Burning the Forest for the Trees

Longleaf pine can survive natural disasters, but it has barely survived us humans. Writer and naturalist Janisse Ray visits a longleaf champion who wants to bring back this forest of heart-stopping beauty – one match at a time.

Words by Janisse Ray | Photos by Kate Medley

The night a massive winter storm hit the pine barrens of the Carolinas, Jesse Wimberly lay awake listening to limbs popping in the forest surrounding his cabin. He had planted every one of the longleaf pines by hand.

Nobody wants to lose longleaf. Too much has been lost already. When Reed Noss surveyed endangered U.S. ecosystems in 1995, only 3 percent of the historic, iconic forest remained. Noss called the landscape “critically endangered.”

Longleaf pine once covered 92 million acres of the upland South. Although it survives disturbances like hurricanes and fires, it could not survive the greatest disturbance of all, us humans.

I imagine Jesse lying in the darkness listening to his trees cracking apart. Yours is a special worry when redemption is what you’re seeking.   

• • •

Cleancut and handsome, Jesse Wimberly is a man who got a second chance. In 1986, he worked as a community activist in Seattle when one day his mother phoned. He was inheriting a piece of family land, she told him, and he needed to come home to take care of it. Jesse is not sure why he answered the call, but he returned to Southern Pines, North Carolina, and took up residence in a historic heart-pine cabin on his property in nearby West End.

What he did next is unthinkable. Just writing it hurts me. Before I tell you what he did, let me describe his cabin.

It’s unpainted, old and gray. It’s small. It was built in 1870. Jesse’s ancestors pulled up onto their newly purchased land in a covered wagon, cut down two longleaf pines, and started building a house. You can bend down and see those original 16-by-16 timbers. A hitching post made of resinous heart-pine still sticks up from the ground in front of the cabin. A small piazza holds a single rocking chair.

All around, in 1870, lay a forest of deeply communal, highly evolved, singing pines. And Jesse — the same Jesse who wants a better world, who wants peace and happiness for everyone — logged them all. When the trees were gone, Jesse stood forlornly on a lighterd stump, staring at a horrible aftermath. He knew he had made a mistake. 

“I’ve got to put it back,” he said.

Jesse Wimberly in the living room of his West End, North Carolina, cabin, built entirely of longleaf pine by his ancestors in 1870. Wimberly is founder of the Sandhills Prescribed Burn Association in North Carolina, teaching landowners skills about prescribed fires.

• • •

Longleaf pine is a strange and beautiful life form. I’d like to tell you a few things about it. I really want you to fall in love with it and praise it as I did with all my heart in Ecology of a Cracker Childhood. Jesse is in love with it, which is obvious when you’re around him. He still lives in that same vernacular, unpainted, heart-pine cabin in the sandhills. 

All round the cabin his new forest is singing. Sometimes singeing. Sometimes snapping in an ice storm.

Here’s what you need to know about longleaf pine. Seedlings remain in what’s called a “grass stage” for one to seven years while they strike a deep taproot. They look like grass. They suddenly leap upward, sometimes developing a proper trunk in one growing season. They do this because they want to survive. Then they grow, ring by ring, for hundreds of years, their heartwood becoming dense and red with resins. As they reach old age, they lose the signature cone shape of evergreens, flattening and taking the form of a chalice. 

This tree ranges from southern Virginia to eastern Texas, covering vast acreages of coastal plains and also diverse niches, from maritime to scrub to montane, from open savanna to sandhill to wet pine meadow to the hills of Berry College. In some places, the pine associates with wiregrass, in others bluestem grass or turkey oak trees. 

A medley of plants and animals evolved with the pine. Let me name a few. I’ll just lay down a little longleaf list poem here. Red-cockaded woodpecker, indigo snake, Bachman’s sparrow, flatwoods salamander, sandhill lily, St. Francis satyr, Sherman’s fox squirrel. Many of them diminished as forests were lost. Denizens of longleaf differ from place to place. Scrub jays aren’t found outside Florida. Gopher tortoises don’t range into the sandhills of North Carolina. Venus flytraps are mostly limited to North Carolina. 

Some longleaf pine habitats are among the most diverse ecosystems in the world. Over 40 species of plants per square meter (about the size of a yard) have been found in pine savannas, for example.  If a bunch of us parachuted into longleaf across its entire range, the system could look quite different, depending on where we landed. Its natural history varies from place to place. 

