Jim Stokes’ Second Act
New Georgia Conservancy president focuses on state’s land, water issues

By Terrell Johnson

 When his 32-year career as an environmental attorney with Alston & Bird drew to a close earlier this year, Jim Stokes could have retired quietly into the sunset. That wasn’t in the cards, however, for a man for whom conservation and the environment have been a lifelong interest.

“I’m working even more hours now,” said Stokes, who in May became president of the Georgia Conservancy, considered perhaps the state’s most influential environmental organization. “It’s different in a nonprofit – there obviously are less resources, and more things to try to accomplish. But I like it, it’s a terrific cause.”

Taking over from John Sibley, who had headed the Conservancy since 1998, Stokes assumed the leadership of the organization at a pivotal moment for the state, which is expected to double in population over the next 25 years, with 2.5 million new residents in metro Atlanta alone by 2030.

“If you look at it statewide, the two most important issues are growth and water,” said Stokes. “And the growth issue is not just the metropolitan Atlanta area – it’s also along the coast, and in the northeast Georgia mountains.”

A New Jersey native who spent part of his early childhood years growing up in Atlanta, the 61-year-old Davidson College and Yale Law School graduate has been involved in environmental issues in one way or another since the late 1960s, when a class he took on environmental law at Yale sparked his interest and gave him the first idea of how he might pursue his law career.

When he moved to Atlanta to take a job with Alston & Bird in 1972 – after working for three years in Washington, D.C., in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ general counsel’s office – Stokes knew his interest lay in environmental law, but the firm had no such practice group.

Over the next few years, he and a few of his colleagues slowly and patiently built the firm’s environmental practice. Today, it includes more than 20 full-time attorneys and claims notable projects such as the cleanup of the former Atlantic Steel mill, which has been developed into what is now Atlantic Station.

Projects such as that one – mixed-use developments that encourage residents to live, work and play INtown – are the model the city will need to increasingly adopt in order to handled its predicted growth over the next couple of decades, Stokes said.

“We’ve got to plan to try to have more density in corridors in centers, so we can serve that with transit,” he added. “We’ve found that when there are more choices of places to live, people are interested in choices – we always assumed everybody wanted to [live] one way, but when you look around in Midtown, people are happy to have the choice and will accept higher density and smaller living space.”

That’s a positive sign, he adds, because the challenges the metro area and the state face with land and water conservation are indeed daunting. “Even though we get a lot of rain in Georgia, most of the streams in the Piedmont [region] are not big,” he said. “Atlanta is located on the smallest primary water supply [the Chattahoochee River] of any major city in the country.

“Where the real challenge comes is with drought, or with the tremendous growth we’re experiencing,” he added. “So we’ve simply got to plan – we have to plan for our water and we have to plan for our growth.”

The Conservancy has made efforts toward such plans, Stokes said, with programs like its Mothers and Others for Clean Air, a grassroots effort to promote better air quality in metro Atlanta. The organization also was instrumental in helping pass this year’s Georgia Land Conservation Act, signed by Gov. Sonny Perdue in April, that sets aside $100 million to purchase and preserve green space and sensitive lands statewide.  

Moves like that, Stokes adds, will help set the stage for the Conservancy’s next critical challenge, protecting coastal areas from the threat of overdevelopment.

“On the coast, development is a real concern – there’s no real plan for that,” he said, adding that today the state’s coastal areas remain remarkably well-preserved, having been in the hands of governmental or environmental groups for many years.

“But when you step back ... in the marsh hammocks, the back barrier islands, there’s much more pressure to develop,” he added. “There’s a real concern about developing right on the interface of the marsh and the upland, as opposed to stepping back and preserving much more of a buffer.”

Where the organization hopes to help Georgians recognize the need to protect the environment, Stokes said, is by showing the parallel between a healthy environment and healthy living. “If people think about the impact that a poor quality environment has on their children and grandchildren, then people understand in their own terms how important it is to keep clean air, to keep clean water.”

To attract more attention from the public, the Georgia Conservancy launched a new membership campaign in June. This effort will enable the organization to grow efforts to make sure that Georgians have healthy air, clean water, unspoiled wild places, and community green space now and in the future. In addition to magazine and newspaper ads, the campaign includes television and radio spots.

More people, Stokes said, are feeling the impact of issues such as erosion and sediment pollution in their everyday lives. “They’re seeing the rivers run Georgia clay red, so I think it’s becoming easier,” he says. “It’s a matter of turning that general sort of support for protection of the environment, into energizing that support into active involvement, and that’s a significant challenge.”