Photo by Mary Kitchens

                                       Historian in a Room Full of Forest Rangers

In another life I was the founding executive director of the Pebble Hill Foundation, a nonprofit set up to operate one of the classic quail plantations in Thomasville, Georgia as a museum and events venue. Pebble Hill Plantation was one of some 70 shooting preserves created from former slave-manned plantations. The owners came in large part from Cleveland, Ohio. I always found it a bit ironic that the “Yankee Plantations” which began in the post- Civil War era have existed for much longer than the pre-war plantations managed to survive.

Among my responsibilities was seeing that the plantation farm crew functioned to maintain the 2000-plus acres of pine forests and supported the work of our consulting forester. Our men maintained over 100 miles of firebreaks, reseeded feed plots for wildlife support and assisted with the regular prescriptive burning of the woodlands. It was this memory that sparked my interest in attending the meeting of the Georgia Prescribed Fire Council in Jasper, Georgia on June 8, 2019. Originally, my daughter Mary was to attend. Considering that she grew up at Pebble Hill, it is no surprise that she is enrolled in a plantation management program at Thomas County Technical College. Her part-time work got in the way at the last minute, much to my disappointment.

Environmental concerns are a major driver in the current firestorm of interest among young people in literary writing. Writers’ workshops and degree programs have sprouted by the hundreds if not thousands. The other major driver is of course the internet, where anyone can become a published author. Well, I seem to have been the only writer to show for the Fire Council workshop but can attest that it was a rich opportunity to find out what scientists have to say about the value of burning our forests to enhance forest productivity, sustain wildlife and prevent forest fires, or at least deprive wildfires of much of the fuel that makes them so destructive. After the California wildfires of recent months this business of fuel reduction seemed reason enough to attend.

If you are not familiar with the principle reasons for prescribed burning, here they are: dead limbs, leaves,  pine needles and other debris accumulate in the forests providing kindling when accidental fires are triggered by human or natural causes (lightening is a major culprit); burning can improve production of certain wood species and destroy competing species that may not serve so useful a purpose (pine is the most favored and encouraged wood in southern forests); low, ground level fires can be used to improve the aesthetics by knocking back vines, “trash trees” and consuming ground debris ; and, finally properly managed and timed burns can enhance wildlife, for example  by providing tenderer and richer new growth as food. Off setting these advantages are challenges to air quality, especially in heavily populated areas like the counties in the Atlanta area. The devil seems to be in the details of course, so one of the presenters explained the amazing technology utilized in monitoring fires-intentional and accidental-a system that regulates the issuance of burn permits to minimize air-quality challenges.

All in all, I felt I was learning something new throughout the five hours of lectures. There were about 250 people in attendance . Most were men wearing the uniforms and caps of state forestry employees. But there were a few of us who were “civilians.” I sat next to a man who replanted a portion of his farm near Calhoun in long leaf pine. At lunch, I happened to meet another gentlemen who set out several hundred acres of the “Alpine” genetic version of long leaf pine near Madison.  I wondered: Could this be called “heritage” forestry.

I left the meeting with many thoughts. In fairness this meeting was only tangentially concerned with environmental issues.  No one talked about global warming or climate change.  But my mind churned over what I thought I knew about the larger concerns impacted by forestry. Long leaf once dominated the coastal plain ecosystem but was harvested for pennies on the acre by timber companies producing lumber for construction during the rapid growth of the US population in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Production of cheap cellulose-based paper also boomed in the late 19th century and has resulted in most of the paper-producing plants being located on the same rivers that once served as arteries for the transport of harvested pine lumber downstream—that is, to the southern coastal shipping centers.

 A serious consequence of this—admittedly not on the day’s agenda-is that forestry and farming have dried up much of the great aquifer (underground water system), driving some negative environmental consequences. For example, behind the coastal islands of the Georgia are the marshlands and less salty waters that are the hatcheries for much marine life. Fishing and seafood resources seem to be in decline.  Well water along the coast is becoming saltier.  Underground water supplies must be accessed by deeper wells. Paper plants also require enormous-indeed, almost unimaginable- quantities of fresh water.  Will good forestry help preserve our water resources? Perhaps. Will paper become outmoded as packaging? In the future, will we find an alternative to the non-biodegradable plastics that are clogging our seas and trashing our coastlines?

I am not an alarmist by nature. Nor am I a scientist who can offer solutions to environmental problems. But I do feel each of us who lives in a nation governed by its own people have a responsibility to work at being an informed citizen.