The practice of converting hardwood forests to pine plantations has long been criticized by scientists and conservationists in the Southeast who maintain that pine monocultures fail to provide adequate habitat for wildlife, fail to protect water quality as a natural forest would, and require heavy use of pesticides and fertilizers. Photo courtesy of the Dogwood Alliance.

John Adams (right), President, and Allen Hershkowitz (left), Senior Scientist, Natural Resources Defense Council. They were two of the chief negotiators of the agreement with Bowater to improve forestry practices on the Cumberland Plateau. Photo courtesy Natural Resources Defense Council.

This Bowater facility in Calhoun, Tennessee, is one of several pulp and paper plants owned by the company on the Cumberland Plateau. Bowater is the first corporation to reach an agreement with conservationists to protect native forests on the Cumberland Plateau. Photo by Kent Kessinger.

The Cumberland Plateau has been turning heads lately. Not since Daniel Boone began leading settlers through the Cumberland Gap, the nation’s first route west through the Appalachian Mountains, has the region received this much attention. Beloved by generations of Southerners, the Cumberland Plateau is now recognized across the country not only as a national treasure, but also as a region facing tremendous threats.

In 2004, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) named the Cumberland Plateau a BioGem, one of the twelve most endangered regions in the Western Hemisphere. They joined the efforts of local and regional organizations to tackle one of the biggest threats to the region, the conversion of rich native hardwood forests to sterile pine plantations for the paper industry.

In June 2005, after fifteen months of negotiations, NRDC and the Dogwood Alliance signed a landmark agreement with timber industry giant Bowater, the single biggest landowner on the Plateau. Bowater pledged to end the clearcutting and conversion of hardwood forests to pine plantations on all of the company’s land in the United States within three years, stop buying timber from pine plantations established by other landowners after 2007, limit spraying of chemicals and fertilizers, and map and protect ecologically critical areas on their lands.

Appalachian Voices executive director Mary Anne Hitt sat down at NRDC’s headquarters in New York with NRDC president John Adams and Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist with NRDC who is heading up their Cumberland Plateau BioGem project. They talked about these successes and the challenges and opportunities currently facing the region.

Hitt: Why did NRDC, a large national environmental organization with considerable resources and stature, decided to focus on the Cumberland Plateau?

Adams: That’s simple. Allen is an expert on paper and garbage, and he worked with a group of experts on an analysis to determine the areas that were most important to protect from the impacts of the paper industry. The Cumberland Plateau was the highest ranking area and wasn’t getting the kind of protection that it needed. Timbering at a high level was coming to the region, chip mills were being built, the big timber companies were moving in, real estate development was ramping up, and the population was growing.
There are only three or four other places in North America that offer a comparable opportunity for protecting species and an important landscape. Considering the extraordinary biodiversity of the area, we decided that focusing on the Cumberland Plateau was the right thing for us to do.

Hershkowitz: The analysis was driven by biology and commercial pressures. We followed the science, and we followed the markets, and that’s how the BioGem boundaries were defined. There was no predetermined notion about what should be included and what shouldn’t be included.

Adams: However, I also happen to have personal ties to the region. I attended law school at Duke University and my wife is a seventh generation North Carolinian, the seventh generation on the family farm near the Nantahala National Forest. Her father was a forester, the head of the Forest Service’s Southeast Research Station in Asheville. He won a Mary Reynolds Babcock Award for his work on stopping clear cutting a decade or so ago.

Hitt: My father was the chief scientist for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, so I imagine they knew each other.

Adams: Without a doubt. His name was Walton Smith, and he really had a big impact on that part of the world. His daughter, my wife Patricia, was part of the founding, with Paul Carlson, of the Land Trust for the Little Tennessee. So personally I was thrilled that we would be focusing on the Plateau, and that the Little Tennessee was included in the BioGem.

Hitt: How have you been received in the region?

Adams: We’ve proceeded carefully so that when we act, we act as much as possible in accordance with the feelings of local communities. We have 117,000 members in the seven states that make up the BioGem. We have a lot of support from environmental groups throughout the Southeast. Combining our resources and technical skills with the groups in the region – Dogwood Alliance, Appalachian Voices, Save Our Cumberland Mountains (SOCM), Southern Environmental Law Center, and others – makes a lot of sense to us.

