Sustainable Neighborhoods: How Athens Land Trust Combines Conservation and Community

04/01/25 • 46 min

Emmanuel Stone was raised to love good food: his mother, a restaurant owner, inspired him to teach culinary arts, learn about agriculture, and emphasize the importance of whole foods. This led him to Athens Land Trust: an organization that simultaneously encourages conservation and community in Athens, GA where UGA is located.
Stone serves as the Strategic Partnerships Director for ALT. From his office at Williams Farm, a space where ALT houses their offices as well as a community garden, sustainable farming classes for both youth and adults, and counseling for homebuyers, he explained the model ALT uses to simultaneously provide affordable housing, educational resources, and whole foods to the Athens community.
"We see these things all as connected," he said. "The Trust tries to do many things, but the main thread connecting all these areas of work is that we see how community development takes many shapes."
Whether you're interested in sustainable communities, agriculture, buying a house, or just hearing us chat about food- this episode is for you!
Links:

Learn more about Athens Land Trust here: https://athenslandtrust.org/
Emmanuel Stone Bio: https://athenslandtrust.org/staff_member/emmanuel-stone/
ALT Workshops and Classes: https://athenslandtrust.org/classes-events/
Upcountry Oyster Roast: https://athenslandtrust.org/classes-events/oyster-roast/

Previous Episode

It's All Connected: A Framework for Intertwined Infrastructure Systems

This month's guest is someone close to home for our team- meet Alysha's PhD student, Negin Shamsi! Negin gives an overview of her first first-author publication, titled, "Interdependency classification: a framework for infrastructure resilience."
Shamsi's research focus is infrastructure and urban resilience. Infrastructure managers collaborate across engineering, urban planning, emergency response, policy making and more. The goal of Shamsi's research, including the new paper, is to better prepare all of these fields for disturbances from hurricanes to cyber attacks.
"These systems do not function in isolation, they are interdependent and if one system fails, it will have effects on other systems as well," she said. "When we talk about interdependencies, especially in the past, people think about vulnerabilities, cascading failures- something negative. But recently, there has been a changing perspective: we can look at them as an opportunity for collaboration and innovation."

Check out the new paper here: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2634-4505/adac89/pdf

Negin's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/negin-shamsi-b6736b160/

Next Episode

The Nation's Heartbeat: Engineering, History, and the Mississippi River

The Mississippi River Basin covers over a million square miles across the southeast and midwest US. Despite growing up far away in the northeast US, Boyce Upholt thinks about the nation's largest waterway more than most: he's the author of "The Great River: The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi." The book began nearly eight years earlier with a paddling trip, a sunken steamboat, and love-at-first-sight for the iconic southern river.
Upholt speaks to our hosts Alysha and Todd about his intertwining passions for history and nature, and why this work centers on "the Great River." The book covers how humans have thought about, related to, and altered the region over centuries, and how the river changes to meet us in new ways.
"We know it's out there, this sort of heart beating in the middle of America, but most Americans don't know what it looks like."
Boyce's Haiku (The Edgelands Wander Haiku):
Shopping cart half-sunk
Into the crust-dried batture mud
Nothing lasts too long
Links:
Check out the book: https://www.boyceupholt.com/
Southlands Magazine, a new project by Boyce Upholt, is launching later this year: https://www.boyceupholt.com/southlands