Tag Archives: Longleaf

Looking for Longleaf

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.

Ecology of a Cracker Childhood

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

Candling Longleaf

In case you wondered why the growing bud on a longleaf pine is called a candle:

Candle

This nine foot loblolly is about 3 years old, as you can see since John S. Quarterman can reach 8 feet high and it’s a foot higher than that: Continue reading →

Divide and Diminish, or Preserve and Survive?

Eagle1 Olivia Judson writes about Divide and Diminish:
A different process goes on when an island forms by splintering. Here, the ecosystem is pre-existing: the island is created with a set of residents already in place. But it is now too small to support them all.

What happens next is a kind of unraveling, a fraying, a disassembling such that the ecosystem becomes simpler, so as to fit the space that is now available. On those recently-created islands of Indonesia, for example, the smallest islands are home to many fewer species than the largest islands. And, as you’d expect, you don’t find big animals on the smallest islands either.

When we humans burn tracts of forest, or make islands in some similar way, the immediate impacts depend on a suite of factors, including how many islands there are, how big they are, and how close they are together. It also matters what is between them. Fields may be more hospitable to wildlife than roads or water; under some circumstances, life forms may be able to flit from one fragment to another, and the “island” nature of the fragments will be reduced. Perhaps we can use such patterns to shape how we use land, to try and minimize the impact we have.

Perhaps.

She’s not talking about prescribed forest burns, which are actually necessary for longleaf pine forest ecology. She’s talking about burns that destroy forests.

The once-mighty longleaf pine ecology that spread from eastern Virginia to east Texas now only exists in tiny islands separated by cities, fields, and roads. Maybe we should preserve the few patches that are left. This isn’t just about plants and animals, you know, it’s also about flood control, food supply, and living conditions.

Half a century ago we overused pesticides, in particular DDT, which caused birds’ eggs to become too fragile. Bald eagles vanished from many places. But sometimes they come back, when we stop poisoning them and instead save some habitat.

The eagle pictured was just sitting beside the road as we drove by. There are more in nearby counties. Picture by Gretchen Quarterman, 23 March 2010.

Sprouting Longleaf

Thousands of these all over the woods:

P2280054

Many people think it takes fire to make longleaf produce seeds. These pictured seedlings came from a tree that hasn’t had fire near it for more than ten years. So why so many seedlings this year? Continue reading →

Moody Forest, home of the Red Cockaded Woodpecker

In addition to her popular trilogy of books, Janisse Ray has also edited a small volume about the Moody Forest Natural Area, which was on sale at her talk in Moultrie the other day. I can’t find a reference to that book online, although Moody Forest itself features in Wild Card Quilt.

However, Gretchen and I did visit Moody Forest in 2008, and took some pictures, like this one on the right that appears to be the home of some rare red-cockaded woodpeckers:

That’s just one picture, but follow this link for the others.

Janisse Ray in Moultrie next week

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!