Hershkowitz: We were asked to get involved in the Southeast, not only by grassroots environmentalists, but also by state legislators in Tennessee and local businesses. We bring a great deal of strength to the issues we take on, and we have a strong track record of success. We can immediately communicate to 1.2 million members, and our board of trustees and members are very dedicated and influential.

Hitt: How did that strength come into play in changing the way Bowater manages their forests on the Cumberland Plateau?

Adams: We started to work with Bowater because they were the biggest operator on the Plateau, and they were in the eye of the storm with our sister organizations. The determined efforts of the Dogwood Alliance and SOCM made a tremendous difference. They get a lot of credit for getting us down there and being part of this partnership through a long and sometimes difficult process.

The governor of Tennessee, Phil Bredesen, had indicated that he was troubled about the amount of cutting on the Cumberland Plateau when he flew over it about a year and a half ago, and when he sent that signal it had a big effect. He saw the problems and began a fund for the state of Tennessee to try to purchase some of those lands. Without Bredesen’s interest in this, it would have been very hard for Bowater to step forward.
Bowater turned out to be an organization that had a real interest in solving the problems on the Plateau. Forestry is going to continue there, and it should, but the right approach to forestry ought to mean the great trees are left and the biodiversity is protected. That’s been the goal, and we’ve worked very hard to achieve it. Our membership was instrumental in that success by being in touch with Bowater.

Hershkowitz: When we wrote Bowater and asked them to sit down, it was an offer of collaboration and conciliation. That was true of the second letter we wrote them, and it was also true of the third letter we wrote them. It was only after we didn’t hear back from them in that six-week period that we then made a little bit of noise. Once they heard that noise, they understood that we were not going away and we were not going to be ignored.

Adams: Everyone in the region, from land trusts and state governments to Members of Congress, needs to be thinking about how this agreement creates new avenues for protecting some of that landscape. This is an opportunity to really move the level of timber operating to a Bowater standard.

Hitt: Would that include leveling the playing field with legislation to regulate forest management?

Adams: It could be legislation, but it could also be additional agreements with other timber operators, the creation of county and state forestry lands, or the enlargement of national parks or national forests. This is an opportunity for the Cumberland Plateau to look at itself on a regional scale, the same way people are looking at the New England forests, or the Everglades, or salmon country in the West. Here’s a chance for the Cumberland Plateau states to get together and preserve their heritage, which is what’s at stake.

Hershkowitz: Right now, I don’t know of a region in the United States that’s under more ecological stress than the South. It’s a powder keg of environmental pressures. Population is growing – some of the counties in the Southeast are among the fastest growing in the nation. Large forested and rural areas are being converted to coal mines, pine plantations, strip malls, and highways, not to mention being battered by the pressures of climate change. More than 90% of the landscape is available for commercial or industrial uses. So you’ve got a confluence of pressures that’s unprecedented for the area.

Hitt: Obviously this is a regional issue with much bigger implications or NRDC would not have taken it on. What are some of the larger, global implications of what is happening on the Cumberland Plateau?

Adams: To the extent that one of the largest forested areas in the United States is not cut, or is cut sustainably so that it has a green future, that will have a major impact on climate change because this vast forest will be able to store carbon that would otherwise go into the atmosphere and warm the planet. That could ultimately provide a tax advantage and an environmental advantage to the Cumberland Plateau states.

There is also an opportunity for the South to take a leadership role in environmental stewardship. Politically, the leaders of the Southern states are the leaders of this country, including our most recent presidents. They’re the ones who govern. The Senate majority leader is Bill Frist of Tennessee, and if Frist made a decision that the Cumberland Plateau should get some form of legislative protection, he could make it happen. Senator Lamar Alexander is a great Tennessean who cares about the environment. If they would join with other Southern senators, they could shape the future of the whole region. It would make an unbelievable difference.

Hitt: Looking to the future, what do you see as the major challenges and opportunities facing environmental protection in the Southeast?

