 
He sweeps his walking stick across the field, proud to show me these fifty acres, even though they could not look more bombed-out, clear-cut, and beat-up. Chunks of graying splintered trees lie about on sandy soil. Dead hickory saplings wilt beneath crisp leaves, and other throttled hardwoods crumple into black thickets. Here and there a single oak stands isolated in the dusty air like a child’s cartoon sketch of a tree. The place could pass for the outskirts of Baghdad. “We sprayed to kill the hickory and the oak but it didn’t work,” he says, and pokes his stick into some audacious green brush. “These will branch up quickly and we’ll be right back where we started from, so they’ll have to spray again this fall.” Porcher winces at talk of chemicals. He is a retired professor of biology at the Citadel and coauthor of the definitive text A Guide to Wildflowers in South Carolina. He wishes there were some other way, but he knows that an ancient environmental battle is being waged here between new terrains — hardwood forests, cotton fields, other farm land uses, pulp-paper pine crops — and the primordial longleaf pine woods that flourished here for millions of years. The only way to win, on this particular acreage, is to strip the old slash pine forest that previously stood here to the bare canvas of the underlying soil and start anew. The price is high, Porcher confesses, but insists it will be worth it. A generation from now, when others stand here, they will be looking into an unusual woodland — the original landscape of much of the Old South: a longleaf pine forest that flourishes by catching on fire every year. To any American who knows by rote that “only you can prevent forest fires,” this single fact sounds preposterous. Yet, if the tropics can boast the rainforest, which needs constant and heavy downpours, then the Southeastern United States can claim what has been called the “fireforest,” which needs an annual low-intensity pine-straw fire to jump-start the mysterious mechanics of its woodlands and nurse a stunning diversity of wildlife comparable to that found in the Amazon. Now, thousands of Southern landowners like Porcher are actively engaged in this restoration, and part of the motivation is ecological: Native wildlife flourish best under the longleaf’s sun-welcoming canopy. Part of it, though, is historical, even spiritual, as many Southerners return the land to its antebellum pristine condition. But part of the changeover is due to a handful of devotees at organizations such as the Longleaf Alliance and Tall Timbers. In the past two decades, they have pulled off an amazing feat: convincing landowners of the value of fire; sussing out the science of planting the finicky longleaf seedlings in the soil; and politicking the government into encouraging this hard work. As a result, today’s landowners luxuriate in a host of government subsidies — cost-sharing plans to kill off the invasive hardwoods, support to seed the longleaf’s understory, as well as outright payments to maintain longleaf forests until they get established again. Rather than continue to squeeze depleted farmlands, now landowners can make money by turning over spent cotton fields and exhausted pastures to longleaf. Their success recently became measurable, according to Dean Gjerstad, codirector of the Longleaf Alliance at Auburn University’s School of Forestry. In 2005, there was an increase of 604,386 acres of longleaf planted by private landowners and another increase of 303,320 acres on public lands. It’s been a long time coming: That’s the first recorded increase in overall longleaf acreage since the forest’s precipitous decline began in the years after the Civil War. For many Southerners, the “forest” is what they see just off the interstate: dense hardwood thickets or row-planted loblollies that flicker past like a picket fence. They are no longer familiar with the sublime beauty of a longleaf forest, with its low ground cover that rises not much more than a foot or eighteen inches, opening up to an airy mid-story creating sunny, prairie-like vistas through ramrod-straight longleaf poles. Nor do they know the largely hidden history of its ghastly holocaust a century ago, a nightmare tale of ignorance, greed, and desperation. The longleaf pine ecosystem used to stretch from Virginia south to Florida’s Panhandle and west to Texas, arguably the largest single-species forest ecosystem in the world. Once covering ninety million acres, longleaf defined the Old South. Some early naturalists looked upon the longleaf in awe, as riders on horseback could gallop through it effortlessly for hours. Other writers were baffled by it. Mark Twain’s neighbor, Harriet Beecher Stowe, descended from her Connecticut pulpit to opine on the South’s slacker landscape in her (now) comically ill-informed book, Palmetto Leaves. She came and saw the “tall pinetrees, whose tops are so far in the air that they seem to cast no shade, and a little scrubby underbrush.” Where others might see a simple difference and appreciate it, Stowe, like some antebellum talk-radio host, saw nothing but hideous moral corruption everywhere. “In New England,” she wrote, “Nature is an up-and-down, smart, decisive house-mother, that has her times and seasons... She will have no shilly-shally.” But below the Mason-Dixon? Why, nonstop shilly-shally: “Nature down here is an easy, demoralized, indulgent old grandmother, who has no particular time for any thing, and does every thing when she happens to feel like it.” For Stowe, the longleaf corrupted Southerners into muddled idlers. After “everybody up North has put away summer clothes, and put all their establishments under winter-orders,” she concluded, Southerners were still staggering around their pine forests in December, wondering: “Is it winter, or isn’t it?” And yet, private landowners like Porcher are willing to sacrifice their virtue to restore this landscape. In fact, they love it. Walking the land with Porcher is a