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Book Review
| Looking for Longleaf: The Rise and Fall of an American Forest. By Lawrence S. Early. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. x+322 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $27.50.
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| A book in the classic tradition of environmental history, Looking for Longleaf: The Rise and Fall of an American Forest takes us through the natural history of the Longleaf pine forest to the present. Along the way, we learn of the diverse soils and ecotones this formerly very wide-ranging tree inhabited, along with the rich floral diversity that accompanied this magnificent pine. But its other virtues were its downfall: remarkably hard for a pine, its timber was prized for ship building and many other uses. Full of oleoresin, it supplied the turpentine industry—and it yielded tar and pitch. Taken for granted due to its vast range— nearly 150,000 square miles from the James River in southeastern Virginia as far south as the shores of Lake Okeechobee in the Florida peninsula and west to southeastern Texas—it has nearly entirely disappeared. |
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Lawrence Early tells the tale of this tree with a sense of loss, explaining the drive for its exploitation. Much like other extractive industries in the United States, the end was not foreseen until it had arrived. Structural economic forces combined to encourage overproduction of turpentine, which, of course, meant the ultimate demise of the Longleaf pine, for less intensive methods were more labor intensive and did not yield as much tar. Early provides a fascinating description of the process of harvesting the tar, and how it was processed into turpentine. In fact, Early provides excellent descriptions of all of the manufacturing processes to which the tree was subjected. |
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Students generally do not understand the relationship between primary resource extraction and manufactured products. Looking For Longleaf is a wonderful introduction to the ways in which early extraction and manufacturing was done. It provides a useful description of the danger and difficulty of such work, and its gradual decline as the economy modernized and the resource declined. Early does this through a lovely combination of historical description using primary texts, but also through his personal experiences, traveling through this former forested area, encountering vestigial remnants of an earlier period—memories of old timers, and a trip to the Georgia Agrirama living museum where he witnessed the turpentine stilling process. |
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But the parts of the book that were perhaps most moving were his ecological descriptions of the extraordinary flora that could be found in these forests. An ancient and stable ecosystem, it was one of the most biologically diverse ecosystems on Earth, with geographical gradients, regional diversity, and high endemism—an indicator of age and evolutionary history. Today the forest is less than 2 percent of what it once was, and to find a representative stand is difficult. For decades other pines were touted as superior—particularly the loblolly and white pine—partly due to ignorance, and partly due to their being more opportunistic in their choice of habitat. This has left a residue of underappreciation for the Longleaf, perhaps one of the motivations for writing this book. Early's description of the Longleaf forests he did discover leave the reader wanting to experience the sensation of being among these trees. Looking for Longleaf is a good book about ecological change in the United States, reminding us of what we have lost, but that points to the glimmer of hope of restoration that exists as well. |
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Stephanie Pincetl, visiting professor, Institute of the Environment, works on issues of land use and the environment. |
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