Conserving Southern Longleaf: Herbert Stoddard and the Rise of Ecological Land Management (Environmental History and the American South)

The book was not exactly what I thought it would be, but it was great in the way it was. I expected it to be about the specifics of growing longleaf. The book is really a history of longleaf pine conservation in the South and in some ways a biography of Herbert Stoddard. I guess it is best described by the subtitle, “Herbert Stoddard and the Rise of Ecological Land Management.”We get to know Herbert Stoddard, which is an introduction for most people and deepen our acquaintance with leading conservationists like Aldo Leopold. I was unaware of the struggles these icons of ecology engaged in to get the idea of ecological management across to skeptical experts, many of whom were actively hostile to these new and radical ideas.An interesting theme was Stoddard’s (and Leopold’s) insistence on getting boots-on-the-ground experience, considering local knowledge and wisdom, and commitment to iterative learning, i.e. try something, see how it works and then learn and modify for next time. This seems like simple good sense to most of us today, but such ideas were viewed with less enthusiasm by many in the “scientific management” era in the first half of the 20th Century. The ideas of management theorist Fredrick Taylor (sometimes also called “Fordism”) dominated factories, farms and even forests. That was probably the high-water mark of the belief in the power of centralized expertise. They really believed that the logic of the machine could be applied to humans and forests and despised what they viewed as old fashioned folk habits, practiced by people with messy habits and messy minds.Nowhere was this attitude more evident than in attitudes toward fire. Fire has been a factor in the environment since before humans were part of it, and fire was commonly used as a management tool by foresters and farmers. However, fire had no role in “scientific” forestry. Well, maybe it had a role as the enemy to be fought and eliminated. Those who continued to advocate the use of fire in forestry were disparaged. They called it “Hillbilly forestry, when practiced in the South, and Paiute forestry, after the Native American practice of fire in forestry, in the West. The goal was to stamp out any particular fire by 10am the day after it was sighted, and to stamp our fire generally.This made sense at the time given the experience of disastrous fires in the early 20th Century. These, however, resulted from unique circumstances of rapaciously done timber harvests in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries and their subsequent regrowth much thicker than before, coupled with piles of slash. The land was waiting for a fire to explode. The big push came in 1910 with the “Big Burn” Washington, Idaho and Montana, which incinerated three million acres and killed 87 people. The Forest Service, then only five years old, learned more from this incident than the lesson had to teach. They learned to fight fire with a mobilization mentality, using metaphors of war.When guys like Stoddard advocated burning in the woods, it was like suggesting using fire in your living room to straighten up. Ideas on ecological imperatives of fire just had not been developed. This is where Stoddard was a great pioneer. It was an uphill fight, since excluding fire creates conditions that make it dangerous to reintroduce fire. Beneficial fires are frequent and low intensity. Once they grow thick and full of fuel, little fires become catastrophic. This meant that the fires observed often were not the good fires advocated.I digressed only a little into the discussion of fire. It is a major theme of the book (and of Stoddard’s life) although not the only one. The theme that subsumes this one is that we have learned that land management is indeed a scientific discipline, but one featuring the complexity of biology and not the mere complicated nature of physics. We are constantly learning and never finished. We know that human decisions do not determine natural outcomes, but that they do influence them. We have to get it right.I have been restoring longleaf on my own land in Virginia. Reading this book has given me insights and ideas about how to do this better. I hope to follow in the path that Stoddard and Leopold blazed.

This book was a gift for my husband. He knew about the book and is familar with the author, subject and area so he has really enjoyed it.