Wormsloe Foundation Nature Books Series

Before 1910 the American chestnut was one of the most common trees in the eastern United States. Although historical evidence suggests the natural distribution of the American chestnut extended across more than four hundred thousand square miles of territory—an area stretching from eastern Maine to southeast Louisiana—stands of the trees could also be found in parts of Wisconsin, Michigan, Washington State, and Oregon. An important natural resource, chestnut wood was preferred for woodworking, fencing, and building construction, as it was rot resistant and straight grained. The hearty and delicious nuts also fed wildlife, people, and livestock. Ironically, the tree that most piqued the emotions of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Americans has virtually disappeared from the eastern United States. After a blight fungus was introduced into the United States during the late nineteenth century, the American chestnut became functionally extinct. Although the virtual eradication of the species caused one of the greatest ecological catastrophes since the last ice age, considerable folklore about the American chestnut remains. Some of the tree’s history dates to the very founding of our country, making the story of the American chestnut an integral part of American cultural and environmental history. The American Chestnut tells the story of the American chestnut from Native American prehistory through the Civil War and the Great Depression. Davis documents the tree’s impact on nineteenth-and early twentieth-century American life, including the decorative and culinary arts. While he pays much attention to the importation of chestnut blight and the tree’s decline as a dominant species, the author also evaluates efforts to restore the American chestnut to its former place in the eastern deciduous forest, including modern attempts to genetically modify the species.

The Chattahoochee River is one of the premier waterways of Georgia and the Southeast. It is a mecca for summer recreation, a priceless natural resource that provides water and power for a great number of Georgia’s citizens, and an essential component to the region’s ecosystem. As public interest in both exploring and protecting Georgia’s rivers such as the Chattahoochee grows, so too has the demand for clear and elegant guides to our rivers. The Chattahoochee River User’s Guide—the latest in a series of river guides from Georgia River Network and the University of Georgia Press—aims to meet that demand. The Chattahoochee River User’s Guide traces the 430-mile course of the Hooch from its headwaters at a spring on Coon Den Ridge near Jacks Knob in northeastern Georgia to its confluence with the Flint River, where they form the Apalachicola River. The Georgia River Network guides provide many little-known facts about Georgia’s rivers, bring to life the river’s cultural and natural history, and present river issues in an immersive and engaging manner that will inspire users to help protect their local waterways. The guide includes 200 color photographs 32 user-friendly maps that reveal the towns, roads, entry points, bridges, public lands, parks, and other landmarks along the river’s course from the southern Blue Ridge Mountains to the Georgia-Florida border Detailed practical information about public access points, potential hazards, camping facilities, and GPS coordinates for points of interest A primer on fishing An introduction and safety overview, as well as a concise natural history guide to common flora and fauna of the river corridor

A broad-based coalition of conservative southern politicians, countercultural activists, environmental scientists, sportsmen, devout Christians, garden clubs in Atlanta, and others came together to push the Coastal Marshlands Protection Act of 1970 through the Georgia state legislature. The law was a first-in-the-nation bill to save the marshes of a state from mining and aggressive development and was a political watershed that reflected the changing nature of the state. It set a foundation that would lead to the thoughtful use of the state’s coastal resources still relevant today. And the Coastlands Wait is the history of this legislative act, as told by St. Simons lawyer and leader of the coalition, Reid Harris. Harris served as head of the environmental section of Governor Jimmy Carter’s Goals for Georgia program and later as chairman of the governor’s State Environmental Council. The coastlands coalition he led backed a groundbreaking act that, when instated, set up a permitting process to control development and to protect five hundred thousand acres of precious Georgia marshland. That coalition did not survive for long and is now seen as an unusual moment in the history of conservation, when allies as deeply diverse as conservative governor Lester Maddox and Atlanta liberals stood together.

Barbara Hurd’s Listening to the Savage weaves rich explorations of science, history, mythology, literature, and music. The listening of the book delineates and champions a kind of attentiveness to what is not easily heard and is written in language that is as precise as it is poetic, providing original ways of engagement in the natural world. As in Hurd’s other books, the previously unknown or the barely known becomeless mysterious but still retain the quality of mystery. The book presumes that nature is a mix of the chaotic and the wondrous. It addresses worry and advocacy—worry about our carelessness that can destroy the balance of that mix and a cry for us to pay more attention to humanity’s relationship to natural history. Listen, be alert, it says without hectoring. Rivers, ferns, streams, birds all have a life that is delicate and worth preserving. Barbara Hurd is one of our finest environmental writers, and this book will please the choir and persuade those on the ambivalent edge.

