The Big Tree Farm

In Alabama, the pine tree is king. Once a land covered by old-growth forests, the state is being turned into a giant tree farm where identical pines dominate the once diverse landscape, and the money they produce dominates the economy and the power structure.

For more than a year, Katherine Bouma of the Montgomery Advertiser investigated the forestry industry. In the process, she examined the ecological impact of devoting more and more of Alabama’s forests to farms of a single species of tree, the loblolly pine.

 

Montgomery, Ala. — Alabama, one of the most ecologically diverse places on Earth, is rapidly being converted into a giant farm of identical trees that are extinguishing the state’s native species.

From the Appalachian Mountains to the Gulf of Mexico, Alabama is home to an incredible variety of plants and animals. But at the same time that the wood products industry boasts that Alabama is growing more trees than ever, scientists are noting dramatic declines in many species, particularly aquatic and forest-dwelling animals.

Increasingly, many are pointing a finger at the timber-growing practices that have steadily altered the state’s woodlands, making them less healthy as forests, and possibly, as businesses. “We are definitely ruining the forests that way,” said Edward Wilson, a native Alabamian who is one of the world’s foremost experts on biological diversity. “Reforestation with one species is roughly the equivalent of building a line of Wal-Marts — as far as biological diversity is concerned.”

During the past 18 months, the Montgomery Advertiser investigated the state of the state’s forests. Our findings include:

▼ The number of acres in pine tree farms nearly doubled during the 1980s, and in 35 years, 70 percent of the state’s woodlands will be pine plantations, the U.S. Forest Service estimates. Already, one-fifth of the total tree mass in the state is loblolly pine.

▼ Tree farms are replacing the state’s natural forests, harming the state’s ecology, scientists say.

▼ Tree farms have not brought the expected prosperity to Alabama. But for better or worse, the state is wedded to the timber industry. Nearly 66,000 Alabamians count on wood products manufacturing for $1.8 billion in wages, and timber companies are a primary source of employment in many of the poorest counties.

▼ Timber companies continue to take advantage of deals the state offered while wooing them. Out-of-state corporations and local timber landowners alike avoid paying even as much tax on land and buildings as private citizens do.

▼ Alabama is number three in the nation for the number of animals protected under the Endangered Species Act, and biologists also are seeing population declines in common forest animals. Scientists have no idea how many species Alabama is losing, or even how many unique species might still be undiscovered, because there’s no system to catalog the state’s bounty.

Every year, 280,000 acres of Alabama are clear-cut: Loggers fell every tree on the land and often burn or poison whatever plants remain. No laws or rules protect Alabama’s forests from loggers who fail to take care to protect the plants, animals, or water systems.

Even the tree crop is increasingly unhealthy. From 1972 to 1985, the annual death rate of standing pine trees in Alabama grew by nearly two-thirds.

 

Native Forests

Things were different 100 years ago.

Timber companies that came to Alabama intending to cut every merchantable tree did not replant the land with species unnatural to the area. And unless they planned to convert the land to agricultural use, they did not take measures to prevent the native forest from rejuvenating.

“All the genetic diversity was still there,” said George Russell, forest practices chairman for the Lone Star Sierra Club. “It naturally regenerated with the exact same gene pool.”

But even those harvests were more destructive than anyone knew, scientists have discovered in the first studies of the subject. They found that native plants and animals might never recover or return to land after a clear cut, contrary to the reassurances of foresters. “I just don’t think foresters have been very interested in these issues,” said Susan Bratton, a University of North Texas forest ecologist.

Even more menacing to the overall diversity of the state are the so-called pine plantations that don’t allow genetic variety. Now, timber companies usually replant using seeds all drawn from a single super tree, one that has grown particularly straight and tall, particularly quickly. Any other plants or animals in a tree farm are considered weeds or pests, to be exterminated by fire or chemicals.

Timber companies have been cutting Alabama’s woods for more than a century. Since Reconstruction, they have flocked to the South on programs designed to bring jobs and prosperity. But neither the cut-out-and-get-out period of the 19th century nor the pulp and paper mills built after World War II have brought that wealth.

“If you look at the indices of economic health, almost any will put Alabama and Mississippi at the bottom,” said Southern historian Wayne Flynt.

Yet the state has grown dependent on the jobs and revenue forestry does provide. Trees are the state’s number one cash crop, and 214,000 people own woods they might consider an investment.

The industry benefits from deals that allow it more freedom from regulations here than in almost any other state. At the same time, the industry is dodging the taxes companies would have to pay in neighboring states. To keep those perks, the companies make political donations and hire lobbyists to work with the legislature, which oversees the departments charged with watching over the industry.

Scientists and industry officials agree that more research is needed on many of the troubles surrounding the industry: poverty, crop failures, and dying wildlife. Some are proposing more careful timbering that maintains a healthy forest throughout all stages of the harvest. But more and more scientists and conservationists are saying the only way to save the state is to set aside natural sites with historic significance and for preservation of plants and animals — now.

