Llewellyn King: Fighting wildfires with fires

Prescribed burn at the Tall Timbers research site, in Thomasville, Ga.

— Photo by Linda Gasparello

(See New England note below.)

Did the fire at the end of Walt Disney’s iconic animated movie Bambi prejudice the country against forest management with controlled burning? Maybe so.

The United States Energy Association in February presented a virtual media briefing on the fire threat in the West and the Southwest this year. The prognosis, especially from the weather forecasting company AccuWeather, was grim.

Now that prognosis is being borne out as terrible fires again scorch those regions. Fire is now a year-round danger.

Enter forest scientists, who believe the solution to rampant wildfires is scientifically managed, preemptive burning.

But this fire-management practice isn’t without controversy. The memory of Bambi and his father, trapped by a raging forest fire, can spill into politics, with fierce advocates for prescribed burning often at odds with activists who believe fire should be suppressed.

The epicenter of the science of forest management with fire isn’t in the West but in the East – in the Red Hills, stretching from Tallahassee, Fla., to Thomasville, Ga. This is the home to the research stations of the Tall Timbers Institute, which studies and practices prescribed burning to save the long-leaf pine forests and their abundant populations of game birds and other wildlife.

It can be argued that a small game bird, the Northern bobwhite quail, has been responsible for preserving a huge acreage of forest land in the Red Hills. The name Red Hills is more poetic than accurate as the land is undulating rather than hilly. However, the name is enshrined in Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

The area is home to some of the largest private estates -- still called plantations -- in the nation. They have been preserved and lovingly tended for hunting since the 19th Century.

Conservation began in the 1920s to preserve the habitat of the quail, fell off in the 1930s, and came roaring back in the 1950s when philanthropist Henry Beadel gave 2,200 acres to establish five ecological-research stations. This has grown to 4,000 acres.

The theory of deliberate burning is that it keeps down the forest-floor “fuel” that makes wildfires so deadly and unmanageable. The prescribed burns are carefully organized, considering the weather, the vegetation and the escape routes for the fauna.

During these burns, the fires sweep through without damaging the soil. The trees are left standing -- because the fires are fast and very hot -- but the forest floor is cleared.

Tall Timbers researchers showed me and a small group of visitors the product of a new burn on the previous day, where there was lingering smoke, and the revived, flourishing areas that were burned one, two, and three years earlier.

These researchers have a passion for their work and their conservation with fire.

The institute is active on more than 500,000 acres in Georgia and Florida and leads the country in remedial burning. California is now tentatively trying to burn on a limited scale, learning from Tall Timbers.

But Tall Timers conservation extends well beyond fire.

They explained the real threat to forests is urban sprawl and they are active, vigorously so, in persuading Red Hills area landowners to write easements into their deeds to preserve what the Nature Conservancy has called one of America’s “Last Great Places.”

And the movement is growing. “We have been working with nonprofits in the West,'' said Morgan Varner, fire research director at Tall Timbers.

Varner said Florida leads the country in preservation of great tracts of untrammeled forest and savannah managed with prescribed burning.

As we toured through Tall Timbers, one could marvel at the resiliency of both the flora and fauna. Animals and birds, which naturally flee fire, also enthusiastically return after the fires have done their work. Bambi went back.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

Prescribed burning in the White Mountain National Forest.

 Editor’s note: Prescribed fires are increasingly being used in New England.

See this article and this one.

Linda Gasparello: The mysterious mound builders; New England grits? Southern hockey

-- Photos of the Great Temple Mound by Linda Gasparello

The Mound Builders of Georgia

On a January day at the Ocmulgee National Monument, in Macon, Ga., a hiker ambles up the Great Temple Mound, a flat-topped, earthen ceremonial structure built by the Mississippians around 900-1100 A.D. Just as the Scottish explorer Joseph Thompson described Mt. Kilimanjaro in 1887, the mound is “entirely suggestive of solidity and repose, of serene majesty asleep.”

Macon lawyer Christopher Smith, a tall mound of a man, guided my husband Llewellyn King and I through the national park, which preserves an area that has been inhabited by humans since the Ice Age (before 9,000 B.C).

From the Visitors Center, we walked across a wooden bridge over a stream flanked by spindly Georgia pines and up a hill path to the Earth Lodge, which was probably a meeting place for the town's political and religious leaders.
 

