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2019 Accomplishments

​Tennessee Heartwood has opened up several new fronts, including innovative work on both state and federal lands....


Defending NEPA


Since early 2018, we have been active on the Forest Service’s plans to change its guidelines for implementing NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act), with action alerts, attending roundtable meetings and providing feedback to legal professionals drafting public comment.  We became concerned that the NEPA issue was getting sufficient public attention when the agency’s drafted of new NEPA regulations in early 2019.  We sprung into action by developing a  tutorial website  to educate the public on the critical importance of NEPA.  Beyond focusing on the obvious ecological ramifications of the Forest Service’s initiative, we also devoted much space to issues on citizen rights, government transparency, economics, and a focus on NEPA rights as a Tocquevillian citizenship education function.  Our website was linked by a number of other conservation organizations.


We also felt that a physical presence by the conservation community was vital, and were increasingly concerned about the lack of public events being planned by conservationists, so we organized a rally at the Region 8 headquarters in Atlanta in May with the Tennessee and Georgia chapters of the Sierra Club.  Following the meeting our two Tennessee Heartwood representatives had a half- hour meeting with Regional Forester Ken Arney. 


Tennessee Heartwood has made NEPA and government transparency a cornerstone of our work since the beginning and plan to maintain a strong presence in the fight to prevent erosion of this important law.


State Lands


It has been over 20 years since there has been an active conservation presence on Tennessee State Forests.  With no oversight, state lands are increasingly clearcut in commercial timber sales, with little mitigation and a regeneration plan that often results in neglected forest land with reduced biodiversity.  We began actively monitoring the timber program and long-term effects of timber sales a couple of years ago.  Our presentation “Tennessee State Forests- Reality on the Ground” chronicles our monitoring of clearcutting on five of our state forests and the long term losses to biodiversity.  We have begun engaging the state in seeking alternatives to the current program.  We met with State Division of Forestry Supervisor David Arnold recently and are looking forward to bringing more attention to these forests.

 


Cherokee National Forest


Little Toqua


For several years, we have been advocating for the Cherokee to give the long-neglected southwestern portion of the forest more attention.  This area is part of the ecotone between the Blue Ridge Physiographic Province and the Ridge and Valley.  The Ridge and Valley ecosystem has been greatly altered in the last two centuries and has very little acreage in public ownership.  Furthermore, study by ecologists has until now been paltry compared to the neighboring Blue Ridge and Cumberland Plateau.
Fortunately, the agency is in the process of a transfer to its inventory 600 acres of Ridge and Valley land in Monroe County.  The Little Toqua parcel is ideally situated near the Little Toqua Rare Community (a part of the Cherokee) and is a site of high potential for restoration. As we have long been supporters of greater focus on Ridge and Valley habitats, we partnered with the Southern Grasslands Initiative to do a quick winter inventory of the site.  Although we only had a day to visit, we catalogued almost 100 species in winter conditions.  What was truly exciting, however, was our discovery of a lowland table mountain pine-blackjack oak community (pinus pungens-quercus marilandica), which we so far have found no mention of in scientific literature for the region.  We have always suspected that blackjack oak was historically more represented in these habitats, but its pairing with table mountain pine was truly extraordinary.  Table Mountain Pine typically occupies xeric sites in the Blue Ridge from 2000-3000 ft in elevation.  Its presence at only 900 feet overlooking Tellico Lake is quite a find.  We shared our data with the Forest Service and have been working to promote this site.  We also have conducted inventories of the neighboring Little Toqua Rare Community, which has significantly expanded the list of plant species that were originally inventoried when the area received special status in the 1990’s. 


Old Growth


As strong advocates for identifying and protecting our precious remaining old growth forest communities, we began last year to focus on the Big Frog Mountain area in searching for previously uninventoried old growth.  We have so far found residual Northern Red Oak stands and an impressive Black Cherry-Hickory stand.  We are particularly pleased to find the latter, as we have argued for some that historic records show a significant presence of this community at 3000-3500 ft elevations in the mountains. We have recently received permission from the agency to research with an increment borer so that we can assess the age and growth patterns of these stands.


Changing the Forest Service Paradigm to Forest Restoration


Increasingly, we have worked to bring to light more field-based research on the realities of current National Forest conditions to the public and academia.  Our website’s “Research, Studies, and Forest Science” page carries reports that reflect years of on-site research. . Since the 1990’s the National Forests in the Southern region have shifted their management to and silvicultural practices to focus on the “restoration of dry oak and pine forest communities”.  In many districts, this goal has been the primary focus of almost every significant project.  This goal skews towards logging sometimes healthy hardwood stands to supposedly prevent “oak decline”.  This agenda follows an ecological model commonly called the “fire-oak hypothesis”, which states that oak and upland pine forest communities are in decline due to 20th century fire suppression and that logging, burning, and often herbiciding forest stands will help begin a restoration of these forest types.  The results in dozens of projects in forests like the Cherokee, the Pisgah, and Chattahoochee have often produced tangles of briars and poplar monocultures, often with significant erosion impacts from heavy logging and skid roads on these steep and sensitive mountain soils.


Unfortunately, many otherwise well-meaning conservationists have been led to believe that the “restoration” language used by timber planners represents beneficial work that often does not bear out on the ground. Our report “Misuse of Fire Ecology and Forest Restoration in the Southern Region”  details the harmful effects of these practices from years of field visits to timber projects around the region. We have spent over a decade raising awareness to the public and conservation groups about the need to take a more critical view of this agenda.  Our work is bearing fruit, from the successful withdrawals of timber sales at Dinkey and Stone Pile in the Cherokee, to other groups joining us in our calls for a new view of forest restoration and management.


Tennessee Heartwood has led the call for the agency to break past the monolithic “upland oak-pine” paradigm and focus on a broader ecological view. We have made persuasive arguments that a combination of past and present land management practices are not only contributing to the continued problem of oak  and upland pine regeneration, but are likely contributing to a suppression of other important flora, including the hickories, cherry and other trees.  Our report “Forest Management and White Pine” was prepared for the Cherokee and a stakeholder roundtable to bring an alternative view to standard agency practices.  The report uses past agency publications and our field work to  address the limitations of the “pine-oak” paradigm. Many of the stakeholders have supported our key concerns and suggestions outlined in the report, from the development of an “ecological cost benefit” model of the most ecologically and economically defensible sites for forest restoration to expanding beyond the “big six” tree species (southern red oak, northern red oak, white oak, shortleaf pine, table mountain pine, pitch pine) to other oaks like post oak, the hickories, and black cherry.  This month the agency is taking an unprecedented step in implementing our ideas in a large scale project “Restoration of Dry Forest Communities”.  While there are several concerns that remain in this project, it is the first time the Cherokee has ever actively planted hickories, cherry, and post oak in a forest project.  So new is practice, that the regional forester told them that no other Appalachian forest had ever attempted this.  Thanks to our years of advocacy, some significant reform is taking place. 


Outings and Education


2019 was an excellent year for our educational mission, with the highlight being the hosting of the 29th Annual Heartwood Spring Council  in the Cherokee.  We spent several months in preparation for a three-day event that is a hub of conservation in the East. We had a diverse set of workshops, presentations, and entertainment, covering environmental law, Appalachian forest ecology and field science,  a barn dance, native wildcraft skills, and a memorial for the recently departed Southern conservationist, Lloyd Clayton.  We had attendees from seven states for a weekend of fellowship and learning.
Our outings program continues to be a success, with ecology walks in the Cherokee National Forest and Savage Gulf State Natural Area.

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