EDITOR’S NOTE: This story originally appeared in our July/August 2012 issue. It is being presented again here as part of our 30th Anniversary celebration.
What if every county in the Blue Ridge region were home to at least one 500-year forest? The foundation carrying that name has already helped several property owners toward taking part in that effort. The result could be a magnificent canopy of old forest, including stands of blight-resistant chestnut and elms.
The Old Gillenwater Place – a tin-roof, weatherboard saltbox with 90 years behind it – was kind of a wreck when Steve Brooks and Maxine Kenny first saw it. In the back bedroom, blackberry vines erupted through broken window panes. No one had lived there for decades.
No matter. The real draw was the property’s 100-odd acres of chestnut oaks, poplars, buckeyes, cherries and maples, which swept up along the north side of Clinch Mountain in Southwestern Virginia. Some of it had been fenced and farmed long ago, but trees had reclaimed the hillside fields, and they were nearly mature.
A broad, rocky section nearest the top of the limestone ridge had never been logged at all. Those big trees were “old growth,” original forest, rare even here in rural Scott County. Rare anywhere east of the Mississippi, in fact. They bought the property in 1980.
The more deeply the couple fell in love with the new homeplace, though, the more they wondered about how to protect their forest. They had already seen too many vivid examples of scalped, eroded mountainsides in the Appalachians, on both private and national forest land. A neighbor offered to sell them an additional 90 acres – or, he said, he could sell it to the loggers. So they bought it, too.
“We knew that no matter what, we were never going to have this logged,” Maxine says now, but their imagination strayed a good bit further. “We thought it would be nice if it were here forever, though we didn’t know anything about how to do that.”
At about that time, Rick Helms and Carolyn Phillips were midway in a 20-year transit from Chicago to Houston, then Manhattan, though their heads were in the mountains. She was a Wall Street journal editor from a cotton farm in Crockett County, Tenn. He was a professional waiter who grew up playing in the woods around Salem, Va., and going on family trips down the Blue Ridge Parkway. He grew trees on their apartment’s roof, five stories above the streets of New York.
“New York City closes in on me- the concrete gets to be too much,” Phillips says. “It was time to escape that, to something more life-affirming.” So they came to Albemarle County, Va., looking for oh, 25 acres.
“We ended up with 200 acres of old hardwoods,” Helms says, still sounding a bit surprised more than a decade later. “I started trying to educate myself to be a good steward of the forest.”
That may have seemed odd to some of the neighbors. A forest can fetch from $400 to $1,000 an acre from logging outfits. Even more important: This land south of fast-growing Charlottesville was ready for a real estate brochure: “Beautiful views of the Blue Ridge, 18 subdivided building sites, and an all-season stream.” The property extends up to Castle Rock and along the crest of Long Arm Mountain. Back in the rocky hollows, there were stands of old growth trees.
Rick attended seminars and workshops to figure out his new role. Most were taught by foresters trained by the logging industry. “So when they talked about the health of the forest they were really talking about preparing trees to cut,” Carolyn recalls.
After six years they lucked onto a meeting of a group called the 500-Year Forest Foundation, however. “Someone there said, what if your goal is, never cut? A light bulb went off,” Carolyn says. “It’s a different attitude. It’s that the health of the forest has nothing to do with maximizing return.” Maxine and Steve had made the same discovery. Theirs was one of the first 500-Year Forests.
Some would call it a romantic idea, even grandiose, but for others it’s as practical as dirt: Allow a forest to age and renew on its own schedule, to provide habitat for the rarer plants and animals that are adapted to these scarce conditions. Give over the task of felling trees to high winds, ice storms and lightning strikes instead of chainsaws and bulldozers. Set a landscape out beyond the reach of the next generation of humans- and of the ones after that- as the forest ecosystem reassembles itself over the centuries.
The foundation has helped several owners like Maxine, Steve, Carolyn and Rick arrange and manage a conservation easement for their forests that eliminates the possibility of development and logging, no matter who acquires it in the future. In legalese, these arrangements are called an “encumbrance,” which sounds like an obstacle or a burden. For the property owners who make the commitment it’s the opposite: an enhancement and a liberation.
“As the centuries pass, these forests will become what we think of as ‘new old growth,”‘ says Ted Harris, a canny Durham retiree with a Cheshire-cat grin and the persistence of an old oak. He is the originator and CEO of the foundation. The creation of some 500-Year Forests can absorb a year or more of patient negotiation.
“By some estimates, less than one percent of our original ancient forests remain, in national parks and wilderness areas,” he says. “Private owners can help restore our inventory of old growth. This protects biological diversity and habitat, and provides science research opportunities. Those aging trees pull in carbon, too, and that helps as we fight global warming.”
“I think it’s just understanding the land, and where we’ve come from,” Steve says. “People at first would ask me if I worried that it would affect the value of the land. But if anything, I told them, it will increase the value of the land.
“I just think it’s a good feeling,” he adds, “knowing that this land is never going to be developed or timbered, and it’s all going to become old-growth forest. I’d like to see a lot more of that.”
Harris and the Foundation are always on the hunt for more candidates with at least a hundred acres of maturing trees and a conservation mind-set.
“What we really need is at least one 500-Year Forest in every county in the Appalachians,” he says. State and federal tax laws may offer handsome incentives for conservation easements. The foundation helps orchestrate that, collaborates with landowners to develop management plans for their property, and documents the ecology with formal botanical surveys. Finally, the foundation provides crucial support and planning in the battle against invasive species such as ailanthus, Pawlonia, Japanese stilt-grass, garlic mustard, mile-a-minute weed and dozens of other uninvited aliens that disrupt forest ecosystems.
Rick and Carolyn have helped a couple of neighbors decide to place conservation easements on their forests. Another recent visitor was inspired to contemplate taking the next step, to a 500-Year Forest designation.
What will these valleys and ridges be like, in five centuries? They’re optimistic: a magnificent canopy of big old protected forest, of course, with stands of blight resistant American chestnuts and elms. With some willing owners, it could stretch from here over the next several ridges to another current 500-Year Forest six miles away, now owned by Hal and Jean Kolb.
Outsized dreams?
“Well, I always call this my water and air factory,” Rick says. “Clean air and water don’t just come from nowhere. They actually have to be manufactured by the planet. So: Make no small plans!”
Stephen Paul Nash is the author of “Blue Ridge 2020: An Owner’s Manual,” University of North Carolina Press, and “Millipedes and Moon Tigers: Science and Policy in the Age of Extinction,” University of Virginia Press. He is a member of the 500-Year Forest Foundation’s board of directors.