But there’s one constant. Actually, there are two. The tree itself. And fire.

Fire is why I visit Jesse soon after the January ice storm. He has become a fire guy. Not a firefighter. A fire-setter. He fills the chalices of the trees with fire. 

Before we get out the matches, let’s talk about why.

• • •

In 2009, the federal government gave Americans an enormous gift. It promised to bring back our iconic longleaf pine landscape. It announced America’s Longleaf Restoration Initiative, with a goal of 8 million acres restored by 2025.

Eight million is a far cry from the 92 that once were. But it’s a start. It’s something. It’s movement. Big movement, actually. Remember, 3 percent was left in 1995.

In a minute I’ll tell you where we actually are, goalwise.

America’s Longleaf Restoration Initiative is managed by a group of folks called the Longleaf Partnership Council.

The landscape, which they call a “recovery area,” includes 18 hotspots, and these hotspots are represented by Local Implementation Teams. By focusing on certain areas for longleaf recovery, money can be funneled to places of highest priority. 

The Carolina Sandhills, where Jesse Wimberly lives, is a hotspot. It encompasses six North Carolina counties, including much of the 70,000-acre Sandhills Game Land, into the Uwharrie Mountains, and then eastward to Fayetteville and the Cape Fear River. It picks up 270,000 acres of Fort Liberty (formerly Bragg) Military Reservation. At the heart is Jesse’s territory and the town of Southern Pines.

Luckily for me, I live in another of these hotspots, in Georgia — Fort Stewart/Altamaha.

• • •

On a cold January morning, Jesse and I walk a trail through the forest he has been painstakingly restoring for over 30 years. Jesse’s in his 60s, his dark hair switching to a gray I’ve come to love. He wears calf-high duck boots and a dark blue fleece jacket over a couple of shirts, and he levels a pottery mug of coffee in one hand, although he seldom sips from it. 

“Longleaf was the prized possession of the early settlers,” he says. “It’s a house. It’s outbuildings. It’s fence posts.” He keeps listing: medicine, grazing for free-range cattle, turpentine, lighting, income. “Every aspect of their lives came from the forest.

“Longleaf seemed so infinite,” Jesse continues. “Our people thought, ‘We can’t affect this thing.’ But we did.” 

The day is crisp and sunny, the sky a lupine blue. Jesse and I walk very slowly, gophering through the forest, gradually descending a sandhill of pines and wiregrass toward a shining body of water that I learn is a beaver pond. 

At first Jesse’s pace is bewildering. He moves 10 or 15 feet, then stops and for the next 20 minutes tells about a seepage bog, or a catface from the era of turpentine, or how he lived in the cabin seven years without electricity. Ours is a long walk over a short distance through a forest that does not show signs of trauma but appears elegant, intact, enchanting. 

Our last stop at Jesse’s place is his boneyard. It’s a museum of heart pine that he’s dragged out of the woods — stumps, catfaces, old fence posts, lighterd knots, limbs. The pine here is gray from sitting out in the weather, as the old-timers say, but it’s as resinous, heavy, and muscular as ever. If polished, any piece of this becomes the impressive, gorgeous, long-lasting wood coveted by builders.

Restoration of longleaf pine means more than tree-planting, Jesse explains. Once saplings are in the ground and a forest is coming back, a forester’s job has only begun. Fire is necessary for battling shrubs and hardwood trees determined to colonize, for scoring the ground so that seeds can germinate in mineral soil, and for nourishing the land. Here in Jesse’s forest I see blackened bark, a clear understory, charred stumps.

The range of longleaf pine corresponds to a high number of lightning strikes per year, meaning longleaf evolved with fire. That’s why seedlings stay small for a few years — they huddle close to the ground during fires — and why they spring quickly upward, rushing to get their growing bud out of the reach of fire.

The original inhabitants and early settlers throughout the range lived with fire. One of Jesse’s favorite stories is of taking his mom — 95, frail, and suffering from macular degeneration and dementia — outside to sit under a pecan tree near the kitchen door. She studied the cabin and yard. 

“Is that grass growing around the cabin?” she asked. 

 Jesse said that it was. 

“We have to get it out,” she said. In 1920, when Jesse’s mom was born, fire regularly ran across the landscape. Early settlers kept their yards meticulously raked and free of grass or tree litter. Jesse’s mother would speak of fire, Jesse tells me, “the way we talk about snow.” 

