Green in Orange Shoals: when you build with nature in mind, more than just animals move in - Earthkeepers - in Canton, Georgia

American Forests, Summer, 2003 by Geoff Williams

You know the drill: Construction crews move in; animals move out. Bulldozers flatten old oaks to make way for a subdivison of matching houses and manicured lawns. The name? Something woodsy like The Oaks.

Enter Orange Shoals and developer Chaunkee Venable, one of a growing number of businessmen who see that keeping green in their building adds green to their business.

Orange Shoals, in the town of Canton, Georgia, a little northeast of Atlanta, ls named for the land's wild orange trees and the shoals, earth flattened out by gurgling waterfalls that are in the creeks and streams. Those shoals and orange trees still remain in abundance--as do thousands of oaks, sweetgum, maple, poplar, redcedar and pine. They coexist in an environment of affluent homes with backyard fences and well-kept gardens.

Venable spent seven years traipsing 400 acres, mapping out a community where he could build houses, but in a way that wouldn't displace the animals that lived there first. His experiment was so successful that the neighborhood has been certified as a wildlife sanctuary by the Atlanta Audubon Society.

"People said I was crazy," Venable says. "But I set out to build a prototype designed with as much sensitivity to the land as possible, and I was hoping to influence development in the area."

Venable was a farmer in a rural countryside that kept getting smaller as the Atlanta area kept getting bigger. He sold his farm, on the condition that the developers incorporate his suggestions for protecting the land that he loved. That didn't happen.

Recalling the memory, Venable says, "I was furious." He becomes silent, his eyebrows lowering, hunkered down in a booth at Earl's Corner Cafe, an old-fashioned diner just half a mile up from Orange Shoals. But Venable no longer holds ill will.

"They were just doing what's been done for generations," he explains. "For some heretic like me to come in and tell them how to build a neighborhood-what did I know? So I realized the only way to speak with authority was to build some credibility."

And build a neighborhood. With the money he had made, Venable bought 400 acres from a timber company and began tramping up and down the hillsides, deciding where each lot should go. Much of the forest had been stripped clean, "but they left these great buffers with old-growth trees," Venable says. Enough trees so that beyond each house's average one-acre backyard is a second backyard of 100 acres, with hiking trails that go into a forest inhabited by raccoons, foxes, and rabbits.

Venable marked some trees as untouchable and hired environmental experts to consult, build things like birdhouses and bat houses, and put up deer feeders. "We had nine deer before we moved everybody in here," says Venable, "and we still have them. One lot was even adjusted in order to not disturb the nest of a blue heron.

As Venable, now a resident of Orange Shoals, and other developers have shown, being green can make green. The homes are "selling 15 percent faster than comparable houses when [homeowners] resell," says Venable, who insists the extra money he spent on things like environmental consulting was negligible to his bottom line.

Ultimately, Venable wants to bring his neighborhood to your neighborhood. He's in the early stages of forming Global Neighbors, a nonprofit that will educate developers on building subdivisions that can also comfortably house the environment. "The important thing is that no matter what, you leave the water alone," insists Venable. "You don't pipe it unless you absolutely have to. If you could find the land, this design would work in Manhattan."

Geoff Williams writes from Loveland, Ohio.