We are here today because either we love Jane, or we love someone that loves Jane.
And I suppose that love sums up what Jane was all about.
Over the last few days, our family assembled a list of some of the qualities that might be used to describe Jane.
Perhaps you recognize some of them:
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Nature is not something
out there, apart from people.
It never was, and nowadays people have built and farmed and clearcut
so much that wildlife species from insects to birds are in trouble.
In south Georgia people may think that our trees make a lot of wildlife habitat.
Actually, most of those trees are planted pine plantations with
very limited undergrowth, and in town many yards are deserts of grass
plus exotic species that don’t support native birds.
Douglas Tallamy offers one solution:
turn yards into wildlife habitat by growing native species.
Since we are as always remodeling nature, we might as well do it
so as to feed the rest of nature and ourselves,
and by the way get flood prevention and possibly cleaner water as well,
oh, and fewer pesticides to poison ourselves.
Douglas Tallamy makes a clear and compelling case in
Bringing Nature Home: How You Can Sustain Wildlife with Native Plants
…it is not yet too late to save most of the plants and animals
that sustain the ecosystems on which we ourselves depend.
Second, restoring native plants to most human-dominated landscapes
is relatively easy to do.
Some of you may wonder why native species are so important?
Don’t we have more deer than we can shoot?
Maybe so, but we have far fewer birds of almost every species
than we did decades and only a few years ago.
Some may wonder: aren’t exotic species just as good as native ones,
if deer and birds can eat them?
Actually, no, because many exotic species are poisonous
to native wildlife, and because invasive exotics crowd out natives
and reduce species diversity.
From kudzu to
Japanese climbing fern, exotic invasives are bad for wildlife
and may also promote erosion and flooding by strangling native vegetation.
All plants are not created equal, particularly in their ability to support wildlife.
Most of our native plant-eaters are not able to eat alien plants,
and we are replacing native plants with alien species at an alarming rate,
especially in the suburban gardens on which our wildlife increasingly depends.
My central message is that unless we restore native plants to our
suburban ecosystems,
the future of biodiversity in the United States is dim.
Tallamy had an epiphany when he and his wife moved to 10 acres
in Pennsylvania in 2000:
Due to discussion on facebook with Rihard Sexton after
the previous post,
I dug around a bit,
and discovered that beautyberry (Callicarpa americana) is also known as
dwarf mulberry, French mulberry,
and Spanish mulberry, sow berry, and sour berry.
That last is especially a misnomer, because its berries are not sour,
they taste like flowers.
And it turns out that beautyberry was mentioned in books before 1800,
it was just mentioned as dwarf mulberry:
Further, William Bartram did mention it in his Travels of 1791, as
French mulberry.
Curiously, even though Google books does have Bartram’s book,
ngrams doesn’t seem to show French mulberry for that date,
but does show American mulberry.
Even more curious, William Bartram’s father, John Bartram,
corresponded with Linnaeus, the founder of modern
botanical terminology.
The currently most popular name is beautyberry, which turns out to
be related to the scientific genus name, Callicarpa: Greek kalli
means beautiful, and Karpos means fruit.
The plant has all sorts of uses:
The surprising thing is so few people have heard of Leon Neel.
Here’s a very interesting biography of this very influential
pioneer in southeastern forestry and agriculture, including
many interesting stories of south Georgia and north Florida
life and politics:
The Art of Managing Longleaf:
A Personal History of the Stoddard-Neel Approach,
by Leon Neel, with Paul S. Sutter and Albert G. Way.
Leon Neel was a atudent, apprentice, and successor of Herbert Stoddard,
who was originally hired by quail plantation owners around
Thomasville to figure out why their quail populations were
decreasing.
The answer included a need to thin and especially to burn
their longleaf pine tree forests.
Stoddard and Neel studied and practiced for almost a century
between them on how to preserve and increase the amount of standing
timber and species diversity while also selectively harvesting trees
to pay for the whole thing.
Their Stoddard-Neel Approach is written up in textbooks.
In this book we learn how it came about, and how it is basically
different from the clearcut-thin-thin-clearcut “efficient” timbering
cycle that is the current fad among pine tree growers in the southeast.
It starts back in the old days of Leon Neel’s youth when his daddy taught
him to hunt quail:
So you’ve read
Janisse Ray’s Ecology of a Cracker Childhood
and you want to know more.
