About Flagpole. (Athens, Ga.) 1987-current | View Entire Issue (Sept. 21, 2011)
WHAT’S UP IN NEW DEVELOPMENT Sometimes I think about what life would have been like for my grandpa, growing up in the Depression. How'd he get from Whitehall down to Gaines School? He used to tell me about that being a dirt road, and also catch ing the train into Athens to see a movie. In that particular way, it must have been fairly magical. What was the land like then? The boll wee vil would have recently struck. Then there's the chestnut blight wiping out the champions of the forest, not to mention Dutch elm dis ease and the Dust Bowl out west. The land must have seemed like it was dying. Combined with the economic harshness of the times, it must have been hard not to take an eschatological point of view. Had God for saken the world, with forests and crops dying and great masses of people's lives in ruin for a generation? In my grandpa's era, the deer population for the state was estimated to be only a few thousand, mostly in the southern portion of the state. With most of the land barren from having recently been in cotton, I wonder if he ever saw a deer growing up. Today, they frequently graze on Mom's hostas out in Winterville. A few hundred years back, in the time of pioneers and explorers like Bartram, the world was quite different, with bison frequently sighted through mighty forests well-cleared by fire, with great canebrakes along the rivers. It's hard to imagine a forest or riverbank not choked by the jungle of privet, bamboo and other invasives that make the woods along the Oconee practically impenetrable now. The reintroduction of white-tail deer in the '40s could probably be considered our first foray into restoring megafauna region ally, but there have been other more recent developments. Ted Turner's popularization of bison meat can certainly be given some credit for the handful of farms in the region that have recently started raising the American buffalo instead of cows. While wild buffalo once roamed much of pre-settlement Georgia, cattle dominate today, kept in large pastures that don't much resemble the diverse wood land mosaic of the past. Could the return of bison as livestock result in a more ecologically robust approach to the management of grazing land? Elk were reintroduced to Great Smoky Mountain National Park in 2001, after a two-centjry absence from the region, and the population has grown from an initial 52 individuals to around 130 today. However, a species here and there does not an ecosystem make. In order to keep an ecosystem in bal ance, predators have to be factored in. While bears, bobcats and coyotes are still present in the area, cougar and wolves are for the most part gone from the South. Efforts to restore the endangered red wolf are also underway, although that effort is mostly concentrated on barrier islands, where interaction with humans can be minimized. The restoration of native species hasn't been just about megafauna, though. Those animals have returned to a landscape much changed from when they departed (or rather, we removed them). The American chestnut, almost wiped out by the chestnut j blight in the early 1900s, was once described as the "Redwood of the East," historically reaching 150 feet tall and 10 feet in diameter. The trees were incredibly important in the Appalachians, repre senting roughly one out of four trees in the forest and producing prolific fc r - j age for animals like elk and deer. The American Chestnut Foundation and other organizations have been working to breed blight-resistant American chestnut trees, crossbreeding the American species with resistant Chinese trees. These trees could be ready in the next few years for a broad reintroduction beyond the research farms where they are currently grown. The longleaf pine is another species native to the area which was nearly lost, in this case not due to any introduced disease, but purely by logging. This tree and the unique ecosys tem that accompanies it once dominated the coastal plain, creating a park-like savanna, kept open by frequent fires. Beyond their ecological value and former dominance in the Southern landscape, both of these trees were once hugely important economically, and the success of their respec tive restorations could hinge on the ability to craft a forestry model that incorporates both ecologically and financially sustainable man agement strategies. With the exception of top predators, removed for their danger to humans and live stock, and disease in the case of the chestnut, it was often the most economically useful aspects of these iconic plants and animals that in the end doomed them. These key spe cies, with their tremendous presence, convert the products of their ecosystems into forms that are easily accessible to us. Consider the grazing bison, taking the grasses we find ined ible and converting them into easily harvested meat, or the longleaf pine, taking water, soil and air and creating an incredibly useful building material. They also provide ecosystem services like cleaner water and air that are hard to quantify but extremely important. If we can tie these economic and eco logical values together into one system, the woods our children and grandchildren inhabit will be every bit as magnificent as those found by explorers like Bartram. Kevan Williams athensrismg@tlagpole.com Elk have returned to the Great Smoky Mountain National Park How might restoration and reintroduction ot other iconic native species reshape the local landscape 7 ecGuntrr Table ' I hr Hr*t I mm I hr I imvounfnj Happy hour Monday-Friday 4-7pm Wednesdays Live Music 6pm 9/21 nnpoLcon solo 9/28 Jim PCRKIM < tpen 4pm Mon-Fri and l lam Sat k Sun £ 8\ the loop V\t to Tall Bm Bncragr lo. If 2095 S. Mi 11 edge Ave. 706-548-3359 L U7\CH ‘Buffet MON - FRI 11 :30am-2:30pm $7 95 SAT fit SUN 12pm-3pm $8 95 Wgg Dinner Mon-Sun Spm-lOpm ||Pf Op«n 7 Day* * Ol B Cad Broad St. j|§ 706 SS9 OOOO * ww indiaalh^ns coi • wer usic^series at The State Botanical Garden of Georgia, Athens 00^ ■\2 Flower Garden Stage September 27 Arvin Scott Quartet Call 706-542-1244 or visit Garden Gift Shop. More info at www.uga.edu/hotgarden. \ Dh n A i i Cf u p t Pi n j/l u i -n Tnti h i t The Mystique of the Automobile A Festival of Cars, Art and Fashion Saturday, September 24th, 2011, 12-5 pm Lyndon House Arts Center 293 Hoyt Street, Athens, Georgia Vintage Cars, Art & "Music of the Decades" 2 pm Narrated Car & Fashion Show 12-2 pm Children's Art Activity Ware L yndon Historic House Tours Memorabilia and Vintage Motorcycles Inside y Cars By Invitation-Only Public Most Welcome • \ www. mystiqueoftheautomobile. org In osstn+eshtp with The Boomers Befleering. Sharing Learning w. boomerswathtm. urg \ sy ftrsstbtt bf t Sraat Ira * tt* ’J S fmiitatB i4 X Ubttr, S*nixta Muse um..c Library SltPins Cltrlu t OV, «•»> l I * » A « » SEPTEMBER 21, 2011 • FLAGPOLE.COM 7
