Flame azalea shows off in the recently purchased Nature Conservancy Nine Times Preserve. A Jack-in-the-Pulpit flourishes in the Side of the Mountain Creek drainage at Jocassee Gorges. Healthy populations of rare Trilliums result from good management practices in the Jocassee Gorges, which have been heavily logged for generations. Fire is still used as a tool in South Carolina’s Jocassee Gorges Wilderness.
A land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members and also respect for the community as such.
-- Aldo Leopold
Somewhere along the line we’ve forgotten the lessons of the great naturalist and ethicist Aldo Leopold and have begun to kill our wild world with kindness.
All too often headlines obscure this fundamental truth, hard though it might be, with stories that are unarguably terrible but mask what counts.
The incredibly devastating wildfires that have become a seasonal visitor in the West are a good example. They ought to be a wakeup call for fundamental changes in management practices.
Instead they’ve become the focus of paralyzing debates on the evils of clear-cutting. Clear cutting isn’t something to be advocated; neither is doing nothing.
In South Carolina’s Jocassee Gorges wilderness area they still use fire as a tool, much like Leopold advocated, for species go extinct in the dense thickets just as quickly as they do under the saw, or bulldozer’s blade.
Along the border between North and South Carolina is the Blue Ridge Escarpment. It is undergoing the greatest plant extinction since the end of the last ice age, 18,000 years ago, on the isolated rock outcrops and iconic coves of the region, say experts.
Many of the plants that have vanished in the Upstate survive in other parts of their North American range. Drought driven by climate change and basic changes in how the land is managed is responsible for most of the loss, say experts like Patrick McMillan.
He is host of South Carolina Educational Television’s “Expedition” series, professor at Clemson University and curator of the herbarium of the Campbell Museum of Natural History.
Dr. Doug Rayner, a botanist and professor at Wofford University in Spartanburg for 19 years, agrees and cites the rapid disappearance of rare species of tropical ferns endemic to the mist zone of the Eastatoe valley in the Jocassee Gorges.
These findings are echoed by amateur botanists and outdoorsmen who live in the region. Men like Rick Huffman of the Native Plant Society and outdoor writer and author Dennis Chastain.
“No one knows how much we’re loosing,” McMillan said. “There are probably plants gone now that weren’t even on the radar as endangered. We just don’t have the kind of staff it would take to survey and find out; but the losses are huge.
“We’ve learned something about climate change. It happens quickly once it starts.”
A lot of the figurative “heat” over drought has eased in the Southeast over the past few months. It has rained and cities like Atlanta are breathing easier over their water supply.
But the fundamental forces driving drought, like those driving climate change, haven’t changed. In the Southeastern mountains of the Blue Ridge and Appalachians, arguably, more species of plants and animals have gone extinct that anywhere else in the United States.
If you want to get an idea of just how devastating man’s effect has been here go to Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest in far western North Carolina and look at the pitifully few remaining forest giants.
Giant poplar trees were endemic to the Southern Mountains and are examples of what was once a forest of incredible diversity that stretched from the Atlantic to the Great Plains.
Industrial logging took care of all but a few pockets of the forest giants and somewhere around the first Earth Day American society discovered that conservation was chic.
Chic seldom works well when dealing with Nature “red of fang and claw.”
Somehow, we must find a balance because balance is surely what we still lack more than 60 years after Leopold’s death.
Nothing, it seems, is simple about biological diversity.
Rayner said the Bog Rose orchid, or Dragon’s Mouth (Arethusa bulbosa Linnaeus) used to be found at one spot in northern Greenville County. The little flower is probably gone there now, although colonies survive in other areas of the country.
“It hasn’t been seen in Greenville since the 1970s,” Rayner said. “I’ve looked for it on five occasions and haven’t found it. This loss is not so much because of man, but because the bog where the flower lived filled in.”
Or the bog was shaded out, as McMillan put it.
Thousands of years ago massive creatures like the mastodon, the wooly rhinoceros and other “mega-herbivores” kept bogs open by grazing and beating back intruding overgrowth.
Those massive creatures were wiped out by variety of factors, but were replaced by other large herbivores like Eastern elk and bison, he said. About 12,000 years ago man first came on the scene and used fire to keep areas open for cultivation. Europeans, in turn, took the Indians’ place and maintained the open spaces with grazing animals and cultivation.