Adams: There are a lot of resource issues in the South: mountaintop removal coal mining, water pollution, factory farms, timbering in the wrong way, sprawl and the building of communities on the tops of the mountains that destroy the scenic quality of traveling to the South. Highway building is opening up rural areas and it’s becoming a second home paradise – the weather’s good, the countryside is lovely, the people are nice – and there’s going to continue to be a mass movement to the South, especially by the older population. Obviously this is going to dramatically change the economics of the South. Air pollution in the South is scandalous. If you go to Utah you can see 135 miles, and yet we can’t get those standards for clean air in the South.

Those are the issues that we need to address very, very quickly. With the combined creativity of the universities and nonprofit organizations, we have the opportunity to have a very big impact on some of these problems. The South will be instrumental in addressing the big global challenges – climate, energy, protection of large landscapes, biodiversity, and oceans – and if we don’t deal with those in your lifetime…

Hitt: We’d better.

Adams: Yes, we’d better.

Hitt: I understand that you’re handing off the torch as president of NRDC and moving to a new position next year.

Adams: I’m going to become the founding director. I’ll be working on climate change and land use issues, and I’ll be an advisor to my friend Allen Hershkowitz on the Cumberland Plateau BioGem. After thirty-five years, it will be nice to step back from the day-to-day management and work on projects where I feel like I can make the biggest difference. I’m looking forward to it.

Hitt: We wish you all the best!

Photo courtesy of Terry Spivey, USDA Forest Service, www.forestryimages.org
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Wild animals appeal to us for various reasons- the freedom of birds, the gracefulness of deer, the majesty of elk, and the strength and danger associated with bears. The fact that wild cats seem to possess all these characteristics in one animal may explain our fascination with them. Lions, for example, have been symbolic of royalty for centuries. An automobile manufacturer has enhanced the allure of its product by associating it with the jaguar. And who living in Appalachia has not heard numerous panther tales? The mention of big cats usually sends our imagination to exotic sites such as the savannas of Africa or the jungles of southeast Asia. But at least one cat- the bobcat- lives in Appalachia and is more prevalent than most people are aware.

A wild reputation

The bobcat is about twice the size of a domestic cat, and is so named because of its short tail. A defining feature of the bobcat is the antenna-like dark hairs that extend from the points of its ears. These hairs actaully function as antennas, allowing the cat to pick up faint sounds that it could not otherwise hear.

Both “bobcat” and “wildcat” refer to the species Lynx rufus, although “wildcat” seems to be the more common term in Appalachia, as attested by the numerous creeks, roads, and ridges with “wildcat” in their names. The bobcat’s scientific name “lynx” can be confusing. Used as a common name, “lynx” refers to the Canada lynx, a different species found only in the most extreme northern reaches of Appalachia. “Wildcat” actually has a double-meaning, referring both to its distinction from the domestic cat (which, incidentally, descended from wild cats in Africa), and also to its disposition. The bobcat has a reputation as a ferocious cat. Its predatory attacks are rapid and vicious. In 1700 Carolina explorer John Lawson noted that the bobcat “is quite different from those in Europe; being more nimble and fierce, and larger.” Interestingly, although Lawson traveled over much of Carolina, the name he used for the bobcat was “mountain-cat,” despite the fact that the bobcat resides throughout North America.

A recent encounter with a bobcat illustrates many of the habits and behaviors of the animal. One evening around dusk I came upon a rabbit that seemed preoccupied; I was very close to the animal but it showed no fear of me and yet had a frantic look. Focusing on the rabbit, I failed at first to notice a bobcat emerging from the woods only a few feet away. Startled, I stepped back, but the wildcat was so concentrated on the rabbit that it seemed oblivious to my presence. The rabbit quickly darted away with the bobcat bounding close behind.

This bobcat sighting is notable because, after living in the same community for many years, I had never seen a wildcat nor heard of anyone else in the community who had seen one. “Wood’s ghost” was a common nickname for the bobcat in the past, due to its secretive nature. Even when much of North America contained vast uninhabited tracts, the bobcat was rarely seen. Nevertheless, the apparent scarcity of the wildcat is deceptive. The animal is not endangered and quite common; in fact, some states designate a hunting season for the cat. In the past, the cat was hunted because it often preyed on farm animals and, on rare occasions, humans. In addition, early settlers and Indians believed that various bobcat body parts would remedy many diseases. John Lawson, for example, noted that bobcat fur worn around the body would relieve “weak and cold stomachs.”

