Dancin' Outlaws Mobile DJ Services

07/27/2026

07/27/2026

Fortnite’s creator is winning a very different kind of battle: protecting tens of thousands of acres of American wilderness.

Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney has been quietly using his tech fortune to keep wild lands out of the hands of commercial developers. In a country where private individuals own about 60% of all land, efforts like this can make or break habitat health by preventing fragmentation and keeping ecosystems connected.

Since 2008, Sweeney has acquired over 50,000 acres of forests, mountains, and critical habitats, mostly in North Carolina. His strategy centers on ecological connectivity, buying key corridors that let wildlife migrate safely instead of picking up scattered, isolated parcels.

Working through a private holding company called 130 of Chatham, he frequently outbids real estate developers to secure land, then locks in permanent protections through conservation easements or donates the properties to state parks and land trusts. A conservation easement is a legal agreement that keeps land wild by restricting development forever, even if ownership changes.

His holdings include the 7,000-acre Box Creek Wilderness, home to more than 130 rare and endangered species. In 2021 he hit two historic milestones for private land gifts in the region, donating 7,500 acres of the Roan Highlands to the Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy in North Carolina and gifting the 7,300-acre Falkland Farms tract to the state of Virginia.

With land prices rising, Sweeney has shifted from buying new acreage to cementing legal protections on what he already owns. The result is a growing network of safe passage for wildlife across some of the East Coast’s most biodiverse landscapes, preserved for future generations.

What do you think about private conservation playing such a big role in protecting wild spaces?

07/25/2026

07/25/2026

Advance your Career with a ServSafe Sanitation Certification

07/24/2026

Debbie Solsman worked the cafeteria at Denver Place Elementary in Wilmington, Ohio, for 14 years. In February 2017, the Wilmington City School District fired her.

The reason, according to district documents, was failing to account for food sales at her cashier job and providing food without payment.

Solsman told reporters how it happened. When a student's lunch account ran out, the standard fallback was a cheese sandwich. If a kid told her they were still hungry, she would upgrade the meal or slip them extra food, sometimes asking first what they'd had for supper the night before.

When she didn't have the money on her to cover it, she wrote an IOU, dropped it in the cashier's drawer, and paid it off from her next paycheck.

She never denied it. "I'm the one that broke the rule, it's not the district," she said. She thought firing was harsh, but said she'd do the same thing again if given the chance.

The district said students are always given a complete meal regardless of account balance, and that it couldn't discuss an individual employee's termination. Parents weren't buying it, arguing a cheese sandwich isn't enough to get a kid through the day.

The district never reversed the firing. But once the story spread, Solsman didn't stay unemployed for long.

Two other schools called and offered her a job, as a lunch lady.