One night, poet and environmental writer John Lane tuned in to a sound from behind his house that he had never heard before: the nearby eerie and captivating howls of coyotes. Since this was Spartanburg, South Carolina, and not Missoula, Montana, Lane set out to discover all he could about his new and unexpected neighbors. Coyote Settles the South is the story of his journey through the Southeast, as he visits coyote territories: swamps, nature preserves, old farm fields, suburbs, a tannery, and even city streets. On his travels he meets, interrogates, and observes those who interact with the animals—trappers, wildlife researchers, hunters, rattled pet owners, and even one devoted coyote hugger. Along the way, he encounters sensible, yet sometimes perplexing, insight concerning the migration into the Southeast of the American coyote, an animal that, in the end, surprises him with its intelligence, resilience, and amazing adaptability.

Janisse Ray was a babe in arms when a boat of her father’s construction cracked open and went down in the mighty Altamaha River. Tucked in a life preserver, she washed onto a sandbar as the craft sank from view. That first baptism began a lifelong relationship with a stunning and powerful river that almost nobody knows. The Altamaha rises dark and mysterious in southeast Georgia. It is deep and wide bordered by swamps. Its corridor contains an extraordinary biodi­versity, including many rare and endangered species, which led the Nature Conservancy to designate it as one of the world’s last great places. The Altamaha is Ray’s river, and from childhood she dreamed of paddling its entire length to where it empties into the sea. Drifting into Darien begins with an account of finally making that journey, turning to medita­tions on the many ways we accept a world that contains both good and evil. With praise, biting satire, and hope, Ray contemplates transformation and attempts with every page to settle peacefully into the now. Though commemorating a history that includes logging, Ray celebrates “a culture that sprang from the flatwoods, which required a judicious use of nature.” She looks in vain for an ivorybill woodpecker but is equally eager to see any of the imperiled species found in the river basin: spiny mussel, American oystercatcher, Radford’s mint, Alabama milkvine. The book explores both the need and the possibilities for conservation of the river and the surrounding forests and wetlands. As in her groundbreaking Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, Ray writes an account of her beloved river that is both social history and natural history, understanding the two as inseparable, particularly in the rural corner of Georgia that she knows best. Ray goes looking for wisdom and finds a river.

Why do we preserve certain landscapes while developing others without restraint? Drew A. Swanson’s in-depth look at Wormsloe plantation, located on the salt marshes outside of Savannah, Georgia, explores that question while revealing the broad historical forces that have shaped the lowcountry South. Wormsloe is one of the most historic and ecologically significant stretches of the Georgia coast. It has remained in the hands of one family from 1736, when Georgia’s Trustees granted it to Noble Jones, through the 1970s, when much of Wormsloe was ceded to Georgia for the creation of a state historic site. It has served as a guard post against aggression from Spanish Florida; a node in an emerging cotton economy connected to far-flung places like Lancashire and India; a retreat for pleasure and leisure; and a carefully maintained historic site and green space. Like many lowcountry places, Wormsloe is inextricably tied to regional, national, and global environments and is the product of transatlantic exchanges. Swanson argues that while visitors to Wormsloe value what they perceive to be an “authentic,” undisturbed place, this landscape is actually the product of aggressive management over generations. He also finds that Wormsloe is an ideal place to get at hidden stories, such as African American environmental and agricultural knowledge, conceptions of health and disease, the relationship between manual labor and views of nature, and the ties between historic preservation and natural resource conservation. Remaking Wormsloe Plantation connects this distinct Georgia place to the broader world, adding depth and nuance to the understanding of our own conceptions of nature and history.

