Looking for Longleaf: The Fall and Rise of an American Forest (review)

Much of the coastal plain from North Carolina to east Texas is "piney woods," familiar to travelers on hundreds of miles of highways I-10 and I-95. But as Lawrence Earley shows us, what they see today is a much altered and diminished shadow of the vast and seemingly infinite longleaf pine domain that impressed such early travelers as William Bartram, Basil Hall, and Charles Lyell. Only scattered old growth remnants survive of what was one of the largest forest realms in North America, some 92 million acres dominated by Pinus palustris. Earley does an excellent job of describing both the original forest and the profound alterations of the last 150 yr.

Earley, a former editor of the magazine Wildlife in North Carolina, is identified as a freelance writer on the dust jacket, though "independent scholar" would serve as well. He writes for a general readership, but the level of documentation and a 24-page bibliography make this book suitable for upper level undergraduate and graduate courses in geography or environmental history. The book consists of fourteen chapters, with a prologue and epilogue. The chapters are grouped in four parts, labeled Ecology, Exploitation, Forest Management, and Ecosystem Restoration. There are 35 photographs and drawings, and 10 pages of index. Much in Earley's discussion of ecology will be familiar to readers who keep up with southeastern conservation issues, such as the role of fire in maintaining the longleaf pine ecosystem and high-profile denizens like the red-cockaded woodpecker and the gopher tortoise. Perhaps less familiar is the remarkably high rate of endemism in longleaf forest.

Both Native Americans and the earliest European/African settlers seem to have trod relatively lightly on this land, using it chiefly for hunting or running cattle and hogs. Serious exploitation of longleaf pine came with an intensification of non-Indian settlement, and, broadly speaking, took two different forms: the production of "naval stores," and logging. (The pulp and paper industry came much later and used replacement species of pine.)

A thorough discussion of that mysterious term "naval stores" is a welcome feature of the text. The links between pines and ships are manifold and ancient. Some are obvious, such as wood for masts and planking, but the heart of the matter is non-wood products like tar and pitch, rosin and turpentine. It takes some effort of imagination to realize how much wooden ships depended on these other products of the pine tree. Ropes are one of many examples; a single sailing ship required miles of rope, and they all had to be treated with pine tar. Longleaf is among the most resinous of pines, which accounts both for the plant's usefulness for naval stores and the prominence of fire in its ecosystem.

In principle, the collection of resin from pine trees need be no more destructive than the gathering of sap from sugar maples, but in fact early methods were crude and tree mortality reached 75%. Turpentine, a humble paint thinner at the hardware store today, is distilled from resin and 150 yr ago it was in demand for many other applications. As late as the midnineteenth century the effects of turpentining were restricted largely to forest tracts near navigable streams, but railroad construction eventually opened up the entire coastal plain. The destructiveness of turpentining became infamous and pressures for conservation began to mount. Only with Charles Herty's introduction of the cup method, which allowed a more sustained tapping of the trees, did the situation improve.

Use of longleaf pines for construction timber began in colonial times, but commercial logging was long limited to areas near rivers large enough to permit the passage of rafts of logs. Furthermore, the commercial value of longleaf was depressed by consumer preference for construction timber from the white pine (P. strobes) of the northeastern and Great Lakes states. The...