Date: Sat, 14 Jun 2014 16:37:59 +0000
From: Michael Burke
Subject: You_all_are_right_in_your_
Cryptic, Mr George, Maryphyllis…
Guess what? You all are right in your positions to a certain extent… first of all let’s look at some things perhaps the most important is taking western U.S. forest ecosystems and placing them in the southeast. Many of the references you are using do just that and while may be true, they really don’t fit Chatham County 100 percent.
Another is the fact that the lands of North Carolina from the mountains to the sea had been manipulated by man for about 12,000 years. Mostly by the use of fire pre European settlement and then the woodsman axe for the 400 years since colonization. I know of few places in NC that have not seen logging of some form or another. If you want to see old growth woods in our state look to Joyce Kilmer or Linville Gorge but remember these are not what true old growth would be due to the absence of fire, the demise of the chestnut and now the dying off of hemlock due to an introduced species. So the term “old growth” is a misnomer.
Probably if you went back 1000 years what you would find in Chatham County would have been a white oak savanna/ piedmont prairie system, with blocks of oaks and hickories with shortleaf pine throughout the uplands and bottomland hardwood such a sweetgum, tulip poplar, river birch, sycamore and the like along the creeks and river riparian areas; perhaps a little longleaf pine in the southern regions closer to the sand hills. Loblolly pine would have been pretty non-existent. It would look a lot different then what you see today. Cryptic, many of your points are valid and true, even though it does look like a policy page from an International Paper website, and I do think the points you made were mitigated some because they look like they were more or less based on western US forests.
Mr. George, many of points are valid and true, though your referencing to “old growth” puts it in a west coast scenario and not necessarily true here. Also I am not that much of a fan of the Dogwood Alliance and to point to them only as a source does not give the discussion a balanced ring. Maryphyllis, many of your points are valid and true, though using incidental observation to back up a point brings up the question: “is the point valid?”
When dealing with nature nothing is absolute.
Of course this all goes back to the Chatham Park thing; one would hope that the overseeing powers and the developers will have the intelligence of using a wise land ethic when proceeding with this endeavor, a “Group B” (The Land Ethic, Leopold 1941) approach as it were.
meburke
a group b forestry guy