Haunts of the wood’s ghost

Bobcats thrive in areas with a mixture of both mature forests and young successional forests. Hollow trees found in older woods provide den sites, in addition to rock outcroppings and caves. Brushy young forests and meadow openings supply habitat for small mammals that the cats eat. Anyone with a domestic cat knows that the animal tends to be more active at dawn and dusk, spending much of the daytime napping. This behavior is characteristic of bobcats as well, which accounts for their hidden nature and aids them in hunting more effectively.

Like all cats, the bobcat is a meat-eater. Its indiscriminate diet consists of whatever it can catch- small mammals, snakes, birds, an occasional weakened deer, and rabbit, its staple food. The bobcat’s taste for rabbit is literally legendary. A Cherokee animal myth describes a deal between a bobcat and a rabbit whereby the wildcat agrees to free the rabbit, and in exchange the rabbit tricks a flock of turkeys into coming close enough for the bobcat to snare. An Uncle Remus tale involving Brer Rabbit and a wildcat has a very similar story line.

Wildcat lore has been somewhat overshadowed through the years by lore of its relative, the cougar. If the panther had never inhabited Appalachia, our big cat legends would be bobcat tales. However, the importance of the bobcat to our cultural (and/or natural heritage) should not be underestimated. Though its presence is often concealed to the eyes, the “wood’s ghost”, who prowls just beyond view retains an element of danger and an air of mystery.

Participants in the recent sustainable forestry workshop on the Cumberland Plateau hike through a healthy, native working forest. Photo by Foster Hunt.

Forester Clint Trammel advocates an ecologically sensitive brand of forestry that is more concerned with what’s left behind than what’s taken out during a logging operation. Photo by Foster Hunt.
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Sunlight filters through the orange, red, and yellow hued forest canopy on a clear Saturday afternoon in eastern Morgan County, Tennessee. Fallen leaves crunch beneath the hiking boots of a group of foresters, landowners and conservationists that have come to learn how this forest is being managed. Standing atop a wooded ridge in the Emory River watershed of the Cumberland Plateau, one would never guess that the forest, which consists of trees of many ages and sizes, all of which are native to the region, was the site of a timber sale just a few years ago.

This tract of land, 30,000 acres in all, was showcased on October 29, 2005, as part of a sustainable forestry seminar hosted by four conservation organizations in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The purpose of the event was to provide private landowners an opportunity to learn about a method of ecologically sustainable—yet still profitable—forest management that is gradually gaining popularity in the southern Appalachians and the Cumberland Plateau.

Purchased in 1997 by a timberland investment management organization (TIMO) called the Forestland Group, the Emory River watershed land is certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) and therefore managed according to an international standard of ecological and social criteria.

“The Forestland Group states two objectives in our mission statement,” says staff member Kaarsten Turner Dalby, “to achieve the highest rate of return for the investors while maintaining the biological productivity of the forest, and to leave the forest in better shape than we bought it.”

The Forestland Group uses funds from large investors such as Yale, Stanford, and Duke Universities to acquire forested areas that are then logged using sustainable methods for a shared profit. They currently hold 1.8 million acres in eleven states, and every acre is FSC certified.

Forestry consultant Jake Almond, hired by the Forestland Group to manage the Emory River watershed property, notes that the greatest impacts logging has had on the timber sale sites are the pathways cut in for logging trucks, and the skid trails created to remove felled trees. “There is very little visible tree damage,” he says. It takes only a casual look around the property to confirm the truth of that statement—the forest still stands intact.

Reaching Out to Landowners

The forestry seminar featured a presentation by Clint Trammel, a widely acclaimed forester known for his management of the 160,000-acre Pioneer Forest in the Ozarks of Missouri over the last 35 years.

