I started learning about the Great Forest in the early 1980s, when my husband and I homesteaded a 100 acre woodlot in the Allegheny Mountains of Virginia. Our long back border is with the 1.2 million acres of the George Washington National Forest. So, from the beginning, we straddled the philosophical and ethical differences between private and public lands. As we learned about the devastation done to the Appalachian Mountain forests by private owners who cared for nothing but money, we took lessons from the past to form our own forest management plan aimed at avoiding such excesses. And we became advocates for the protection of national forests from any repeat of the past.
I love this book because it recreates the globally unique original forests of the eastern U.S., now lost. From the 1920s through the 1940s, Braun traveled first by horse and buggy, then by Model T, from New England to Alabama, to document the original forests of the East. She particularly loved the Great Forest of the Southern Appalachians, the lushest, most biodiverse hardwood forests in the world.
She sought out the last virgin stands even as they were being logged, and as mighty American chestnut trees died out from blight. Perhaps her most surprising lesson was that not only does second-growth forest (not to mention 3rd, 4th, etc.) not indicate what originally grew there, but it can be completely misleading.
Deciduous Forests of Eastern North America was published in 1950 and describes in detail the trees and shrubs in the deciduous forests of Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, Virginia, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania. It is still widely used as a reference work today. Lucy Braun was perhaps the foremost botanist in the deciduous forest region. Her descriptions of the deciduous forest associations, from mixed mesophytic to beech-maple, are wonderful, a classic title in plant ecology. Emma Lucy Braun (1889-1971) was an American botanist and ecologist whose commitment to conservation led to the eventual preservation of over 10,000 acres in Ohio. Much of…
I love how this book turns the foundational stereotype of the backward, violent hillbilly, formed by the Hatfield-McCoy feud in 1880s West Virginia, on its head. There was friction between the two families after the Civil War, but both used courts rather than violence.
Then came the first railroad into the area in 1892, and with it came outsider capitalists intent on industrial coal mining and timbering through manipulation of political leaders. Conflicts over land and timber rights ignited the feud, as the Era of Deforestation and social destabilization in the Appalachians accelerated.
The Hatfield-McCoy feud, the entertaining subject of comic strips, popular songs, movies, and television, has long been a part of American folklore and legend. Ironically, the extraordinary endurance of the myth that has grown up around the Hatfields and McCoys has obscured the consideration of the feud as a serious historical event. In this study, Altina Waller tells the real story of the Hatfields and McCoys and the Tug Valley of West Virginia and Kentucky, placing the feud in the context of community and regional change in the era of industrialization. Waller argues that the legendary feud was not an…
A magisterial history of Indigenous North America that places the power of Native nations at its center, telling their story from the rise of ancient cities more than a thousand years ago to fights for sovereignty that continue today
The amazing photos and descriptions in the book absolutely stunned me. From 1880 to 1930, West Virginia went from being 95% forested with mostly virgin woods to 85% denuded, reflecting the fate of much of the Appalachian Mountain chain. In the early 1900s, the mill in Rainelle, WV, was the largest hardwood lumber plant in the world.
Clarkson tells this story through text and an amazing collection of photos, including of the largest tree ever cut in WV, in 1913: a white oak thirteen feet in diameter and estimated at 1,000 years old.
Outcries over damages from reckless timbering, followed by roaring fires and eroding floods, resulted in the Weeks Act of 1911, which authorized the U.S. Forest Service to purchase millions of acres of burning, eroding mountains for reforestation.
A truly entertaining and historical book with educational merit that portrays the lumber industry from its inconspicuous beginnings through a century and a half of progress. The main emphasis throughout Tumult... is on the day to day work and lives of the men engaged in the felling, skidding, loading, hauling, and sowing of timber. This book includes 257 full-page photos and a map insert.
European settlers brought the ancient tradition of the forest commons, in which peasants could gather firewood, hunt small game, and cut forage for livestock regardless of what aristocrat owned the land. It was a matter of survival.
I’ve heard Appalachians be accused of anti-environmentalism, but through interviews, attending meetings and protests, and deep research, Newfont shows how people of the Blue Ridge see national forests as a commons, and have fought to preserve those forests against destructive practices such as clear-cutting and oil and gas development.
This book helped me understand that the national forests are a modern commons, providing enormous benefits like clean air and water to all of society.
In the late twentieth century, residents of the Blue Ridge mountains in western North Carolina fiercely resisted certain environmental efforts, even while launching aggressive initiatives of their own. Kathryn Newfont examines the environmental history of this region over the course of three hundred years, identifying what she calls commons environmentalism-a cultural strain of conservation in American history that has gone largely unexplored.
Efforts in the 1970s to expand federal wilderness areas in the Pisgah and Nantahala national forests generated strong opposition. For many mountain residents the idea of unspoiled wilderness seemed economically unsound, historically dishonest, and elitist. Newfont shows that…
The rediscovery of Aristotle's works by Christians in the libraries of Muslim Spain set off an intellectual and moral revolution in the Roman Catholic Church that, in many ways, launched the modern era. Rubenstein's book tells how a remarkable series of characters, including Peter Abelard, Thomas Aquinas, and William of…
This book gave me hope for the future of new old-growth, which is the Holy Grail of forest development. Like Lucy Braun’s book, it is an overview of eastern forests, but updated to contemporary conditions. Several essays focus on the Southern Appalachians and give easily understood ecological information on defining old-growth, the survival of remnant old-growth patches, old-growth characteristics like coarse woody debris, and invasive pests and diseases.
But the most important highlight is the role of forests as the largest terrestrial carbon storage, essential against climate change, and the older the forest, the more carbon it takes out of the air and sequesters.
New, groundbreaking science on forests for forest owners and managers.
North American landscapes have been shaped by humans for millennia through fire, agriculture, and hunting. But the arrival of Europeans several centuries ago ushered in an era of rapid conversion of eastern forests to cities, farms, transportation networks, and second-growth woodlands. Recently, numerous remnants of old growth have been discovered, and scientists are developing strategies for their restoration that will foster biological diversity and reduce impacts of climate change. Forest ecologists William Keeton and Andrew Barton bring together an edited volume that breaks new ground in our understanding of eastern…
Bolgiano blends personal anecdotes with biological and human history to tell the story of the world’s most beautiful forests of oaks, hickories, maples, and many more trees that provide habitat for creatures found nowhere else on earth.
This book uncovers the complex relationships between the region's human culture, economics, and ecology, while maintaining a hopeful tone despite the terrible legacies of the past.
Two women separated by time learn what happens when they embrace their inner magic in this inspiring environmental fiction novel.
Although Sara's college degree provided her an out, she always knew she’d return home to the small logging community that is like family to her. But when she learns the…
The Dark Backward is the story of the strangest case ever tried in a court of law. The defendant, who does not speak English or any other language anyone can identify, had been found on an island no one knew existed and charged with murder, rape, and incest.