“This book,” writes marine biologist Evelyn B. Sherr, “is meant to give others an understanding of the fascinating life of the region, from the smallest creatures in marsh mud and estuarine water, to the mummichogs and multitudes of other animals that find food and shelter in the vast expanses of marsh grass, in the sounds, and along the beaches of the Georgia Isles.” Sherr not only spent years doing research in coastal Georgia, she began her family there. Although Sherr’s career would take her around the world, this special place stuck with her. Here she shares her deep knowledge of the remarkable environment that she, her scientist husband, and their two children explored time and again. Dr. Sherr is the ideal companion with whom to discover coastal Georgia. She points out its swimming, running, flying, drifting, and wriggling wildlife—and tells how it all exists in balance in a landscape subject to its own daily ebbs and flows, its own seasonal cycles. As we learn about Georgia’s distinctive intertidal salt marshes, subtidal estuaries, and open beaches and dunes, Sherr reveals the creatures that support—and are supported by—these habitats: the microbes in estuarine water and in marsh mud; the zooplankton swarming in the tidal rivers and sounds; and numerous fish, reptiles, birds, and mammals. This engaging and curiosity-rousing book blends scientific fact with a timely conservation message and anecdotes of a family’s encounters with nature.

Susan Cerulean’s memoir trains a naturalist’s eye and a daughter’s heart on the lingering death of a beloved parent from dementia. At the same time, the book explores an activist’s lifelong search to be of service to the embattled natural world. During the years she cared for her father, Cerulean also volunteered as a steward of wild shorebirds along the Florida coast. Her territory was a tiny island just south of the Apalachicola bridge where she located and protected nesting shorebirds, including least terns and American oystercatchers. I Have Been Assigned the Single Bird weaves together intimate facets of adult caregiving and the consolation of nature, detailing Cerulean’s experiences of tending to both. The natural world is the “sustaining body” into which we are born. In similar ways, we face not only a crisis in numbers of people diagnosed with dementia but also the crisis of the human-caused degradation of the planet itself, a type of cultural dementia. With I Have Been Assigned the Single Bird, Cerulean reminds us of the loving, necessary toil of tending to one place, one bird, one being at a time.

After reading J. A. Baker’s fifty-year-old British nature classic The Peregrine, John Lane found himself an ocean away, stalking resident red-shouldered hawks in his neighborhood in Spartanburg, South Carolina. What he observed was very different from what Baker deduced from a decade of chronicling the lives of those brooding migratory raptors. Baker imagined a species on the brink of extinction because of the use of agricultural chemicals on European farms. A half century later in America, Lane found the red-shouldered hawks to be a stable Anthropocene species adapted to life along the waterways of a suburban nation. Lane watched the hawks for a full year and along the way made a pledge to himself: Anytime he heard or saw the noisy, nonmigratory hawks in his neighborhood, he would drop whatever he was doing and follow them on foot, on bike, or in his truck. The almanac that results from this discipline considers many questions any practiced amateur naturalist would ask, such as where and when will the hawks nest, what do they eat, what are their greatest threats, and what exactly are they communicating through those constant multinoted cries? Lane’s year following the hawks also led him to try to answer what would become the most complex question of all: why his heart, like Baker’s, goes out so fully to wild things.

Providence Canyon State Park, also known as Georgia’s “Little Grand Canyon,” preserves a network of massive erosion gullies allegedly caused by poor farming practices during the nineteenth century. It is a park that protects the scenic results of an environmental disaster. While little known today, Providence Canyon enjoyed a modicum of fame in the 1930s. During that decade, local boosters attempted to have Providence Canyon protected as a national park, insisting that it was natural. At the same time, national and international soil experts and other environmental reformers used Providence Canyon as the apotheosis of human, and particularly southern, land abuse. Let Us Now Praise Famous Gullies uses the unlikely story of Providence Canyon—and the 1930s contest over its origins and meaning—to recount the larger history of dramatic human-induced soil erosion across the South and to highlight the role that the region and its erosive agricultural history played in the rise of soil science and soil conservation in America. More than that, though, the book is a meditation on the ways in which our persistent mental habit of separating nature from culture has stunted our ability to appreciate places like Providence Canyon and to understand the larger history of American conservation.