“You’ve got to think ahead and recognize that saving and maintaining natural areas of Alabama is going to have a more serious and sustained, larger, long-term income yield than stripping and developing it will,” said Edward Wilson of Harvard University. “I’m sure the state has been pretty careful about maintaining its oldest and most historic buildings. It should look at its environmental treasures with equal fervor because some of these are literally 10,000 years old and irreplaceable.”

 

“Burning Down the Library”

Alabama’s wild plants and animals are disappearing at a frightening rate, scientists say. And we may never even know what we’ve lost since we don’t know what we have.

“We’re burning down the library: We don’t even know what’s in there,” said David Cameron Duffy, a New York biologist who recently completed studies of Southern forests.

As pine plantations blanket the state, supplanting natural forests, evidence pours in that Alabama is losing its native plants, animals, and even entire ecosystems. “There’s not a species in Alabama that’s not affected,” said George Folkerts, a field biologist at Auburn University and former forester. “It’s the most wide-ranging change to the environment that’s going on in the Southeast.”

Alabama has 86 plants and animals listed as threatened and endangered, placing it behind only the diverse states of Florida and Hawaii. Songbirds, wildflowers, frogs, salamanders, mollusks, and mice are disappearing from Alabama in disturbing numbers.

“For the last 20 years, a lot of our forest species have been declining on an average of two to four percent a year,” said Jim Woehr, non-game program coordinator for the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources. “Do you know what that means? We’ve lost over half of them.”

Although wildlife biologists agree that the numbers of all sorts of wildlife are declining, no scientist has solid numbers on most species. Most plants and animals in Alabama remain uncounted — some probably even undiscovered. “I think it’s very safe to say that a significant percentage of our native fauna and flora are in decline,” said Scott Gunn, coordinator of the Natural Heritage program, a division of the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources supported by the nonprofit Nature Conservancy. “What percentage? Nobody knows. Nobody’s doing the work. We don’t have the money or the time to gather the cold, hard facts to present them so people will believe it whether they want to or not.”

While species have been declining, the number of trees and total acres of Alabama covered by woods have increased. But many plants and animals can’t survive on tree farms or among the tiny young seedlings and sprouts that boost the total tree count.

A tree farm is better habitat for animals than any sort of development, biologists say. But without diversity of plants, trees of different sizes and ages, good soil, and a variety of prey species, most species won’t survive.

The number of different kinds of plants and animals in a forest usually is directly proportional to the number of layers of foliage, Woehr said. “In a tree farm, you don’t have the ground cover, the sub-canopy trees, you don’t have the shrub layer below that, so that instead of having maybe a five-layered forest you have a lone-layered forest, and that is devastating to many of our species, including most of our birds.”

Most dramatic has been the drop in the number of migratory birds stopping in Alabama during the past few decades, Woehr said. “If you look at the species across the eastern United States you will find 45 to 90 percent of neotropical migratory birds are in steep decline for the last decade. We’re probably talking about anywhere from 30 to 60 species.” The wood thrush, which Woehr said has the most beautiful song of any Southeastern bird, is declining at a rate of four percent each year.

Most biologists agree that deforestation and lack of healthy forests in the Southeast are playing a role in the decline of birds that stop here during annual migrations. After crossing the Gulf of Mexico, migratory birds drop dead of exhaustion if they don’t quickly find a place to recover.

And finding a tree isn’t enough for many birds. For reasons that aren’t completely clear to scientists, some birds won’t live near the edge of a forest. According to research presented at last spring’s Alabama Wildlife Society meeting, breaks in the forest as narrow as a road can ruin it for a forest interior species, one that will live only deep in the woods.

Many such birds may avoid forest edges because of pests like the brown-headed cowbird, biologists say. The cowbird drops its eggs into the nest of a smaller bird. After hatching, the baby cowbirds break the eggs or throw to their death the other, smaller hatchlings. Wood thrushes in Alabama now are raising five times as many cowbirds as their own offspring, Woehr said.

 

Snakes and Salamanders

Not only birds are suffering from forest fragmentation. Various animals are declining as a result of the fire ant, which may be the single largest problem for all sorts of forest interior animals, said Bob Mount, a retired professor of zoology and wildlife at Auburn University.

Fire ants live on the forest’s edges and prey on the eggs and the young of many animals. So a long, narrow plot is useless for forest interior species, as is one that’s too small. Even 2,000 acres can be too small for certain animals, wildlife biologists say.

Even in areas where a large enough forest exists, many animals can’t survive standard components of timber harvests, particularly herbicides and clear cuts. “Snakes and turtles are devastated because they can’t move to another habitat,” Woehr said. “The soil, after a clear cut, dries out and is horridly compacted by the driving of the heavy equipment through there in what they call site preparation. Even if their habitat recovers 10 or 20 years after a clear cut, they can’t move back.”

Mount, Alabama’s foremost reptile expert, said forestry is the culprit in the decline of the threatened gopher tortoise, the threatened Eastern indigo snake, the Florida pine snake, and the black pine snake, which is one of the rarest snakes in North America.

