Mississippi
With help from GreenTrees, Mississippi business visionary embraces new role as environmental steward in the Delta
Jim Ingram has experienced plenty of business success. The founder of Ingram Consulting LLC has supervised the leasing of approximately 11 million square feet of office properties in the Southeast and Southwest. In his decade as chief investment officer of Hertz Investment Group in Jackson, Mississippi, he led the acquisition of 31 office properties, totaling $1.7 billion in investment. Prior to that, he spent 23 years at Parkway Properties, where he bought and sold more than 130 office properties valued at approximately $4 billion.
But aside from his business acumen, Ingram has a palpable love for the natural world and is taking actions on behalf of our common future. He owns 760 acres near the tiny hamlet of Satartia, Mississippi (population: 41 as of 2020), about 45 miles north of Madison on the banks of the Yazoo River. Of this, he counts 120 acres as “virgin timber” hardwoods and 640 acres under contract with the USDA’s Wetland Reserve Easements (WRE) program, which provides a contractual opportunity for private landowners to rehabilitate their low-lying landscapes to provide habitats for migratory waterfowl and other wetland wildlife. The program is also designed to improve water quality, reduce flooding, recharge groundwater and provide educational and scientific opportunities.
Upon purchase, Ingram’s new property was already under contract with GreenTrees, but he didn’t know what that might mean for his future land use. Steve Burgess, a GreenTrees forester since 2012 after a 35-year career with the Mississippi Forestry Commission, was able to give insight into what Ingram could achieve by simply letting his trees grow.
“Steve called one day and said that GreenTrees wanted to replant hardwoods all around my property – for free,” Ingram recalled. “I said, ‘Really? Let me get this straight. I’m going to get paid to do a good thing for the environment?.’”
Ingram said Burgess provided “fabulous” satellite imagery of his property, detailing where replanting in hardwoods could reduce flood damage. That was a big deal, since flooding is a perpetual threat in the Mississippi Delta. Many in the region still remember the events of February 2022, when a carbon pipeline ruptured due to heavy rains and shifting subsoil, causing dozens of Satartia residents to become ill and evacuate.
Ingram felt that by growing trees on his land, he was making a long-term investment for himself and the planet by doing his part to mitigate flooding and store more pollutive carbon dioxide every year. He also wanted the property to reflect his background as a hunter by becoming a wilderness of healthy forests, forming a vibrant, native ecology for native wildlife. GreenTrees fits the bill perfectly.
“I’m getting paid to do a good thing for the environment,” he said. “Carbon capture isn’t something that a lot of people know about or understand yet, but how can you go wrong? And, everyone I’ve worked with at GreenTrees has been wonderful. This really looks like the wave of the future.”
Ingram especially prefers Nuttall oaks, a relative of the pin and red oak that thrives in the floodplains and bottomlands of the Delta region, for his GreenTrees replanting. Nuttalls are a tough species of hardwood that latch on to the unsteady soils of a wetland environment, stabilizing the soil while providing copious amounts of acorn mast for native wildlife.
Currently, GreenTrees is replanting most of the 640 acres in the WRE program, but landowners should know that not all of one’s property must be enrolled in replanted hardwood forest to qualify for WRE or GreenTrees participation, as other environmentally friendly land uses are welcome.
“It’s the new WRE timber, the growing hardwoods now at 10 to 15 feet tall, that GreenTrees is directly involved with,” Ingram said. “Older oaky woodlands ultimately store more carbon, but they sequester it much more slowly than the younger, carefully managed forests that GreenTrees works with.”
Ingram has also carefully set aside 70 to 80 acres for wildlife food plots for corn, Japanese millet, wheat, and rye. While the region’s perennial struggle with river flooding and threats from rooting feral hogs has reduced the numbers of ground-nesting turkeys and quails on Ingram’s land, Ducks Unlimited has provided eight water control structures on his property through DU’s “wetlands and flood attenuation” program, which he hopes will provide more durability for a wetlands habitat. A low-lying 80-acre portion of his property is flooded before duck season through the end of March, providing excellent waterfowl habitat and hunting opportunities.
All of this means that Ingram is taking steps to put his Mississippi land in the best position to be a quality natural resource for decades to come and “a family property for life.”
MISSISSIPPI (WKRG) — It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas on the Gulf Coast and that means Santa Claus will be heading to town for multiple parades around the area.
WKRG has compiled a list of Christmas parades coming to Southeast Mississippi.
