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Anniversary Forum
Representing the Resource
Paul S. Sutter
| LEON NEEL LOVES a good fire. I recently drove with Leon and Bert Way, a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Georgia, through Greenwood Plantation near Thomasville, Georgia, one of the few supreme tracts of longleaf pine left in the Southeast, right after a hot spring burn. "This was a good fire," Leon gushed as we crept through the forest, its understory temporarily blackened. Soon the wiregrass—a definitive marker of minimal human disturbance—would spring to life, as would the system's staggeringly diverse array of forbs and legumes. But always there, threatening to grow up into what southerners have long referred to as "rough," were incipient hardwoods. In the absence of regular fire, a hardwood forest was where nature, such as it is, would take this landscape. Leon Neel has spent his entire adult life thwarting that successional tendency by burning these woods, as a surrogate for the lightning strikes and earlier human inhabitants whose fires shaped what was once one of the most extensive North American forest types. |
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Leon and his mentor, the late Herbert Stoddard, developed a system for managing these woods—the Stoddard/Neel Method—that has been crucial to preserving the scattered fragments of a system that once covered 70-90 million acres of the southeastern coastal plain. Leon went to work for Stoddard in 1950, almost two decades after Stoddard published his landmark wildlife study, The Bobwhite Quail (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1931). Stoddard undertook the quail study at the behest of wealthy landowners in southern Georgia and northern Florida, who had in the early twentieth century assembled massive quail-hunting plantations, most with good stands of longleaf, from lands sliding into agricultural marginality. By the 1920s, these men of privilege were trying to figure out why their quail populations were in decline. Stoddard had a number of answers, but the most important was the absence of fire. Over time, Stoddard and Neel began to look beyond the production of quail, a disturbance species that thrives in longleaf forests riddled with primitive agricultural patches (of the sort made by sharecropping), to see the fuller system. In doing so, their management confronted intra-system competition and trade-offs. The landscape in which quail did best was not necessarily one in which wiregrass was valued, and the winter burning kindest to quail breeding did not promote the landscape diversity that a more varied burning schedule did. While Stoddard and Neel remained committed to meeting management imperatives to produce quail—and, increasingly, timber—they began preaching the virtues of system integrity and pegging their management to that goal. We might call it ecosystem management. As Leon puts it, they began "representing the resource." |
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What does this have to do with the future of environmental history? In his dissertation, Bert will examine the ecological history of this system and the considerable social and cultural tensions present at the birth of longleaf conservation. So I can cut to the chase. What I find compelling about Leon's management in this landscape is how it pushes beyond several categorical oppositions and lacunae that have characterized our field's sensibility over the last decade or so. Let me mention a few examples. |
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Leon is working to preserve a once-extensive North American landscape, but wilderness is a term of little use to him. The lands under his care must be actively managed (mostly with fire), and most will have to remain working landscapes if they are to be protected (though, in this case, lightly worked by landowners who do not have to wrest life's essentials from these piney woods). These forests are not pristine, and they exist in defiance of where nature would take them if left alone. But this does not make them merely cultural landscapes. They stand comfortably between nature and culture, and we need to do the same. These woods may not be wilderness, but there is plenty of wildness in them; they may be inscribed with human intention, but they also reflect human wisdom and restraint. Places like Greenwood are the products of a more careful dialogue with the natural than, say, a slash pine plantation, and a managerial reverence for their natural history is at the heart of their integrity and beauty. We need new ways to talk about the cultured wildness of places like these. |
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