Longleaf, Far as the Eye Can See: A New Vision of North America’s Richest Forest by Bill Finch, Beth Maynor Young, Rhett Johnson and John C. Hall (review)

Longleaf, Far as the Eye Can See: A New Vision of North America’s Richest Forest is a visual and narrative journey into the most biologically diverse and complex forest ecosystems in North America—the longleaf pine forests of the southern United States. The longleaf forest, once the largest ecosystem in North America, covered ninety-two million acres extending from Florida to Texas and as far north as Maryland. As a result of over harvesting, urban encroachment, and other complex factors, the longleaf range is limited to scattered remnants totaling three million acres.

The book is captivating, blending cultural history, biology, and conservation ethos with elegant images highlighting the complexity of a stately tree and the unique ecosystem it defines. The authors, Bill Finch, Rhett Johnson, and John C. Hall, offer compelling evidence for the longleaf’s importance and efforts underway to restore the tree to the landscape it once dominated. The oversized coffee-table book adds to the limited works written of the longleaf and features a foreword by Pulitzer Prize–winning sociobiologist E. O. Wilson and five chapters beautifully illustrated by photographer Beth Maynor Young. Young’s work captures the essence of a longleaf forest and the cornucopia of life abounding beneath its canopy. The final chapter and epilogue highlight the restoration efforts of partners of the Longleaf Alliance in the South. Activists themselves, the authors acknowledge assistance from a cadre of specialists yet do not provide a bibliography or endnotes for their source material. While geared toward a general audience, these omissions hamper the book’s scholarly effectiveness.

The book interweaves the longleaf’s cultural value and the importance of this “alpha tree” to the ecology of the region, noting the tree was integral to being “southern” and that it was impossible to “imagine a world without it” (15). The authors contend that the longleaf’s popularity and its misperception as an inexhaustible resource was its undoing. The longleaf was “the most esteemed of all the pines”; shipbuilders and carpenters on both sides of the Atlantic prized its lumber, and others prized the turpentine and pine tar made from its resins (8). Entrepreneurs, boasting the healthful benefits of living and playing among the hypoallergenic trees, built sprawling resorts across the South. To the southerner, the longleaf forest was “so ubiquitous it became as invisible as the air, as predictable as sunset and moonrise, as unremarkable as the color of the sky” (15). It was “only when it was reduced, almost entirely, to a sea of stumps” that they were able to comprehend the loss and its impact on southern culture (15).

The authors advocate that the longleaf is worth saving. Its unique ecosystem turns the concept of what a forest should look like and be “upside down” (69). A longleaf forest’s biodiversity is attributed to its canopy and the forest’s dependence on a regular fire regime. They contend that Appalachian forests’ pine and deciduous trees control growth by rationing sunlight, turning forest floors into a “sunless desert in summer” (69). In contrast, a longleaf forest “thrives by encouraging other plants to grow in its thin shade,” producing a grassy savannah teeming with life (70). This hyperbole is reinforced by plant studies that identified “some 925 endemic species in coastal plain longleaf forests alone compared to fewer than 170 species in the entire Appalachian province” (74). The longleaf forest’s scale and diversity complicates management planning as the forests are not one type but are instead a patchwork of thousands of varying ecosystems unified by the presence of the longleaf.

The book highlights partnerships promoting the longleaf forest’s resurgence. The US military, a most unlikely partner, controls 35 percent of public lands containing longleaf. It has an “odd contract” that has...