A professor in the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Government for more than 50 years, Heath drafted most of North Carolina's environmental laws, including the 1974 Coastal Area Management Act, which limited development along the state's shoreline.

"He was involved in environmental law before anyone knew there was such a thing," says Willis Whichard, a former state Supreme Court judge who worked with Heath on the coast management act as a state representative. "I doubt that the state of North Carolina has ever gotten more for its money for an employee than they have with Milton."

Now semi-retired, the 80-year-old Heath says he was simply at the right place at the right time. He was the School of Government's environmental law expert when the school was providing most of the legislature's legal counsel and when the environmental movement found a foothold at the statehouse.

"I wound up being the only lawyer [serving the legislature's environmental committees]," he says, "and it turned out that this was the time when almost all of North Carolina's major environmental legislation got enacted. ... Can you imagine, in career terms, falling into a better piece of luck?"

When the act passed in 1974, North Carolina helped to set the bar for coastal protection in the United States.

"It opted for a different kind of development than the more intensive, right-up-to-the-water kind of development that you see in other places," says Bill Ross, secretary of the State Department of Environment and Natural Resources. "You notice a big difference between North Carolina's coastline and the way the coastline is managed or dealt with in places like Virginia Beach or Myrtle Beach."

The son of a UNC-CH economics professor, Heath has spent most of his life in Chapel Hill, except for a year at Phillips Exeter Academy, four years at Harvard, three years at Columbia and five more years between the governor's office in Albany, N.Y., and the Tennessee Valley Authority's legal division. Notably, Heath's favorite parts of Chapel Hill are downtown and the historic district where he lives, not the rolling green landscape.

For years, he enjoyed walks through town with his Labrador retriever Andy.

"He put the umbrella over the dog to keep the dog from getting wet," says his wife, Betty Sanders.

An avid tennis player since high school, he was ranked as high as seventh in the Southeast in his age bracket when he was in his 50s. He is also a sacred choral singer, a passion his son Frank, the owner of the Carrboro rock club Cat's Cradle, doesn't share.

"Frank likes music. He's not a singer. He's not a dancer," the proud father says. "I can occasionally get him to come to a major service at the Chapel of the Cross, but mostly he gets me to come to the Cat."

Cutting-edge coastline

Of all the bills Heath has authored, including a water-rights protection law in 1967 that is still in effect, Heath is most proud of the coastal management act because, in his view, the coast is North Carolina's greatest treasure. He and his wife continue to enjoy summer trips to the pet-friendly Atlantis Lodge in Pine Knoll Shores, a motel designed by a Chapel Hill architect with wildlife habitat throughout the grounds and ocean views from every room.

And they're not the only ones enjoying the fruits of his labor.

The Surfrider Foundation, which annually assesses beaches from coast to coast, scores North Carolina tops among its Southeast and Mid-Atlantic neighbors for public beach access and behind only Virginia for water quality.

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