Looking for Longleaf: The Fall and Rise of an American Forest - Softcover

Earley, Lawrence S.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807856991 ISBN 13: 9780807856994

Verlag: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006

Inhaltsangabe

Covering 92 million acres from Virginia to Texas, the longleaf pine ecosystem was, in its prime, one of the most extensive and biologically diverse ecosystems in North America. Today these magnificent forests have declined to a fraction of their original extent, threatening such species as the gopher tortoise, the red-cockaded woodpecker, and the Venus fly-trap. Conservationists have proclaimed longleaf restoration a major goal, but has it come too late? In Looking for Longleaf, Lawrence S. Earley explores the history of these forests and the astonishing biodiversity of the longleaf ecosystem, drawing on extensive research and telling the story through first-person travel accounts and interviews with foresters, ecologists, biologists, botanists, and landowners. For centuries, these vast grass-covered forests provided pasture for large cattle herds, in addition to serving as the world’s greatest source of naval stores. They sustained the exploitative turpentine and lumber industries until nearly all of the virgin longleaf had vanished. Looking for Longleaf demonstrates how, in the twentieth century, forest managers and ecologists struggled to understand the special demands of longleaf and to halt its overall decline. The compelling story Earley tells here offers hope that with continued human commitment, the longleaf pine might not just survive, but once again thrive.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

LAWRENCE S. EARLEY, former editor of Wildlife in North Carolina magazine, is a writer and photographer living in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

Longleaf pine once flourished across the South in park-like forests of astonishing beauty and diversity--the most extensive forest ecosystem in North America. Much of the region's history is connected to these trees, which were exploited for agriculture, pasturage, timber, and naval stores. Today longleaf pine forests are recognized as one of the world's most endangered ecosystems. This book blends human and natural history to reveal the compelling story of these magnificent trees and also addresses current conservation and restoration efforts.

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Looking for Longleaf

The Fall and Rise of an American ForestBy Lawrence S. Earley

University of North Carolina Press

Copyright © 2006 Lawrence S. Earley
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780807856994

Chapter One

What Bartram Saw

A magnificent grove of stately pines, succeeding to the expansive wild plains we had a long time traversed, had a pleasant effect, rousing the faculties of the mind, awakening the imagination by its sublimity, and arresting every active, inquisitive idea, by the variety of the scenery. -William Bartram, Travels (1791)

A longleaf pine forest on a bright day is a light and sound show. There's the verdant ground cover, mostly grasses that sway to each hint of breeze. The forest is open with widely scattered trees, and the early morning sun casts angled shadows from the pine trunks; by midday each tree will be standing in its own small pool of shadow. Here and there, dense groups of young pine saplings gather and the tufts of infant pines are nearly indistinguishable from the wiregrass. Above, the sky burns azure. The sound emanates from the treetops, a low and constant tone like the surf crash of a distant sea. Even on a perfectly still day you may hear this roar in the distance, as if somewhere an individual tree was gathering and amplifying some ambient sound. The great eighteenth-century explorer William Bartram described it as "the solemn symphony of the steady Western breezes, playing incessantly, rising and falling through the thick and wavy foliage."

On a sunny morning in April, I've come to the 200-acre Wade Tract Preserve near Thomasville, Georgia, to walk through an old-growth longleaf pine forest. Old-growth longleaf pine is scattered in small pieces throughout the Southeast, unlike the Pacific Northwest where relatively large tracts of old-growth Douglas fir still exist. The Wade Tract is one of these remnant longleaf forests. It's owned by the Arcadia Plantation and managed, through a conservation easement, by Tall Timbers Research Station just down the road. This rolling country is known as the Red Hills region, where erosion over the eons has carved an originally flat plain into pleasant hills and valleys.

Some of the older longleaf pines have a distinct lean to them, and their tops have flattened with the loss of branches. Longleaf can grow to a ripe old age, about 400 to 500 years. The heights of the trees vary from 50 or 60 feet high in the deepest sands of the Carolina Sandhills to 110 feet or taller in richer soils. Their girth is modest-anything larger than 3 feet in diameter at breast height is really large; many old-growth trees had diameters of less than 2 feet measured at breast height. Longleaf is a beautiful tree, with lower branches that are undulant and graceful and that carry large cones. Its long needles distinguish it among all other pines and give it its name.