Looking for Longleaf: The Fall and Rise of an American Forest,
by Lawrence S. Earley
The tallest and strongest of pine trees, longleaf made great sailing ship masts
,
tar for caulking ships, and of course saw timber.
How the early settlers cut down trees for houses and to clear land to farm.
Their hogs and cows running loose in the woods ate the young longleaf,
suppressing new trees for a hundred years.
Then professional forestry took over, trying to suppress the
fire that destroyed northern white pine forests, yet which
preserves southern longleaf pine forests.
The sad story of turpentine: we knew better, but we did it anyway.
The peculiar life cycle of a tree that starts out looking like
a clump of grass, and can stay that way for decades, yet promotes
and survives fire and can grow more than 100 feet tall and live for centuries.
The thousands of species of plants, animals, and fungi the forest protects,
many of them, like wiregrass, also adapted to fire.
How tuberculosis and quail led to new understandings of longleaf and fire,
and the people who discovered those things.
We do know how to grow these trees now, and lots of people are doing it:
for jobs, for sawtimber, for the beauty of the forest.
The other day somebody asked me to recommend some books
about longleaf forests, how they used to be, what happened to them,
what can be done now.
I was going to start by posting a short list, but each item was
turning into a review, so I’ll just post them one by one as reviews.
Ecology of a Cracker Childhood (The World As Home),
by Janisse Ray.
How dirt poor crackers and corporate greed destroyed most of the most diverse
ecosystem in North America; yet these same people are the tragic
heroes of the book.
Half autobiography, half ecology, this book will either get you with
Janisse’s “stunning voice” or you won’t get it.
If you’re from around here, you’ll hear the wind in the pines, feel the breeze, and see the summer tanagers yellow in the sun.
If you’re not, here’s your chance to meet a “heraldry of longleaf”
up close and personal.
“I will rise from my grave with the hunger of wildcat, wings of kestrel….”
See
Janisse read in Moultrie. “More precious than handfuls of money.”
See her wikipedia page
for a pretty good bio.
But read the book.
If nothing else, you’ll never think the same again about Amazon
deforestation once you realize we already did that to ourselves,
and in the south we live in the devastated remnants of what was
one of the most extensive forests on earth, with longleaf pine trees
100 feet tall and 500 years old, maintained by fire, protecting everything from the Lord God bird to the lowly Bachman’s sparrow, from the rattlesnake-eating indigo snake to the beetles that live in gopher tortoise burrows.
The forest can return,
because reforestation can pay.
Meanwhile, there are still places
where you can see how it used to be.
Janisse Ray had a lot to do with preserving Moody Forest, too,
but that’s another story.
-jsq
Janisse Ray
spoke and read from her books in Moultrie last night.
The place was packed with a wide variety of people:
Here’s her opening poem:
Janisse Ray plans
to speak in Moultrie and sign books.
The Georgia Center for the Book, with the support of the Georgia Humanities Council, is working with the Moultrie-Colquitt County Library System and the Moultrie Chapter of the Georgia Conservancy to present a free public lecture and book-signing by Ray on Tuesday, Jan. 26, at 7 p.m., in the library auditorium.
Ray was born in Baxley, Ga., and is an environmentalist activist, poet, a memoirist and the award-winning author of “Ecology of a Cracker Childhood.” This book, a memoir about growing up on a junkyard in the ruined longleaf pine ecosystem of the Southeast, was published by Milkweed Editions in 1999.
Why should you care?
Ray has won a Southeastern Booksellers Award 1999, an American Book Award 2000, the Southern Environmental Law Center 2000 Award for Outstanding Writing, and a Southern Book Critics Circle Award 2000. “Ecology of a Cracker Childhood” was a New York Times Notable Book and was chosen as the Book All Georgians Should Read.
As an organizer and activist, she works to create sustainable communities, local food systems, a stable global climate, intact ecosystems, clean rivers, life-enhancing economies, and participatory democracy. She is a founding board member of Altamaha Riverkeeper and is on the board of the Environmental Leadership Center of Warren Wilson College and Satilla Riverkeeper.
Are you tired of development trumps all?
Do you like trees and home-grown vegetables?
Come hear Janisse Ray!