This nine foot loblolly is about 3 years old, as you can see since John S. Quarterman can reach 8 feet high and it’s a foot higher than that: Continue reading
The state of Georgia already finances a
Conservation Reserve Program (CRP)
to plant longleaf pines with
associated native ground cover (partridge pea that the quail like,
and bunch grasses such as wiregrass that help fuel periodic fires).
However, CRP payments typically only last 10 years and not more than 15 years, and such trees usually eventually get cut for sawtimber or pulpwood. Now that’s better than cotton: much less pollution involved and far more carbon sequestered.
But even better would be to treat such replanting as real reforestration and sell carbon sequestration rights for such forests. Like what is being planned in Florida: Continue reading
Nor does any of this have to adversely affect the Georgia lumber industry.
It’s well established that the currently popular method of clearcutting
isn’t the only way. Pine forests can be managed profitably
via selective logging;
here’s
more about that.
That permits the forest to remain a forest, with native vegetation, wildlife, hunting, recreation, flood control, etc., all for more forests than we have now.
Plus carbon sequestration credits.
Cotton farmers might like growing trees better under such economic conditions.
All this is shovel-ready for stimulus. There’s no new technolgy to develop for forest planting or management. Just implement carbon-sequestration credits for ongoing sustainability, and perhaps use stimulus funding to speed planting trees.
Here’s what they look like just after they come up:
It’s a pretty big tree: Continue reading
Many people think it takes fire to make longleaf produce seeds. These pictured seedlings came from a tree that hasn’t had fire near it for more than ten years. So why so many seedlings this year? Continue reading
This one has a branch already.
Picture by Gretchen Quarterman, 7 Feb 2010, Lowndes County, Georgia.
In addition to her popular trilogy of books,
Janisse Ray has also edited a small volume about the
Moody Forest Natural Area,
which was on sale at
her talk in Moultrie the other day.
I can’t find a reference to that book online, although Moody Forest
itself features in Wild Card Quilt.
However, Gretchen and I did visit Moody Forest in 2008, and took some pictures, like this one on the right that appears to be the home of some rare red-cockaded woodpeckers:
That’s just one picture, but follow this link for the others.
Janisse Ray
spoke and read from her books in Moultrie last night.
The place was packed with a wide variety of people:
Here’s her opening poem: Continue reading
Janisse Ray plans
to speak in Moultrie and sign books.
The Georgia Center for the Book, with the support of the Georgia Humanities Council, is working with the Moultrie-Colquitt County Library System and the Moultrie Chapter of the Georgia Conservancy to present a free public lecture and book-signing by Ray on Tuesday, Jan. 26, at 7 p.m., in the library auditorium.Why should you care?Ray was born in Baxley, Ga., and is an environmentalist activist, poet, a memoirist and the award-winning author of “Ecology of a Cracker Childhood.” This book, a memoir about growing up on a junkyard in the ruined longleaf pine ecosystem of the Southeast, was published by Milkweed Editions in 1999.
Ray has won a Southeastern Booksellers Award 1999, an American Book Award 2000, the Southern Environmental Law Center 2000 Award for Outstanding Writing, and a Southern Book Critics Circle Award 2000. “Ecology of a Cracker Childhood” was a New York Times Notable Book and was chosen as the Book All Georgians Should Read.Are you tired of development trumps all? Do you like trees and home-grown vegetables? Come hear Janisse Ray!As an organizer and activist, she works to create sustainable communities, local food systems, a stable global climate, intact ecosystems, clean rivers, life-enhancing economies, and participatory democracy. She is a founding board member of Altamaha Riverkeeper and is on the board of the Environmental Leadership Center of Warren Wilson College and Satilla Riverkeeper.
The Valdosta Daily Times caught me working on being tactful.
Matt Flumerfelt’s writeup actually conflates two different county commission meetings, but gets the gist right:
The fate of the tree canopies lining the rural road were thought to hang in the balance. Several residents spoke in favor of the paving, citing dangerous conditions along the road during periods of stormy weather.Oh, the beaver will be mad. I forgot to mention the beaver.John and Gretchen Quarterman, whose ancestors lent their name to the country lane, led the fight to preserve the road in its original pristine dirt-road condition.
The forest along Quarterman Road is “a scrap of the longleaf fire forest that used to grow from southern Virginia to eastern Texas,” said John Quarterman following the ribbon-cutting ceremony. “This forest has been here since the last ice age.”
Quarterman Road, pre-paving, was the kind of dirt road down which Huckleberry Finn might be envisioned skipping barefoot with a fishing rod projecting over one shoulder.
It was the kind of road near which Thoreau might have planted a cabin.
“Many people don’t know that a longleaf pine forest has more species diversity than anything outside a tropical rain forest,” Quarterman said. “In our woods, we have five species of blueberries, …
The rest of the story is on the VDT web pages.
More pictures of the event in the previous blog entry.
For pictures of what lives in the forest, see longleaf burning gopher tortoises, snakes, frogs, bees and butterflies, spiders and scorpion, and raccoon, and beautyberry, pokeberry, passion flower, pond lily, ginger lily, Treat’s rain lily (native only to south Georgia, north Florida, and a bit of Alabama), thistle, sycamore, palmetto, mushrooms, lantana, magnolia, grapes, yellow jessamine, dogwood, and native wild azaleas.
The VDT has a good picture of Gretchen cutting the ribbon.
But it’s not over just because one road project is completed:
“More people around the county seem to be paying attention these days. Commissioners tell us that already another road in the county has had its canopy saved during paving, and the commission has promised residents of Coppage Road that if their road is paved, their canopy will be saved. Commissioners even seem to like the idea of recognizing canopy roads as a feature of quality of life for residents of the county and for visitors.”
We have a forest. The county just has roads.
Now let’s go see what they’re doing to the rest of our roads. And schools, and waste management, and biofuels, and industry…. If you’d like to help, please contact the Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange.