Cookeville that TDOT found was wasteful and unnecessary and that actually threatened to reduce trade at local businesses.  We joined in a fight to stop a sand quarry north of Monterey on Highway 62.  Now it looks as if the permits for this quarry will not be used.  Earlier we worked with Monterey residents on sewer overflows and repair of the city storm and sanitary sewer system, a project that continues to this day.  One of our members, an attorney, led a successful challenge to an attempt to expand the Putnam-White airport by filling a wetland.

We have joined others in asking the Cookeville City Council to hire a full time urban forester and to create a greenway along Pigeon Roost Creek.  We fought a plan which would have filled a sinkhole and cave opening to make room for a new consumer electronics store.  We also opposed a plan which would have filled important slope wetlands to make a pad for still another restaurant on Interstate Drive.

Our chapter joins in all of SOCM’s statewide events such as the Walk-a-thon and the annual picnic. Chapter members participate in SOCM visits to Nashville to lobby the legislature on issues such as clear cutting, aerial chemical spraying, and toxic waste disposal.  These activities are virtually unregulated in Tennessee, and only our arguments to legislators can change this. 

We have many cooperative relationships, including one with the Caney Fork Watershed Association.  We usually share a table at TTU’s Windows on the World with the Sierra Club and the City Stormwater Program.  We work closely with the Upper Cumberland Chapter of the Sierra Club.  Recent projects include a Rain Barrel Festival with proceeds to be used for water protection education at Dogwood Park. The chapter has advocated before the City Council for them to join ICLEI, Local Governments for Sustainability, and is doing a City Green House Gases Emission Inventory as the baseline for a city climate change plan which would put the Recovery Act funds to their most effective use.

If you want to be in the know on environmental issues, please join us.  You can email our chapter’s newsletter editor Brian Paddock at bpaddock@twlakes.net or call him at (931) 268-2938.