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Epilogue In the Chinese philosophy of Daoism, there is an appreciation of things for their contrast regarding other things. This is most famously depicted in the familiar yin-and-yang symbol. Thereby daylight is appreciated through night, summer through winter, the female principle through the male, and so on. It is also how valleys and lowlands render mountains for what they are, and this is especially true in the valley and ridge province of the southern Appalachians, which includes much of southwestern Virginia. Valleys render magnificent views of mountains, and ridgetops afford views of valleys and other mountains. This topography becomes all the more remarkable when considering how public and private ownership tend to follow elevation patterns . In North Carolina lawmakers saw a necessity to pass legislation limiting ridgetop development.1 This seems less likely in southwestern Virginia, where the public already controls many ridgetops. The highest reaches of the southwestern Virginia mountains have evoked awe, religious regard, aesthetic appreciation, and respect from a great many people throughout the millennia. Briefly they were overly exploited, albeit comparatively mildly, by a swelling agrarian population struggling to survive. Even more briefly they were pillaged by industrialists whose main or sole concern was quick monetary gain.2 But it is their very elevation that now renders them a public commons, and largely they became so in response to industrial abuse. The first Forest Service chief, Gifford Pinchot, embraced the idea that national forests should serve “the greatest good, for the greatest number, for the longest run.” Pinchot’s supporters, President Theodore Roosevelt and Secretary of Agriculture James Wilson, agreed with this perspective. The phrase was lifted from the founder of Utilitarian philosophy, Jeremy Bentham. Whether or not Pinchot consciously followed Bentham’s philosophy, he and other early national forest supporters certainly embraced a pragmatic sort of forest conservation centered squarely on commodity products. A great deal has changed in the agency’s first century.3 If Utilitarianism characterized the earlier agency, ecological forestry is eclipsing it now. There are even elements of pantheism or natural religion, 186 j Epilogue especially among wilderness advocates and supporters of noncommodity forest values in general. Pragmatism lives on most prominently among certain segments of the multigenerational local population, who still rely on the woodlands for game, firewood, pulpwood employment, tourism dollars, and the enduring tradition of gathering ginseng, morel mushrooms, sassafras, and other foraging items. All local customs aside, the national picture has long shifted toward environmentalism. Consider the following excerpt from the 1969 National Environmental Policy Act, which pertains to the JNF and every federal land management agency. According to Congress, the purpose of the act was “to declare a national policy which will encourage productive and enjoyable harmony between man and his environment; to promote efforts which will prevent or eliminate damage to the environment and biosphere and stimulate the health and welfare of man; to enrich the understanding of the ecological systems and natural resources important to the Nation.”4 This forty-year-old proclamation seems astonishingly idealistic, and yet in retrospect it clearly provided one of the turning points in American environmental history. For the Forest Service, it became one of the legal stipulations that began turning the agency away from almost exclusive timber commodity emphasis to a greater orientation toward ecological forestry. For the JNF, as of 2009 the trend has included an accumulation of over 96,000 acres reserved in wilderness, or about 13.7 percent of the original, premerger JNF acreage. This is hardly an insubstantial amount. W From a distance perhaps much of the forested mountainous land of southwestern Virginia seems pristine, untouched, or even ignored by humans. But obviously, over the centuries, these lands have experienced a large amount of direct and indirect human influence. Biologically and botanically, this forest is significantly altered from the woodland that preceded it even one century earlier. It only faintly resembles the forest of 400 years ago. The American chestnut tree, eastern wolves, eastern elk, and passenger pigeons are among the many life forms that have diminished or disappeared completely. On the other hand, oak trees and white tail deer are much more numerous than in any past time. Because of the changing flora, and for other reasons, topsoil depths and their chemical compositions have changed. Without question, this land and its flora and fauna, will continue to change, both through its own evolution and in relation to human action or nonaction. What is unprecedented is the knowledge, awareness, and even self...

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