By: 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. | 1 |
| 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.” | 2 |
| 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. | 3 |
| 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. | 4 |
| During his decades-long dialogue with the longleaf-wiregrass system, Leon Neel has learned to love stochasticity. Rather than steering the lands he manages towards a static ideal form, Leon aims to perpetuate the diversity built by small-scale disturbances and patch dynamics. Stochasticity allows him an entrance into the forest as a participant in its processes; it lets him experiment creatively and watch how various patches respond. When he marks timber, for instance, he looks for ways to mimic a windfall or other canopy-opening events. By cutting trees cautiously and with particular ecological objectives, he becomes a sculptor of the uneven-aged forest that the region’s natural history produced until it was severely disturbed by industrial timber cutting. For Leon, the stochastic forest of history is normative, and his managerial “art” (the term he prefers) is to render its details and processes faithfully. If we are to make sense of landscapes like these, environmental historians must move beyond seeing chaotic ecology as only a destabilizer of traditional narratives. We need to build new stories of people interacting with a nature that is more recognizably historical. | 5 |
| Like many Americans of the last century who cared deeply about a natural world crashing down around them, Leon became a scientific conservationist. But his methods also sprang from regional folk practices often seen as antithetical to modern conservation. As Stoddard and Neel pushed professional foresters and timber managers to rethink the role of fire in the longleaf system, they did so from a hybrid position, at once of the conservation establishment and defiant of its orthodoxies. Today, when land owners and managers approach Leon and ask for his expert advice on how to get started with fire management, his first impulse is to hand them a box of matches. That subversive sensibility—the residue of the southern backwoods-burning tradition, and of the Native American one that preceded and informed it—is always there, defying the efforts of those who would strip his management of the years’ worth of practical learning that inform it. Leon’s career suggests that, in the realm of conservation management, folk practices and scientific principles have had a complex dialectical history to which we must attend. | 6 |
| Above all else, Leon Neel does what he does because he wants to live among these trees, in an environment with some historical depth of field. In that commitment, he points to a blind spot in our field: aesthetics. We have dismantled the wilderness climax that was the field’s foundational aesthetic, but in the process we have become suspicious of the entire aesthetic endeavor—the search for what is beautiful and meaningful in nature. Now, as we move into a world in which the discrete structures of nature and culture are collapsing into a single pile, a world in which conservationists confront the reality that few natural systems lack cultural interventions and legacies, the need to pursue sophisticated aesthetic judgments—and to argue fiercely over what constitutes environmental quality—is pressing. Environmental historians recently have recoiled from “representing the resource,” chastened by past mistakes and injustices that have occurred in the name of speaking for nature. Now we need to get back into the fray as pragmatists, realizing that while beauty may ultimately be a cultural value rather than an objective natural quality, we come to our sense of the beautiful—and valuable—only in dialogue with the natural. Aesthetics is a representational process, the product of a conversation between subject and object. In this sense, Leon Neel has been representing the resource in two ways: Not only has he been a voice for preserving the remnant longleaf forests of the southeast, but he also has been creating, over the last half century, a series of representations of what he has found beautiful in these woods and how he thinks they ought to look. But while his values and preferences drive his interventions, they do not alone determine the results. Natural processes respond to his brushstrokes, and he replies in turn. Leon is involved in a managerial call and response, and his capacity to represent the resource, his sense of its quality, grows with each exchange. | 7 |
| Leon Neel not only loves a good fire; after years of tossing lit matches into patches of wiregrass matted down with pine-needle fuel, he knows what a good fire is. And that goodness cannot be reduced to abstract ecological principles; it resides in the very quality of the exchange. If environmental historians are to represent the resource—and, arguably, that’s what we are paid to do—then we similarly need to put our values in dialogue with the natural. | 8 |
Paul S. Sutter is an associate professor of history at the University of Georgia. He and Bert Way are working on an oral history of the Stoddard-Neel Method, a project that is being funded by the Joseph W. Jones Ecological Research Center at Ichauway. | |
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