Lightning would strike and fires would travel through the woods. The woods needed fire and the people recognized that. “We had a fire culture,” Jesse says. Scientists, foresters, and longleaf aficionados still recognize it. 

For restoration of the landscape to be successful, longleaf pine needs fire. As Jesse puts it, “Longleaf is not a hands-off place.”

This makes the term “hotspot” especially apropos.

• • •

One more thing. According to Jesse, about 90 percent of Southern land is privately owned, and the average landowner in the South owns fewer than 100 acres. To meet America’s goals for recovery of the longleaf pine landscape, we are going to need small, working landowners, people like Jesse. Private land is expensive to buy for conservation, and if owners aren’t interested in selling, conversion to longleaf pine forests requires landowner buy-in. 

“There’s a lot of enthusiasm for moving a landowner from interest to action,” Jesse says. 

He runs a Prescribed Burn Association, part of the Sandhills partnership. The group has no president, no hierarchy, no structure. Jesse is its coordinator, and the group’s goals are simple: 1) return fire to the land; 2) educate the public about fire; and 3) support independent fire practitioners. “That’s the only way to restore this landscape,” Jesse says. 

Some 70 Prescribed Burn Associations have been formed in 12 states.

When he first began this work, Jesse surveyed 200 forest landowners. Eighty percent were interested in using fire, but only 20 percent did. They didn’t know how; they were nervous about liability; and they didn’t have enough people to help with a burn. Often federal agencies like forestry commissions don’t have the resources to serve small landowners well.

Jesse set out to create a critical mass of burners in the Carolina Sandhills. On weekday evenings or Saturday mornings, if conditions are right, neighbors get together to help each other. To reduce liability, they create a fire plan; by participating, they learn; and for person-hours, they enlist each other. 

“It’s like the old barn-raising,” Jesse says. Neighbors do a quick round of hellos, they go over the plan, then they set the woods afire.

• • •

The second day I spend with Jesse, we tour the Sandhills. He points out placards that indicate landowners who burn: Pardon Our Smoke. “Those are our signs,” he says.

We head to Calloway Forest Preserve, owned by The Nature Conservancy, where we meet, beneath an ancient longleaf pine, Deb Maurer, a program director for the conservancy, and Jeff Marcus, a longleaf restoration director for the group. Jeff, a tanned, brown-eyed man wearing hemp shoes and a plaid flannel shirt, pulls out a laminated map of the Sandhills. He traces the route Jesse and I traversed, Game Land to the west, Fort Liberty to the east. 

We are in between, the area they call The Gap. “A big part of our conservation strategy has been to work across The Gap,” Jeff says, “with steppingstones of habitat.”

“We’re trying to make a resilient, connected landscape,” Deb says. She’s small, with long sandy hair,  and wears black leather work boots and skinny-leg jeans. “If our vision comes to fruition, the pieces will one day hook up.”

The Calloway preserve not only fills a hole in The Gap but is hundreds of acres of mature, well-restored, crazily beautiful longleaf. They want to show it to me, so we get in a vehicle and drive for miles on car-wide paths through long rolling vistas of longleaf and wiregrass. “Open, burned pine with a grassy understory is the goal,” says Jeff.

The Nature Conservancy, a longtime proponent of longleaf pine restoration and one of the ecosystem’s best friends, has planted more than a million longleaf pine seedlings in the region, and Calloway is the centerpiece.          

Especially important in this hotspot is the recovery of the red-cockaded woodpecker, once on the brink of extinction. Numbers of woodpeckers is one way the ecologists measure success, and blessedly, Jeff’s map is decorated with red dots, each symbolizing an active cluster of woodpeckers. Restoration in The Gap helps create landscape corridors for the birds to use. 

Like the bald eagle, the red-cockaded woodpecker is recovering, and there’s talk of de-listing. A restored woodpecker population, however, does not mean the work is done, Deb says. Longleaf pine ecosystems are complicated, multilayer, stunningly diverse places, and restoration does not end with any one species. “There are a lot more species to think about,” Deb says. “To benefit all species, we need to accomplish more thinning and more burning.” 

I ask Deb to list other species important to longleaf  habitat. Pine barrens tree frog, ornate chorus tree frog, northern pine snake, pygmy rattler. She’s listing when we decide to stop and get out. We stand among the trees. A Cooper’s hawk flies through.

The vast majority of Southern land is privately owned, and recovery of the longleaf pine landscape is going to require the dedicated buy-in of working landowners. To that end, some 70 Prescribed Burn Associations have been formed in 12 states.

• • •

Across the 92 million acres of historic longleaf range, ecologists put the system back together in such a way that everything is restored piece by piece, layer by layer, story by story. 

The Longleaf Partnership Council releases annual data on progress — number of acres protected, number planted, number burned. According to Colette DeGarady, the council’s past chair, “Today, we are right about [at] 5.2 million acres of longleaf pine on the Southeastern landscape.” 

Some of the additions are outright land purchases, some are conversions from pine plantations to natural forest, and some are conservation easements. We have a long way to go, and, sadly, restorationists realize that we won’t reach 8 million by 2025. But we’re making progress. Acres of longleaf come online, and at the same time folks continue to restore other elements of the ecosystem.

As for fire, some landowners are trying growing-season burns to encourage growth of native plants. Some states set up burn trailers containing drip torches, fire rakes, and “smoke ahead” signs and make them available for private landowners. In Louisiana, where neighborhoods surround a remnant longleaf forest, neighbors have embraced burning as a tradition. More Prescribed Burn Associations form. 

As for fauna, biologists install more artificial nest cavities for red-cockaded woodpeckers. In Florida, The Orianne Society breeds eastern indigo snakes to release in the wild. Four hundred  captive-bred Louisiana pine snakes, one of the most rare and endangered snakes in North America, have been returned to  the Kisatchie National Forest. At Apalachicola Bluffs in Florida, volunteers collect wiregrass seeds so that local genetics can be used in replanting. Texas is developing locally adapted native seed sources for restoration. 

The Jones Center in Georgia studies the effects of hurricanes on longleaf pines. At Weymouth Woods in the Sandhills, an ancient longleaf’s birthday is celebrated with festivities. It is now 480 years old.

• • •

“Our cultures are short on vision-keepers,” Jesse said to me at one point during our two days together.

Maybe, maybe not. I know dozens and dozens of people who have fallen in love with longleaf pine. They are planting it, managing for it, walking in it, making films about it, writing books about it, studying it. We don’t have the space to name them, although they deserve to be named, because together these longleaf-lovers make a conflagration. 

There’s Jesse himself. He is keeping the vision of a forest that went for hundreds and hundreds of miles across the entire South, an expanse of heart-stopping beauty. He is remembering what we had, holding onto that history, keeping its fire going. Burning down the woods to bring them back.

When I walked the longleaf with Jesse, all my personal disturbance about its present and future left me. Instead, hope burned like embers in my heart, so hot I could put my hand to my chest and feel the heat. 

A long time ago, almost 30 years now, longleaf pine called to me. It asked me to fall in love with it. It asked me to learn its story. It asked me to see its suffering and give it a hand. It asked me to pray for it. 

And I did. I prayed in the way I knew how, by writing. I listened closely. I gathered the rustling, chirruping, warbling, trilling, chattering, buzzing, and cantillating movements of the forest, and I turned them into words. The word “psalm” comes from the Greek “psalmos,” meaning the twanging of a harp; longleaf played its harp for me and I wrote a psalm to it. Also a revelation.

Since that time, I’ve stood in many longleaf forests, some young, some old. Every one of them exists because of a vision-keeper. The vision expands, from southern Virginia to eastern Texas, from the wet meadows to the piney mountains. Now the government keeps the vision. The harp twangs louder than ever. 

Every day, another vision-keeper stands up. Even as a longleaf lover ages out, 10 more step up to take their place. Someone reading this homage to Jesse and fire will stand up, holding open the hope that we get it all back. They will stand and pick up the torch.  ◊

Janisse Ray is an American writer whose subject most often falls into the borderland of nature and culture. She has published six books of nonfiction and two collections of eco-poetry. Ray has won an American Book Award, Pushcart Prize, Southern Bookseller Awards, Southern Environmental Law Center Writing Awards, and Eisenberg Award, among others. Her first book, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, was a New York Times Notable. The author has been inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame. She lives on an organic farm near Reidsville.

Kate Medley is a Durham, North Carolina-based visual journalist and filmmaker documenting the American South. Her work focuses on storytelling and environmental portraiture and often explores issues of social justice and the shifting politics of the region. As a kid growing up in Jackson, Mississippi, her first job was making snowballs at a gas station.