leisurely all-day affair because there isn’t a tree or plant that he can’t talk about. “Every plant has a story,” he says. When I bend down to touch an unusual plant, he tells me: “That’s gummo root, supposed to be an aphrodisiac, if you chew it, according to the rural people of South Carolina.” His eyes begin to smile. “It doesn’t work,” he observes. At another spot, where the land is further along, the longleaf seedlings, like Roman candles in the ground shooting off green pyrotechnics, are arrayed amid other green shoots cracking the charred surface of a recent burn. “Here is Stipulicida, wire plant,” he says, plucking a stalk as thin as a needle. “This is all your ground cover. That’s climbing butterfly pea, and here’s Desmodium, or beggar’s-lice. This is sweet goldenrod.” Of course, he can talk this way because he’s a botanist, but here’s the deal: Hang around enough longleaf enthusiasts and you realize they all talk like Porcher, and they can’t wait to tell you about the fireforest’s diverse ground cover. Retired Auburn professor Rhett Johnson refers to such people, and he includes himself, as “longleaf pimps.” What makes them so eager to entertain you with their version of “Pimp My Dirt” is that the complex environmental mechanics of the longleaf forest are in fact pretty cool, and once you get a sense of how all the (very slowly) moving parts work, it’s impossible not to want to explain it to somebody. You get the sense that they’re writing their own Disney movie, featuring any of the potential protagonists, our wily longleaf friends: the fox squirrel, bobwhite quail, gopher tortoise, harvest mouse, indigo snake, wild turkey, and red-cockaded woodpecker. In the opening drama of the movie, the critters are at play in their sunny cathedral-like piney woods until they realize that invaders have come, and not just predators: Even in their midst, alien trees such as the oak and persimmon and hickory trees are sending up shoots. The conflict is clear. The invaders want a shady damp forest. They intend to remake the place into a dark forest that Little Red Riding Hood would recognize (a morally correct Harriet Beecher Stowe forest). What to do? In a last-ditch effort, they turn to the ancient longleafs. The towering senator trees preach patience, telling everyone to wait for the summer to get just a little hotter. Then, in the climactic (and climatic) scene, an August thunderstorm erupts. The outsiders get spooked when bolts of lightning ignite the dead longleaf needles and brown wire grass blanketing the forest floor. The resin in that mix is so flammable that they can burn even in the rain. The outsiders flee, and the fire burns the hardwoods and other competitive pines to the ground. The highly fireproofed longleafs practically yawn through a nice cozy burn. Meanwhile, the longleaf critters recall that they can sense the fire quicker than others, and that in some parts of the fireforest they have fallout shelters, like the gopher tortoise’s burrow. Running some fifteen to thirty feet in length, these holes have been found by longleaf scientists to provide temporary shelter for more than three hundred species, including snakes and mice and some other fairly sizeable animals. And when it’s over, everyone returns just in time for all those legumes and seeds and tasty ground cover, also adapted to fire, to poke right back up. In a fireforest, the intense diversity is not in the canopy, as it is in the rainforest, but on the ground. Scientists have counted as many as forty species flourishing in a single square yard of healthy longleaf ground cover. It all might seem like a cartoon now, but understanding how this system works has been a long time coming — and the misunderstanding of it lies at the root of the longleaf’s decline. For much of the twentieth century, federal forest agents heard about the old custom of burning the land, but simply refused to give any credibility to the local argument that fire might be beneficial. In the 1920s, a group called the Dixie Crusaders traveled around, showing films and giving talks, preaching the evil of fire. Later, Smokey Bear took up the same sermon far more effectively. Fire suppression made sense in some parts of America, but as the new rule in the South, the oaks and the hickories and the sweet gum seized their advantage, shading out the longleaf and driving off the luxurious wildlife food found in the ground cover. Otherwise, the land got planted over in slash or loblolly, which had a shorter rotation and were more easily marketed as pulp, chip-and-saw wood, or pole timber. Longleaf critters also began to experience massive population declines. The bobwhite quail has plunged some 90 percent in the past few decades. In the era before World War II, though, a forester and scientist named Herbert Stoddard began to make the case that the folklore was right: Smoldering ground fires were good for the land. Later he hired a young kid named Leon Neel, who still preaches the benefits of fire in northern Florida, one of the original longleaf pimps inspiring the current generation to assist the longleaf to regain its natural advantage. “See, the seed bank is still here in the soil,” Porcher tells me, poking at the ground with his stick. “Once I cleared it of hardwoods and started burning, these plants popped right back up.” It’s as if the longleaf ecosystem were hiding in these hardwood forests, waiting patiently for us. Yet, fire suppression continues to be practiced in much of the South. It allows dried needles and fallen timber to accumulate into a natural ammo dump that will eventually explode into a massive forest conflagration, killing everything. That is precisely what happened in 2007 when the Bugaboo Scrub Fire in Florida merged with Georgia’s Big Turnaround Complex Fire. Cumulatively they burned more than 564,000 acres, and Georgia’s portion of that fire is, to date, that state’s largest recorded fire. Learn More |
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