“When we first purchased a lot of the land in Pioneer Forest in 1954, we had about 2,200 board feet of timber per acre,” Trammel explains, using a forestry term for measurement of timber volume. “Today we have 4,800 board feet per acre, and some of our stands go up to 10,000 to 14,000 board feet. In spite of the harvesting—and we’ll harvest anywhere from five million to eight million board feet per year—we’ve increased our volume from 2,200 to 4,800 board feet per acre over the last 50 years.”

“What we do is go in with each harvest and remove the poorest quality timber on the harvest site,” continues Trammel. “We’ve done that from day one. After fifty years, the result of this type of management is that the poor quality timber we take out today is in a lot of cases better than what we were leaving when we first started.”

In contrast with widespread clear-cuts that are commonly used to log timber on the Cumberland Plateau – particularly on forests owned by private timber companies – Pioneer Forest uses a method called single-tree selection that marks individual trees for cutting based on their health and the benefit of removal to nearby trees. Using this approach, the Pioneer Forest has been able to turn a healthy annual profit while still maintaining a focus on forest health and conservation.

“Our approach is very strongly environmental, because if we have to make a decision between revenue and the forest, we’ll favor the forest every time,” says Trammel. About 6,000 acres of Pioneer Forest are reserved in natural areas and state parks, and roughly 3,000 acres are set aside from logging to use as a standard to measure how the rest of the forest is progressing. A forest inventory has been conducted on the land every five years since 1954.

A Transferable Technique?

The question on landowners’ minds here in the Appalachian region, however, is whether the kind of sustainable forestry practiced at Pioneer Forest is transferable to the Cumberland Plateau and the Appalachian Mountains. Trammel admits there are differences in forest type and climate, “We get oak regeneration in Missouri way easier than they do here in Tennessee,” says Trammel. “Here it’s cooler and wetter, so they get oak regeneration, but they get a lot of other species as well.”

But with slight modifications, it’s already being demonstrated that single-tree selection is a viable management technique at this forest on the Cumberland Plateau. “You could say that what’s practiced here is an adaptation of the way we do it at home,” says Trammel. “The results we’re seeing out here are very similar to the results that we get in our sustainable management practices at Pioneer.”

Small clear-cuts are occasionally used on the Emory River property to open up the canopy and allow in the sunlight needed to encourage oak regeneration. In Pioneer Forest, where oaks proliferate more easily, clear-cutting is only used as a last resort in cases of disease, or after destruction left by a major storm. Under FSC certification, the small patches of clear cuts used on the Emory River watershed property can never exceed ten acres, a size that is dwarfed by the huge swaths of forest spanning thousands of acres that are clear-cut annually on many industrial timber sites in the Southeast.

Nancy Gilliam, co director of the Model Forest Policy Program(MFPP), one of the groups that co-hosted the seminar, believes that an important part of conserving native forests is exposing landowners to sustainable forestry techniques such as those used by Trammel.

“We want to give landowners, community leaders, and decision-makers alternatives to the destructive clear-cutting and conversion practices commonly used by big timber companies,” says Gilliam. “We have been looking across the country for those forests that have the most ecologically sensitive and sustainable management practices and Pioneer was the best model that we could find.”

But the goals of the Model Forest Policy Program go beyond just educating individual landowners, especially in the Southeast where forest management on private lands is almost entirely unregulated. The group promotes changes in forest policy at the local and state level and believes that showing decision-makers alternatives to the conventional, and far more destructive, forestry techniques is a first step toward changing governmental policy.

“Decision-makers, particularly those in charge of protecting water quality, have a hard time doing their job when big timber companies clear-cut local watersheds and denude the local forests and stream banks,” says Bud Watson, co-director of MFPP. “We think that a lot of local government officials as well as town planning boards would love to learn more about forestry techniques that don’t destroy water quality but are still able to turn a healthy profit.”

“We try to provide those decision-makers with the tools and information they need to make better forest policy decisions for their communities,” adds Watson.

For the landowners and conservationists who attended the seminar, such as John Johnson who sits on the board of directors of the Dogwood Alliance, the timber operation was clearly impressive.

“It’s nice to walk through a place that’s been logged where you can’t even tell, unless you look real close,” remarked Johnson.