In modern times areas were designated as special and preserved and managers like Mary Bunch at the Watson-Cooper Heritage Trust site were forced to hire workers to keep the bogs trimmed out so that a federally endangered specie called Swamp Pink (Helonias bullata), can survive, McMillan said.
Swamp Pink is one of the most unique and beautiful wildflowers in the Eastern United States and survives at Watson-Cooper and in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, he said.
The problems with bog species pales in comparison to the decimation McMillan reports in the protected zones of the escarpment due to drought. The complex interrelationship between plants and animals in this ecologically robust region threatens more than just plants, he said.
“I can’t think of a single animal specie that we’ve lost,” McMillan said, “But all of the species of animals that are dependent on high moisture levels are under considerable stress.”
Globally, the escarpment region is an epicenter of salamander species, he said, with many different kinds of salamanders concentrated within micro climates conducive to their survival.
Yet, during a recent survey near state Route 11 McMillan reports being unable to find a single green salamander (Aneides aeneus). “That particular spot is one of my most reliable ones for finding them in the fall of the year. That doesn’t mean they’re gone. It just means conditions (no rain) are not favorable for them to be in their normal area right now.”
McMillan is quick to note that climate change is also what made the escarpment area unique in the first place. “It is vertical refugia, a place where unprecedented specie diversity has been concentrated in a small area by changes in the climate over a relatively long time,” he said.
“Plants can escape warmer times by moving a few hundred feet upslope or cooler times by moving into the bottoms.”
Small animals like salamanders do, too.
And man, by his traditional uses of the land in the mountains, has actually been a great preserver of many rare plants and ecosystems, McMillan said.
It is the well-intentioned efforts at preserving special areas by stopping traditional usage that has wiped out some populations of plants, he said, by shading the bogs where they grow and closing off the ecosystem from the sunlight it needs to thrive.
The green salamander, unlike its stream-dwelling kin, relies on atmospheric moisture to keep its skin hydrated. “We had one day this year with 16 percent humidity,” McMillan said. “That’s unheard of (in this region). I’ve been in Phoenix, Ariz., many times when humidity levels where higher than that.”
According to the Chattooga Conservancy, a Georgia group focused on preservation efforts, breeding female green salamanders require cool, clean and moist horizontal crevices or narrow chambers in which to breed. The habitat provides a specific micro-climate necessary for successful embryonic development. Due to these unique habitat requirements, the Green Salamander is patchily distributed and uncommon throughout its range.
“But where you do find green salamanders, you find lots of them,” McMillan said, “But not this year.”
Trout, obviously dependent on water, have suffered a decline McMillan described as dramatic and scary.
Most are rainbows and browns, not native trout, he said. But the little jewels that are native to the region, the brook trout, are holdovers from the last ice age, too.
And illustrative of the complex relationship between plants and animals in the escarpment, climate change coupled decimation of the hemlock trees by the wooly adelgids (Adelges tsugae), an invasive specie, have put brook trout at extreme risk.
“I’d classify the destruction of the hemlock forest right up there with loss of chestnut trees due to blight in the last century,” he said. “So far as trout are concerned loosing the hemlocks is like loss of ice in the arctic; it affects everything.”
Rayner sees the same factors at work with his research. “Global warming is increasing factor, particularly in gorges. I’m seeing more and more species crammed into smaller spaces because of climate change. Eventually species will have no place to go and will become extinct.”
Rick Huffman, an amateur botanist and president of the local chapter of the Native Plant Society, is less than sanguine about man’s effect on rare plants. “Twenty percent of all known species have gone extinct since 1900 in our area,” he said. “Most of that is due to habitat loss.”
Historically the Upstate has been a caldron of overuse and misuse of natural resources. “Cotton farming is the best example,” Huffman said. “The landscape still bears the scars of that here.”
Dennis Chastain, who is on the state’s drought response committee in addition to his work as an outdoor writer and author, said this drought might well be the “new normal for us and the implications of that stretch out of sight right now.”
“The fact is the mountain climate is completely out of synch,” McMillan said. “The decline of the mountain sweet pitcher plant (Sarracenia rubra ssp. Jonesii) is a classic example. I’ve been working for nine years trying to revive one of the best sites for the plant in Pickens County. Because of the tremendous surge in drought conditions during the past two years I’ve lost four of the five populations and the fifth won’t survive to the end of the year.
