These Woods Have Never Existed Before

These are second growth forests, some of it planted in non-native hardwood species, and choked with foreign invaders such as Multi-flora rose, Bradford Pear, Kudzu, Japanese Honey-Suckle, Knot-weed, Thistle, Tear-Thumb, and Bitterweet.

More importantly, this is forest never treated with fire, which means any bushes and low-growth weeds and vines which taste bitter to deer have spread unchecked.

When combined with downed tree limbs and thickets of Wild Grape and Poison Ivy, it makes movement through this forest never linear, and sometimes quite difficult.

These woods have no precedent in American history, and as I struggled through them yesterday I appreciated the good work of the native people who managed these forests quite well some four hundred years ago.

For 15,000 years before Columbus, North American Indians treated the forest with cold winter burns which took out a great deal of dead wood and small understory. This, in turn, promoted grass and other forbes which fed not only deer and turkey, but also eastern elk and buffalo which, in turn, supported eastern wolf and eastern mountain lion, as well as the eastern Native American tribes themselves.

When Scotland's John Muir showed up on the east coast of the US, much of America's eastern forests had already been logged, cleared, plowed, invaded, and shot out.

But the West was different.

When John Muir visited the American west and saw the beautiful park-like forests, quite recently devoid of native people thanks to disease and systematic land clearance by troops, he mistook what he saw for untrammeled nature rather than what it really was: a carefully cultivated Garden of Eden landscaped by rotating fires sent quite intentionally by Native Americans.

“We need to preserve and protect this,” he thought, with all good intent, not understanding the role of fire in shaping the land he loved so much.

Fire is no longer possible in these East Coast woods due to houses, roads, power lines, pollution and crops. That said, they now make wonderful understory-devouring machines that spit mulch out of their back end as they clear paths and eliminate multi-flora rose breaks. I would love to tidy up this land with one of those; not to eliminate all the chaos, but to punch in the paths and clearances that would go a long way to making this land a Garden of Eden again.