2024 Conservation Celebration Invite

Keynote Speaker: Jay Leutze

Jay Leutze will discuss conservation from our Appalachian backyard to the global effort to protect 30% of the earth's land and water by 2030. Trained as an attorney, he has become a leading voice for state and federal conservation funding for investment in public lands. He is the senior board advisor for Asheville, NC's Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy (SAHC), one of the nation's most established land trusts. He has served as chair of the land protection committee, directs their government relations program, and has been president of the board. He is the author of Stand Up that Mountain: The Battle to Save One Small Community in the Wilderness Along the Appalachian Trail (Simon & Schuster). In the tradition of A Civil Action, it's the compelling true story of a North Carolina outdoorsman who teams up with his Appalachian neighbors to save a treasured landscape from being destroyed. He is the national spokesman for the Land and Water Conservation Fund Coalition and has testified before Congress on the need for increased funding for public land conservation. He is frequently asked to be a guest lecturer on conservation. Since publication of Stand Up That Mountain he has lectured at 38 universities across the country, teaching courses in literature, environmental studies, environmental law and public policy. He recently appeared at the National Press Club in Washington DC. In 2012, he was awarded North Carolina's highest civilian honor, The Order of the Longleaf Pine, for his contribution to the conservation of land and water in his home state. He was the winner of the 2013 North Carolina Governor's Conservation Communicator of the Year Award and was named Outstanding Conservation Advocate by the Roosevelt-Ashe Society. Since 2007 he has been on the team leading the effort to pass and implement the Great American Outdoors Act (GAOA). In 2020 Leutze was invited to the White House for the GAOA signing ceremony and will discuss navigating a broken Congress and dysfunctional administration to get the bill across the finish line. Stand Up That Mountain has won numerous awards, including The Reed Environmental Writing Award from the Southern Environmental Law Center, and was named the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance Nonfiction Book of the Year. The American Bar Association honored the book at its Silver Gavel Awards dinner in July, 2013, citing it as "a work of art that has added to the public's understanding of the law."