“I can’t emphasize enough how rapidly this is happening. In my lifetime, in the place where I grew up (Alleghany County, North Carolina, along the Blue Ridge Parkway), the woods I walked in at five and six years of age are just gone. The whole world has changed.”
All too often headlines obscure this fundamental truth, hard though it might be, with stories that are unarguably terrible but mask what counts.
The incredibly devastating wildfires that have become a seasonal visitor in the West are a good example. They ought to be a wakeup call for fundamental changes in management practices.
Instead they’ve become the focus of paralyzing debates on the evils of clear-cutting. Clear cutting isn’t something to be advocated; neither is doing nothing.
In South Carolina’s Jocassee Gorges wilderness area they still use fire as a tool, much like Leopold advocated, for species go extinct in the dense thickets just as quickly as they do under the saw, or bulldozer’s blade.
Along the border between North and South Carolina is the Blue Ridge Escarpment. It is undergoing the greatest plant extinction since the end of the last ice age, 18,000 years ago, on the isolated rock outcrops and iconic coves of the region, say experts.
Many of the plants that have vanished in the Upstate survive in other parts of their North American range. Drought driven by climate change and basic changes in how the land is managed is responsible for most of the loss, say experts like Patrick McMillan.
He is host of South Carolina Educational Television’s “Expedition” series, professor at Clemson University and curator of the herbarium of the Campbell Museum of Natural History.
Dr. Doug Rayner, a botanist and professor at Wofford University in Spartanburg for 19 years, agrees and cites the rapid disappearance of rare species of tropical ferns endemic to the mist zone of the Eastatoe valley in the Jocassee Gorges.
These findings are echoed by amateur botanists and outdoorsmen who live in the region. Men like Rick Huffman of the Native Plant Society and outdoor writer and author Dennis Chastain.
“No one knows how much we’re loosing,” McMillan said. “There are probably plants gone now that weren’t even on the radar as endangered. We just don’t have the kind of staff it would take to survey and find out; but the losses are huge.
“We’ve learned something about climate change. It happens quickly once it starts.”
A lot of the figurative “heat” over drought has eased in the Southeast over the past few months. It has rained and cities like Atlanta are breathing easier over their water supply.
But the fundamental forces driving drought, like those driving climate change, haven’t changed. In the Southeastern mountains of the Blue Ridge and Appalachians, arguably, more species of plants and animals have gone extinct that anywhere else in the United States.
If you want to get an idea of just how devastating man’s effect has been here go to Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest in far western North Carolina and look at the pitifully few remaining forest giants.
Giant poplar trees were endemic to the Southern Mountains and are examples of what was once a forest of incredible diversity that stretched from the Atlantic to the Great Plains.
Industrial logging took care of all but a few pockets of the forest giants and somewhere around the first Earth Day American society discovered that conservation was chic.
Chic seldom works well when dealing with Nature “red of fang and claw.”
Somehow, we must find a balance because balance is surely what we still lack more than 60 years after Leopold’s death.
Nothing, it seems, is simple about biological diversity.
Rayner said the Bog Rose orchid, or Dragon’s Mouth (Arethusa bulbosa Linnaeus) used to be found at one spot in northern Greenville County. The little flower is probably gone there now, although colonies survive in other areas of the country.
“It hasn’t been seen in Greenville since the 1970s,” Rayner said. “I’ve looked for it on five occasions and haven’t found it. This loss is not so much because of man, but because the bog where the flower lived filled in.”
Or the bog was shaded out, as McMillan put it.
Thousands of years ago massive creatures like the mastodon, the wooly rhinoceros and other “mega-herbivores” kept bogs open by grazing and beating back intruding overgrowth.
Those massive creatures were wiped out by variety of factors, but were replaced by other large herbivores like Eastern elk and bison, he said. About 12,000 years ago man first came on the scene and used fire to keep areas open for cultivation. Europeans, in turn, took the Indians’ place and maintained the open spaces with grazing animals and cultivation.
In modern times areas were designated as special and preserved and managers like Mary Bunch at the Watson-Cooper Heritage Trust site were forced to hire workers to keep the bogs trimmed out so that a federally endangered specie called Swamp Pink (Helonias bullata), can survive, McMillan said.