The gopher tortoise digs burrows used by snakes and other animals, Mount said. “Any time you harm the gopher tortoise, you hurt a whole host of animals.”

Not only are the gopher tortoises’ burrows smashed by heavy forestry equipment, but the animals themselves sometimes are killed by herbicides. “I can’t prove it, but it makes sense that if you kill the herbaceous vegetation that the gopher tortoise depends on, the gopher tortoise can’t survive,” Mount said.

He also blames forestry practices for troubles of some small animals that live in tree cavities or on the forest floor. “Common sense is going to tell you if you go out and strip an area of vegetation, any animal that is not big enough and quick enough to get away is going to be destroyed.”

The Red Hills salamander depends on shady, moist ravines, which aren’t shady or wet any longer when the trees are gone, said Mount.

Scientists blame loss of forests for the probable extinction of the ivory-billed woodpecker, which lived in river bottom hardwood swamps, and the endangerment of the red-cockaded woodpecker in Alabama, which lives in pine trees that are at least 80 to 100 years old. Much of both birds’ habitat has been replaced by plantations of pines that are allowed to reach an age of only 15 to 25 years, scientists say.

 

Cultivating Diversity

Why should it matter if timber harvests extinguish a tiny, mud-dwelling amphibian that survives in five south Alabama counties?

The Red Hills salamander might never contribute to the state’s economic, medical, or social well-being. It’s certainly not adding much beauty or recreational value to the state. But, like a canary in a coal mine, it might be a signal that something is very wrong with the planet. Scientists say that ecosystems become more precarious every time they lose a bacterium, fungus, plant, or animal. Not every one is a keystone species, the one that holds the ecosystem together, but scientists have only the most rudimentary understanding of the job of many organisms.

“We talk about how this species is connected to that species, and we get the idea that it’s a few points connected on a line,” said Ed Passerini, a University of Alabama professor of environment and humanities. “No, it’s not that way. It’s that this species is connected to this species, while it’s being connected to this species, while it’s being connected to this species, and so on. It’s far more complicated than any diagram we could ever devise, any language could ever describe, especially primitive things like English or mathematics.”

As a result, scientists don’t know how long extinctions can continue without ruining Earth for the plants and animals absolutely necessary for human survival.

The smallest organisms are the least known but also the most abundant. Edward Wilson, one of the world’s foremost experts on biological diversity, estimates that 4,000 to 5,000 bacteria exist in a pinch of soil. That leads scientists to believe small, unknown species also are the most crucial.

“Things that people don’t think are very important are very important in the fabric of the world,” said George Florets, an Auburn University field biologist. “We couldn’t get along without the maggots.”

Worldwide, species disappear every day, some before they are even cataloged. We are in the midst of the sixth great “extinction spasm” of the world’s history, Wilson wrote in The Diversity of Life. “The extinction of species has been much worse than even field biologists, myself included, previously understood.”

“Any number of rare local species are disappearing just beyond the edge of our attention,” he wrote. “They enter oblivion . . . leaving at most a name, a fading echo in a far comer of the world, their genius unused.” Scientists are still so ignorant of the natural world that they don’t know whether the number of species on Earth totals 10 million or 100 million, said Wilson.

Passerini said, “We are blowing away species faster than ever before and don’t even know what species are out there.”

Wilson, who teaches at Harvard University, said every plant and animal has performed billions of acts of natural selection during millions of years and now has a special ability or trait that enables it to survive. That trait may provide the gene for an important crop, fiber, energy source, or medicine, he wrote. Forty percent of the pharmaceutical prescriptions filled each year are derived from plants, animals, or microorganisms.

Habitat destruction is responsible for the current extinction phase, Wilson said. Humans are the first animals to become a geophysical force, altering the face of Earth so that other species can no longer survive on it.

Some naturalists also worry that, in the words of Georgia woodlands manager Leon Neel, “we dehumanize ourselves when we destroy the land.”

Wilson quotes studies showing that patients recuperate from surgery more quickly when they can view natural landscapes. He also says that people will always choose to look at natural landscapes rather than any urban view. They are especially drawn to grassy savannas similar to those found in Africa, the birthplace of the human race. That suggests a primal, human link to nature far beyond the understanding of physicians and other scientists.

Although science is far from determining the importance of nature to the human mind or soul, Wilson said, the salvation of humans might lie in setting aside ecosystems, habitats, and beautiful, ancient natural forest areas for people to enjoy.

Alabama is still one of the most diverse places in the United States, and even the world. It has as many different species of snakes as anywhere on Earth, with 40 species in south Alabama alone, Wilson said.

“What’s important for Alabama is clearly more land put aside as natural reserves to preserve its beauty and diversity,” Wilson said. “Alabama is an exceptionally beautiful state, and its natural beauty and extraordinary diversity of life from the Gulf waters to the Appalachian Mountains of the northeast should be cultivated.”