week of 3/27/02
 
 
 

Southern forests are in danger
By Christopher Camuto
During the last 20 years, I’ve spent more than my share of time in the Southern Appalachian backcountry from Virginia to Georgia. I put down “writer” for an occupation on my tax forms, but what I should list is “walker, bird watcher, unabashed tree lover, wildflower and mushroom seeker, trout fisherman, grouse hunter, deer hunter, mid-day snoozer, mountaintop midnight stargazer, wanderer and waster of time in the woods.” But the IRS has no code number for all that.

What I like about that list is how common those extraordinary activities are for all of us — millions of people — who live in the Southeast. Is there any place on earth where so many people have access to so many river miles and so many acres of forest? A place where a relatively short drive will get you out of the 21st century and back into something like the 18th?

To cover my tracks, I have fashioned a modest writing career out of all those backcountry hours, carried off entire rivers and their forested watersheds to use in the prose with which I’ve built a few books. Along with some trout, damn few grouse and a little venison, I’ve made off with red wolves and black bears, old growth hemlock and poplar, stream banks full of bloodroot, mossy Cherokee myths, and any wild weather I could carry home in my mind. I’ve gathered it all in an attempt to connect myself and, I hope, my readers, with a world beyond the shopping malls and metastasizing highways that are barely safe enough for ordinary citizens to travel on anymore.

“In the woods,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “we return to reason and faith.” The woods are a perfect antidote to the irrationality, greed, corruption and violence that seem to grow more pernicious with each passing week. Lose contact with nature and you lose contact with the past. Lose contact with the past and you are cutting off your supply line to important values, not the clichéd values politicians prattle about for self-serving reasons, but a genuine sense of civility, thoughtfulness, respect, humility and awe that contact with undisturbed nature inspires in many people. Most of us come out of the woods a little better than we went in. I guess that’s what Emerson meant.

But the woods can’t save themselves, and they won’t be there for people to enjoy if we do not commit ourselves to preserving them. Recent reports on the Bush administration’s politically secretive and ecologically unsound forest policy suggest that our great forests are in more serious danger of abuse than they have been in a century. Following the administration’s doggedly anti-environmental lead, the U.S. Forest Service seems intent on returning to arrogant, destructive and undemocratic practices of forest management. There has been an alarming increase throughout the region in proposed road building and logging in ecologically sensitive areas, including the destruction of irreplaceable old-growth Appalachian hardwoods. There are now plans to exempt road-building from water pollution regulations.

Public opinion polls show strong citizen support for forest preservation throughout the region and an end, finally, to the ongoing destruction of the natural ecology of public lands. Ninety-eight percent of the Virginians and Tennesseans who responded to the proposed roadless rule were in favor of increased backcountry preservation. But neither the Bush administration nor the current regional leadership of the U.S. Forest Service seems to care any more for democratic principles than they do for ecological principles. They are intent on riding roughshod over the public’s wishes on environmental matters.

For the past year, the Forest Service has been devising ways to choke off public comment on its increasingly controversial activities and to reduce the right of ordinary citizens to have a say about what happens to their land and landscape. Former Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck’s philosophy of watershed protection and sound ecological management was a move in the right direction. Now the Forest Service is headed back toward the forest-destroying practice of road-building and resource extraction that destroys the aesthetic value of our forests and undermines their ecological viability.

The current trend — to manage forests in the 21st century with unsound principles from the 19th — will be the death knell of what William Faulkner called “the big woods.” Is that what people want? Or does what people want no longer matter?

It is time for public lands to be managed to protect and preserve the forested Southern Appalachian backcountry for the benefit of the millions of ordinary citizens who love and respect nature for its own sake and who want the opportunity to take a break from the increasingly dubious benefits of “growth and development” in this region. Enough corporate welfare at the public’s expense.

I think most folks have had a bellyful of “progress” shoved down their throats in the last 20 years.

See you in what’s left of the woods.

Christopher Camuto is the author of A Fly Fisherman's Blue Ridge, Another Country: Journeying Toward the Cherokee Mountains, and Hunting from Home: A Year Afield in the Blue Ridge Mountains (forthcoming from W. W. Norton).