On this spring day, the red-headed woodpeckers are in frenzied motion, darting after each other among the pines and drumming incessantly on dead trees. They are mating and establishing territories, displaying the broad, black and white patterns of their wings, their large black bodies and crimson heads.

Grass is the predominant type of plant in this forest. There are possibly dozens of species growing here, although the most common is wiregrass (Aristida stricta). It grows green in spring and summer and turns a vivid gold in fall and winter, in all seasons rippling and bending in the wind. A wildfire ran through the forest three weeks ago, blackening some of the tree trunks and turning their needles a copper color. Yet the wiregrass has already greened out and grown two or three feet high, and the landscape looks scrubbed and fresh.

Across the rolling, parklike landscape of randomly spaced trees the open vista quickly thickens with distant trees. If I ambled off this path and through the wiregrass, past a drain that has thickened with a few shrubby oaks and up the sun-dappled hillside beyond, I'd see another vista just like the last. And then another.

I'm thinking: Perhaps this is what Bartram saw.

Not John Bartram, the famous Pennsylvania botanist to the King of England, friend of Benjamin Franklin, explorer and naturalist, but his son, William. Both Bartrams explored the southeastern United States in the late eighteenth century and wrote about their encounters with the longleaf pine forests. You can find John Bartram's account of their trip in a good research library, although it might prove skimpy reading. "Fine warm morning. Birds singing, fish jumping, and turkies gobbling," he said about one particularly fine day. John's friends and supporters shook their heads over his sketchy travel accounts. One noted that "he did not care to write down his numerous and useful observations.... He is rather backward in writing down what he knows."

Not so William. The younger Bartram accompanied his father on his first journey to the Southeast concluding in 1766 and then, alone this time, covered almost the same itinerary beginning about seven years later. He had been commissioned by London physician and fellow Quaker, Dr. John Fothergill, to collect botanical specimens and make botanical drawings of his travels. From Pennsylvania, he sailed to Charleston and explored the region around Savannah, pushing up the Savannah River to Augusta before continuing south to Florida. He negotiated the St. Johns River by canoe, accompanied an expedition of Indian traders west across Florida, pressed into northern Georgia and the Carolina highlands in Cherokee country, and then made his final trip west to the Mississippi River. Intended to take two years, William's travels actually lasted five (1773-77). Throughout that time he was rarely out of sight of longleaf pine.

William Bartram's account of his trip, originally entitled Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, the Cherokee Country, the Extensive Territories of the Muscogulges, or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Chactaws, published in 1791, provides one of the earliest and most detailed descriptions of the virgin longleaf pine forests, although his literary style takes a while to get used to it. He was a practitioner of the eighteenth-century literary school in which a noun without an adjective is like a man without his pants. Often he seems to overwhelm the scene he's describing with the artificial flowers of his prose: "At cool eve's approach, the sweet enchanting melody of the feathered songsters gradually cease, and they betake themselves to their leafy coverts for security and repose." His father might have said, had he been tempted to say anything at all about such matters, "The birds stopped singing."

Bartram was thirty-nine years old when he began his trip and fifty-two when the book was published, yet Travels has the feel of a young man's book, a young man who has lately slipped the leash of his father's influence and expectations. He writes emotionally about the places he sees, and none of the scenes he witnessed stirred more joy and exuberance in his writing than the pine-covered landscape of northern Florida. On one occasion, he describes his journey in the company of Indian traders from the St. Johns River to the great Indian town of Cuscowilla, near the Alachua Savanna, today known as Payne's Prairie, near Gainesville:

For the first four or five miles we travelled westward, over a perfectly level plain, which appeared before and on each side of us, as a charming green meadow, thinly planted with low spreading Pine trees (P. palustris). The upper stratum of the earth is a fine white...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: The University of North Carolina Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2006
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0807856991
• ISBN 13: 9780807856994
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 334
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland