Excerpt from Chapter 1
“Fire Is Good”


The Carolina Sandhills are ancient. They are small hills, often just subtle risings and fallings in the land. It’s easy to imagine when you drive down a dirt road here or hike through the forest that the Sandhills are the time-wasted dunes or marooned shore of an unknown Paleozoic sea . . .
To an untrained eye, the pine forests of the Carolina Sandhills National Wildlife Refuge look, well, monotonous. . . . But the refuge harbors a remnant of one of the rarest ecosystems on Earth--a longleaf pine forest, a forest home to over 720 plant species . . .
It is good to know that you don’t have to trek to Alaska or the Amazon to find the wild or rare. Sadly, you don’t have to go far to find the endangered, either. At the NWR are plant and animal species hanging onto life with slender roots and talons. And one thing that these species and the forest share is the need for fire.
To find out more about longleaf pine forests and fire, I talked with Scott Lanier, Manager of the Carolina Sandhills NWR. Scott’s headquarters is a red brick building surrounded by 45,000 acres of tall pines, wiregrass, pocosins, ponds and purple-flowering green lupine . . .
“One reason we have wildfires is because fire has been suppressed for so long that when a forest finally burns, it’s catastrophic,” Scott explained. “Had prescribed burns been introduced periodically, we might not have experienced those wildfires.”
The Sandhills, he said, has a history of fires, both natural and manmade. “Native Americans burned off fields to grow crops and hunt game. Lightning also caused areas to burn occasionally. Our area suffered some real smokin’ wildfires in the early 1940s, but as the US Fish and Wildlife Service began prescribed burning, catastrophic wildfires decreased." . . .

Back at home, I dusted off a copy of William Bartram’s “Travels” and thumbed to a passage where the author, venturing from Savannah to Augusta in the 1780s, finds himself “on the entrance of a vast plain, generally level, which extends west sixty or seventy miles . . . This plain is mostly a forest of great long-leaved pine (P. palustris Linn.) the earth covered with grass, interspersed with an infinite variety of herbaceous plants . . .”
Nearly a hundred million acres of original forest lost to America, and never having seen a stand of virgin longleaf, I was incapable of imagining what we had lost. I promised myself that I would visit an old growth longleaf forest before the year was out.