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Autumn Trail
AUTUMN TRAIL. The bridge is along Hurricane Knob Trail in Virginia's Mt. Rogers National Recreation Area.
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Beech Gap
BEECH GAP. The fall image is in North Carolina.
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Signpost
SIGNPOST. It's at Bent Creek in Pisgah National Forest, North Carolina
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Autumn Trail
AUTUMN TRAIL. The bridge is along Hurricane Knob Trail in Virginia's Mt. Rogers National Recreation Area.
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Liza Field Family
1969. Liza Field (left) and her family (clockwise, father Bob, brothers Jeff and Tombo; mother Betty was taking the picture) were winter hiking near Arcadia, Va.
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Moonset
MOONSET. Dawn approaches over Pisgah National Forest in the Black Balsam Area, North Carolina.
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Pisgah National Forest
OFF THE BLUE RIDGE PARKWAY. A visitor views North Carolina’s Pisgah National Forest.
The National Forest Service has celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2005. Writer and naturalist Liza Field takes a walk through its past and speaks up for its future.
All year, I walked local forest trails and creeks with the happy sense of roots one might feel at a kinperson’s 100th birthday bash. Without this amazing legacy of “family land,” very little of my childhood scenery would remain, today, in our age of rapid sprawl. And I myself would feel less concerned for all of America’s forest, without the early love of one particular place.
I spent a chunk of my childhood in the cool, tea-bag-odored woods near Arcadia, Va., in the Jefferson National Forest. This hemlock-steeped, castle-rocked place, plunged through with North Creek and Jennings Creek, their stone baths and crawdads and mountain walls, provided my family a low-cost vacation spot, a sanctuary from city life.
This enchanted forest saturated our hearts and returned home with us, providing the imagined scenery of scripture, Christmas carols, frontier history, Kipling, Mark Twain – the whole ancient human book of forests and wildlife, darkness and stars and journeys.
It was here that we acquired reverent behavior toward land and water. Something alive, a kind of majestic presence about the place, made us realize that it mattered how we lived.
Likewise, the living place mattered to us. Whatever went wrong in the human world, I felt we could always return to these woods and find our place on earth. The woods might not belong to us, but they gave us a sense of belonging and, therefore, of ownership and care.
This Land is Your Land
This mental property transfer was perhaps appropriate. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (U.S.D.A.) National Forest Service lands – some 193 million acres across the U.S. – belong to every American.That “everyone’s land” also belongs to no person is a paradox crucial to its survival, the very reason these green places have not been cut up, sold and turned into the sprawl rapidly replacing America’s historic beauty.
But land belonging to and protected by no individual also attracts claims from any number of private interests who’d like to make money off it. This very dilemma inspired the creation of America’s forest reserves in the late 19th century.
A timber culture act in 1891 contained a small amendment allowing the President to establish forest reserves from public domain land. Presidential initiative quickly followed – almost 40 million acres reserved by 1897. Timber companies were outraged. Having cut like a locust swarm through the private forestland of the continent, the early industry had assumed it would next saw through the public domain.
Gifford Pinchot thought not. A Yale man whose love for the American landscape had led him to forestry as a career, Pinchot decried timber practices of the day. Loggers would cut the most valuable trees, abandon the land and move on to the next cheap source of virgin forest, leaving wakes of erosion, floods and vanishing wildlife – some species of which would never return. Pinchot later wrote in his autobiography: “The lumbermen regarded forest devastation as normal and second growth as a delusion of fools… As for sustained yield, no such idea had ever entered their heads.”
The Organic Act of 1897 secured the reserves to protect live forest, sustainable timber, and “favorable conditions of water flows.” The notion that public land merited protection jarred the day’s mindset of boundless frontier and endless resources free to anyone ambitious enough to go haul them away. Timber theft from these lands remained rampant.
The General Land Office, which understood little about forestry – or ethics – managed these reserves. The nation’s only two foresters worked out of the U.S.D.A., with no forest to manage.
Thanks to the urgings of Gifford Pinchot and his friend President Teddy Roosevelt, Congress authorized the transfer of all forest reserves to the U.S.D.A. in 1905, bringing real forest and foresters together. The Forest Service was born, christened by its first chief, Pinchot. Roosevelt, who considered such conservation efforts his greatest contribution as President, worked with Pinchot to chart the agency’s role of “caring for the land and serving people.”
Our Time
Today, the National Forest both benefits from a growing appreciation (in every sense) of the forest’s value, and faces an increasing array of threats to its health and survival.
Even the prescience of Pinchot and Roosevelt, who wished to guard public forest as watershed, did not foresee the surrounding asphalt, development, deforestation, river-siphoning and aquifer-draining that would threaten the nation’s water supplies a century later. Today, more than 60 million Americans depend directly on National Forest watersheds for drinking supply.
How many flood- and drought-relief dollars these forests save the U.S. and her communities yearly remains incalculable. Such factors have only begun figuring into forest worth as NTVs (non-timber values).
Other NTVs difficult to quantify include the complex interplay among climate, air quality, wildlife, insect invasions and fire ecology. Ornithologists, for instance, point out that a denuded landscape reduces breeding habitat for many songbirds whose numbers are in rapid decline. Songbirds, meanwhile, significantly reduce a forest’s insect damage to timber.More quantifiable NTVs include the growing recreation business, whose local jobs and dollars now far surpass those offered by timber operations.Meanwhile, a number of religious organizations have called for a valuing of forest beyond the dollar, as places of inspiration, solitude, silence, beauty and other qualities that keep people from going insane. “These are God’s great cathedrals. The giant trees, streams and creatures are God’s work,” says Nan Gustafson of the Religious Campaign for Forest Conservation.
In a world where such “outdoor cathedrals” will only grow more rare, and whose populations are suffering costly surges in depression, violence and stress-disorders, whose children have rarely seen a star, heard a whippoorwill, or waded in a creek, perhaps this deeper valuing of a live forest will prove the more accurate accounting method.
Owning Up:The Ownership Society
Today, we Americans look around in a daze at the vanishment of childhood “countrysides” we assumed would last forever. Anyone over 30 can realize not only is the America of frontier days gone, the rural roads of his childhood, the mountainsides and hollows, have given way to sprawl in a handful of decades.
Our nation loses more than 4,000 acres of greenspace to development, daily, or three acres per minute. This liquidation of private habitat has left National Forest a default lifeboat to numerous wild species who can’t live on lawns and barren asphalt.
Public lands have also become a refuge for sprawl-weary people seeking a breath of air, wildness and majesty, views of stars, room to think and reflect. Hunters, fishermen, geologists, hikers, scouts, churches, campers, paddlers, equestrians, botanists and birdwatchers now flock to public lands in quest of those priceless qualities our private landscape has lost.
Since our "family land" does not ask us a fee, since it belongs-and does not belong- to all of us, we might consider not merely our rights to the place, but our responsibilities - how we might not just use, but guard it.
Protecting our last natural areas, public and private, may be the most urgent call to our generation - and the greatest privilege. Such care not only allows us to particpate in the history of our American landscape, it humbles us with the human gratitude that comes from remembering our place.