Crouching, we entered the grass-covered lodge through an opening buttressed with thick wooden planks. Bent at our waists, we walked through a narrow hall with woven reed walls into the reconstructed council chamber of the Mississippians.

The circular chamber incorporates and protects the original clay floor, which is about 1,000 years old. There is a round fire pit and a raised platform in the shape of a large bird, where the chiefs or high priests sat. The chamber's wood-beamed ceiling and clay walls give it the look and feel of a Tudor chapel.
 

“The site of Ocmulgee is synonymous with Georgia and Southeastern archeology. During the 1930s, it was a training ground for a whole generation of American archeologists, some of whom later became the 'fathers' of modern American archeology,” according to the National Park Service.

The history of the park, from its inception as a Depression-era works project through to World War II, is intertwined with archaeological-project management on a grand scale by the Smithsonian Institution, various federal relief agencies (the Works Project Administration, Civilian Conservation Corps, and the Federal Emergency Relief Agency) and the National Park Service.

From 1933 to 1942 as many as 1,200 people excavated the site under the direction of Arthur R. Kelly, a Harvard-trained archaeologist working for the Smithsonian, and built the Visitors Center, which contains beautifully crafted dioramas of human habitation of the area from 10,000 BCE to the early 1700s. The 702-acre site was designated a National Monument in 1936; it is now a national park.

We toured Ocmulgee a day before its closure on Jan. 20, due to the government shutdown. That day, the national park posted a message on its Facebook page that the Visitors Center and Earth Lodge would be closed during the shutdown, but the roads, trails and outside grounds would be open as usual, daily from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Dee Shannon Garrison left this comment on the page, “Stupid congress critters. Ain't happy unless they putting somebody out of work.” 

True Grits

Recently, I read in Yankee magazine that the Algonquin Indians of New England, not Southerners, invented grits. That may very well be true, but I don't trust New Englanders -- not even Rhode Islanders who make a corny cousin, johnny cakes -- to cook grits.

Northerners just don't get grits. In 1980, when I was living in Manhattan, I watched Stan Woodward's hilarious and insightful documentary about grits on PBS's WNET. Using a hand-held camera, the South Carolina filmmaker went from the streets of New York to the grist mills of the South asking people a simple question, “Do you eat grits?” A New York City construction worker replied, “Grits? Ain't that the stuff on my collar?” New York Times food editor Craig Claiborne, who grew up in Indianola, Miss., replied by making a grits souffle.

True grits are cooked in the “Grits Belt,'' which stretches from Virginia to Texas. Kevin Whitener, who was our neighbor for nearly 30 years in The Plains, Va., and cooks at the Old Salem Cafe, in nearby Marshall, makes the grits of my dreams.

Georgia is the middle hole of the Grits Belt: the one that's comfy for someone with a grits belly. Grits became the state's official prepared food in 2002.

Chris Smith, host of our Georgia trip, treated us to dinner at the Grits Cafe in Forsyth, near Macon. I ordered the fried catfish, remoulade and cheddar soft grits. I left the restaurant full as a tick.

High Sticking, Tripping and Roughing in Macon

I grew up in Massachusetts: a hotbed of ice-hockey rest. So I just can't get my head around professional ice hockey teams in the South. Sure, you can build a rink and import players from Boston. But how do you build a fan base in a region where people only like ice when it's in Coke or sweet tea?

Yet there are five National Hockey League teams in the South. The Southern Professional Hockey League has 10 teams, including the Macon Mayhems, who were the 2017 President's Cup champions.

Southern ice hockey teams have crazy good names, like the Roanoke Rail Yard Dawgs. But hands down, the best-ever professional hockey team name is the Macon Whoopees. The defunct team played in Southern Hockey League during 1973-74. A Macon reporter told me, “The first game the Whoopees played, folks left during halftime because they thought the game was over.” Poor attendance led the team to disband mid-season.

The Macon Whoopees rose again in 1996, renamed the Whoopee. After several owners endured seasons of poor attendance and financial losses, the team went belly up in 2001.

An East Coast Hockey League team, the Tallahassee Tiger Sharks, relocated to Macon in 2001. They became known as the Macon Whoopee and played just one season. The Macon Trax, a later effort to continue professional hockey in Macon, got stopped short.

I hop that the Macon Mayhem, a relocation of the former Augusta River Hawks, will play in the city for a spell.


Linda Gasparello is co-host and producer of White House Chronicle, on PBS. Her e-mail is lgasparello@kingpublishing.com.