Christmas on the Water — Biloxi
- Dec. 7
- 6 p.m.
- Begins at Biloxi Lighthouse and will go past the Golden Nugget
Lucedale Christmas Parade
GULFPORT, Miss. (WLOX) – The Mississippi Aquarium in Gulfport is spreading holiday cheer with a new event, ‘’A Magical Mississippi Christmas.’
The aquarium held a preview Tuesday night.
‘A Magical Mississippi Christmas’ includes a special dolphin presentation, diving elves, and photos with Santa.
The event also includes “A Penguin’s Christmas Wish,” which is a projection map show that follows a penguin through Christmas adventures across Mississippi.
“It’s a really fun event and it’s the first time we really opened up the aquarium at night for the general public, so it’s a chance to come in and see what it’s like in the evening because it’s really spectacular and really beautiful,” said Kurt Allen, Mississippi Aquarium President and CEO.
‘A Magical Mississippi Christmas’ runs from November 29 to December 31.
It will not be open on December 11th, December 24th, and December 25th.
Tickets can be purchased online or at the gate.
The event is made possible by the city of Gulfport and Coca-Cola Bottling Company.
See a spelling or grammar error in this story? Report it to our team HERE.
Copyright 2024 WLOX. All rights reserved.
Mississippi
Mississippi asks for execution date of man convicted in 1993 killing, lawyers plan to appeal case to SCOTUS
Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch, a Republican, is seeking an execution date for a convicted killer who has been on death row for 30 years, but his lawyer argues that the request is premature since the man plans to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Charles Ray Crawford, 58, was sentenced to death in connection with the 1993 kidnapping and killing of 20-year-old community college student Kristy Ray, according to The Associated Press.
During his 1994 trial, jurors pointed to a past rape conviction as an aggravating circumstance when they issued Crawford’s sentence, but his attorneys said Monday that they are appealing that conviction to the Supreme Court after a lower court ruled against them last week.
Crawford was arrested the day after Ray was kidnapped from her parents’ home and stabbed to death in Tippah County. Crawford told officers he had blacked out and did not remember killing her.
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Mississippi death row inmate Charles Ray Crawford, who was convicted and sentenced to death in 1994 in the 1993 kidnapping and killing of a community college student, 20-year-old Kristy Ray. (Mississippi Department of Corrections via AP)
He was arrested just days before his scheduled trial on a charge of assaulting another woman by hitting her over the head with a hammer.
The trial for the assault charge was delayed several months before he was convicted. In a separate trial, Crawford was found guilty in the rape of a 17-year-old girl who was friends with the victim of the hammer attack. The victims were at the same place during the attacks.
Crawford said he also blacked out during those incidents and did not remember committing the hammer assault or the rape.
During the sentencing portion of Crawford’s capital murder trial in Ray’s death, jurors found the rape conviction to be an “aggravating circumstance” and gave him the death sentence, according to court records.
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During the sentencing portion of Crawford’s capital murder trial, jurors found his prior rape conviction to be an “aggravating circumstance” and gave him the death sentence. (iStock)
In his latest federal appeal of the rape case, Crawford claimed his previous lawyers provided unconstitutionally ineffective assistance for an insanity defense. He received a mental evaluation at the state hospital, but the trial judge repeatedly refused to allow a psychiatrist or other mental health professional outside the state’s expert to help in Crawford’s defense, court records show.
On Friday, a majority of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected Crawford’s appeal.
But the dissenting judges wrote that he received an “inadequately prepared and presented insanity defense” and that “it took years for a qualified physician to conduct a full evaluation of Crawford.” The dissenting judges quoted Dr. Siddhartha Nadkarni, a neurologist who examined Crawford.
“Charles was laboring under such a defect of reason from his seizure disorder that he did not understand the nature and quality of his acts at the time of the crime,” Nadkarni wrote. “He is a severely brain-injured man (corroborated both by history and his neurological examination) who was essentially not present in any useful sense due to epileptic fits at the time of the crime.”
Photo shows the gurney of an execution chamber. (AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki, File)
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Crawford’s case has already been appealed multiple times using various arguments, which is common in death penalty cases.
Hours after the federal appeals court denied Crawford’s latest appeal, Fitch filed documents urging the state Supreme Court to set a date for Crawford’s execution by lethal injection, claiming that “he has exhausted all state and federal remedies.”
However, the attorneys representing Crawford in the Mississippi Office of Post-Conviction Counsel filed documents on Monday stating that they plan to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the appeals court’s ruling.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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