Looking for Longleaf

Looking for Longleaf

Michelle Nijhuis

LOOKING FOR LONGLEAF:
The Fall and Rise of an
American Forest.
By Lawrence S. Earley

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LOOKING FOR LONGLEAF:
The Fall and Rise of an
American Forest.

By Lawrence S. Earley. Univ. of North Carolina Press. 322 pp. $27.50

Longleaf pines once covered 92 million acres of sand dunes, savannas, and foothills from southeastern Virginia to eastern Texas: “a continuous, measureless forest, an ocean of trees,” German traveler Johann David Schoepf wrote in the 1780s. Today, less than three million acres of longleaf forest remain, mostly fragmented into isolated stands near the Gulf and Atlantic coasts. The former range of this long-needled, giant-coned species is now dominated by loblolly and slash pines—and, of course, by civilization.

The decline of the longleaf pine is a complex story, well and thoroughly told by journalist Law­rence Earley. Human exploitation of the longleaf forest began in the 18th century, when settlers loosed millions of grazing cattle and foraging hogs beneath the canopy. Later in the century, the tar industry rose in the Southeast to satisfy worldwide demand for naval stores; it was followed in the early 19th century by the rapid expansion of the turpentine industry. Turpentine “chippers,” Earley writes in one of his charming detours, hacked into the trees to draw out the resin, while crews of “dippers” collected the gum for the distillers—“outlaw work carried on by outlaws,” in the words of one worker. Though these practices didn’t always kill the trees, “cutting into a living tree with an ax . . . was not conducive to its health,” Earley writes. Slapdash chipping and dipping exhausted hundreds of thousands of acres of longleaf forest each year.

With a half-century of enthusiastic “cut-and-run” logging that began around 1875, the timber industry liquidated most of the remaining longleaf stands. What the 18th-century explorer William Bartram described as “the solemn symphony of the steady western breezes . . . rising and falling through the thick and wavy foliage” was largely silenced. Though some observers mourned the loss of the graceful trees, there was little hope for the species. Longleaf was difficult to cultivate and grew slowly, so the pulp mills that followed the loggers planted the now-ubiquitous loblolly and slash pine.

The U.S. Forest Service, wedded to its long campaign against wildfire, also helped keep longleaf off the landscape during much of the 20th century. Beginning in the 1930s, several researchers found that regular fires encouraged the recovery of longleaf stands, but the federal agency discouraged the release of their work. “Smokey Bear could not distinguish between a fire that warmed a house and one that burned it down,” a retired Forest Service researcher said. Not until the mid-1980s, when environmentalists sued, did the Forest Service commit to reversing the decline of the longleaf forest.

By the time the tale reaches the present day, one wonders how even a single longleaf pine could have survived. Yet Earley finds some hardy remnants. At Eglin Air Force Base in the Florida Panhandle, tall turkey oaks camouflage a large swath of old-growth longleaf; at a Girl Scout camp in southern Louisiana, a Louisiana State University researcher is attempting to piece together a longleaf ecosystem. Longleaf restoration is usually considered a money-losing proposition, but a few small landowners, timber companies, and managers of hunting plantations have turned restoration projects to their financial advantage by selling longleaf needles, so-called brown gold, for garden and landscaping mulch, or by patiently raising large, high-value trees.

Could the once-grand longleaf forest, whose remains still shelter some of the most diverse plant communities in the world, be restored to its past glory? Not in our lifetimes. But the corps of longleaf defenders, Earley suggests, may yet midwife a humbler recovery.

—Michelle Nijhuis

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