Swamp Pink is one of the most unique and beautiful wildflowers in the Eastern United States and survives at Watson-Cooper and in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, he said.
The problems with bog species pales in comparison to the decimation McMillan reports in the protected zones of the escarpment due to drought. The complex interrelationship between plants and animals in this ecologically robust region threatens more than just plants, he said.
“I can’t think of a single animal specie that we’ve lost,” McMillan said, “But all of the species of animals that are dependent on high moisture levels are under considerable stress.”
Globally, the escarpment region is an epicenter of salamander species, he said, with many different kinds of salamanders concentrated within micro climates conducive to their survival.
Yet, during a recent survey near state Route 11 McMillan reports being unable to find a single green salamander (Aneides aeneus). “That particular spot is one of my most reliable ones for finding them in the fall of the year. That doesn’t mean they’re gone. It just means conditions (no rain) are not favorable for them to be in their normal area right now.”
McMillan is quick to note that climate change is also what made the escarpment area unique in the first place. “It is vertical refugia, a place where unprecedented specie diversity has been concentrated in a small area by changes in the climate over a relatively long time,” he said.
“Plants can escape warmer times by moving a few hundred feet upslope or cooler times by moving into the bottoms.”
Small animals like salamanders do, too.
And man, by his traditional uses of the land in the mountains, has actually been a great preserver of many rare plants and ecosystems, McMillan said.
It is the well-intentioned efforts at preserving special areas by stopping traditional usage that has wiped out some populations of plants, he said, by shading the bogs where they grow and closing off the ecosystem from the sunlight it needs to thrive.
The green salamander, unlike its stream-dwelling kin, relies on atmospheric moisture to keep its skin hydrated. “We had one day this year with 16 percent humidity,” McMillan said. “That’s unheard of (in this region). I’ve been in Phoenix, Ariz., many times when humidity levels where higher than that.”
According to the Chattooga Conservancy, a Georgia group focused on preservation efforts, breeding female green salamanders require cool, clean and moist horizontal crevices or narrow chambers in which to breed. The habitat provides a specific micro-climate necessary for successful embryonic development. Due to these unique habitat requirements, the Green Salamander is patchily distributed and uncommon throughout its range.
“But where you do find green salamanders, you find lots of them,” McMillan said, “But not this year.”
Trout, obviously dependent on water, have suffered a decline McMillan described as dramatic and scary.
Most are rainbows and browns, not native trout, he said. But the little jewels that are native to the region, the brook trout, are holdovers from the last ice age, too.
And illustrative of the complex relationship between plants and animals in the escarpment, climate change coupled decimation of the hemlock trees by the wooly adelgids (Adelges tsugae), an invasive specie, have put brook trout at extreme risk.
“I’d classify the destruction of the hemlock forest right up there with loss of chestnut trees due to blight in the last century,” he said. “So far as trout are concerned loosing the hemlocks is like loss of ice in the arctic; it affects everything.”
Rayner sees the same factors at work with his research. “Global warming is increasing factor, particularly in gorges. I’m seeing more and more species crammed into smaller spaces because of climate change. Eventually species will have no place to go and will become extinct.”
Rick Huffman, an amateur botanist and president of the local chapter of the Native Plant Society, is less than sanguine about man’s effect on rare plants. “Twenty percent of all known species have gone extinct since 1900 in our area,” he said. “Most of that is due to habitat loss.”
Historically the Upstate has been a caldron of overuse and misuse of natural resources. “Cotton farming is the best example,” Huffman said. “The landscape still bears the scars of that here.”
Dennis Chastain, who is on the state’s drought response committee in addition to his work as an outdoor writer and author, said this drought might well be the “new normal for us and the implications of that stretch out of sight right now.”
“The fact is the mountain climate is completely out of synch,” McMillan said. “The decline of the mountain sweet pitcher plant (Sarracenia rubra ssp. Jonesii) is a classic example. I’ve been working for nine years trying to revive one of the best sites for the plant in Pickens County. Because of the tremendous surge in drought conditions during the past two years I’ve lost four of the five populations and the fifth won’t survive to the end of the year.
“I can’t emphasize enough how rapidly this is happening. In my lifetime, in the place where I grew up (Alleghany County, North Carolina, along the Blue Ridge Parkway), the woods I walked in at five and six years of age are just gone. The whole world has changed.”