Fifty years ago Georgia chose how it would use the natural environment of its coast. The General Assembly passed the Coastal Marshlands Protection Act in 1970, and, surprisingly, Lester Maddox, a governor who had built a conservative reputation by defending segregation, signed it into law. With this book, Paul Bolster narrates the politics of the times and brings to life the political leaders and the coalition of advocates who led Georgia to pass the most comprehensive protection of marshlands along the Atlantic seaboard. Saving the Georgia Coast brings to light the intriguing and colorful characters who formed that coalition: wealthy island owners, hunters and fishermen, people who made their home on the coast, courageous political leaders, garden-club members, clean-water protectors, and journalists. It explores how that political coalition came together behind governmental leaders and traces the origins of environmental organizations that continue to impact policy today. Saving the Georgia Coast enhances the reader’s understanding of the many steps it takes for a bill to become a law. Bolster’s account reviews state policy toward the coast today, giving the reader an opportunity to compare yesterday to the present. Current demands on the coastal environment are different—including spaceports and sea rise from climate change—but the political pressures to generate new wealth and new jobs, or to perch a home on the edge of the sea, are no different than fifty years ago. Saving the Georgia Coast spotlights the past and present decisions needed to balance human desires with the limits of what nature has to offer.

The World of the Salt Marsh is a wide-ranging exploration of the southeastern coast—its natural history, its people and their way of life, and the historic and ongoing threats to its ecological survival. Focusing on areas from Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, to Cape Canaveral, Florida, Charles Seabrook examines the ecological importance of the salt marsh, calling it “a biological factory without equal.” Twice-daily tides carry in a supply of nutrients that nourish vast meadows of spartina (Spartina alterniflora)—a crucial habitat for creatures ranging from tiny marine invertebrates to wading birds. The meadows provide vital nurseries for 80 percent of the seafood species, including oysters, crabs, shrimp, and a variety of finfish, and they are invaluable for storm protection, erosion prevention, and pollution filtration. Seabrook is also concerned with the plight of the people who make their living from the coast’s bounty and who carry on its unique culture. Among them are Charlie Phillips, a fishmonger whose livelihood is threatened by development in McIntosh County, Georgia, and Vera Manigault of Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, a basket maker of Gullah-Geechee descent, who says that the sweetgrass needed to make her culturally significant wares is becoming scarcer. For all of the biodiversity and cultural history of the salt marshes, many still view them as vast wastelands to be drained, diked, or “improved” for development into highways and subdivisions. If people can better understand and appreciate these ecosystems, Seabrook contends, they are more likely to join the growing chorus of scientists, conservationists, fishermen, and coastal visitors and residents calling for protection of these truly amazing places.

With this collection of essays, Anthony J. Martin invites us to investigate animal and human traces on the Georgia coast and the remarkable stories these traces, both modern and fossil, tell us. Readers will learn how these traces enabled geologists to discover that the remains of ancient barrier islands still exist on the lower coastal plain of Georgia, showing the recession of oceans millions of years ago. First, Martin details a solid but approachable overview of Georgia barrier island ecosystems—maritime forests, salt marshes, dunes, beaches—and how these ecosystems are as much a product of plant and animal behavior as they are of geology. Martin then describes animal tracks, burrows, nests, and other traces and what they tell us about their makers. He also explains how trace fossils can document the behaviors of animals from millions of years ago, including those no longer extant. Next, Martin discusses the relatively scant history—scarcely five thousand years—of humans on the Georgia coast. He takes us from the Native American shell rings on Sapelo Island to the cobbled streets of Savannah paved with the ballast stones of slave ships. He also describes the human introduction of invasive animals to the coast and their effects on native species. Finally, Martin’s epilogue introduces the sobering idea that climate change, with its resultant extreme weather and rising sea levels, is the ultimate human trace affecting the Georgia coast. Here he asks how the traces of the past and present help us to better predict and deal with our uncertain future.

Sally Sierer Bethea was one of the first women in America to become a “riverkeeper”—a vocal defender of a specific waterway who holds polluters accountable. In Keeping the Chattahoochee, she tells stories that range from joyous and funny to frustrating—even alarming—to illustrate what it takes to save an endangered river. Her tales are triggered by the regular walks she takes through a forest to the Chattahoochee over the course of a year, finding solace and kinship in nature. For two decades, Bethea worked to restore the neglected Chattahoochee, which provides drinking water and recreation to millions of people, habitat for wildlife, and water for industries and farms as it cuts through the heart of the Deep South. Pairing natural and political history with reflective writing, she draws readers into her watershed and her memories. Bethea’s passion for the natural world—and for defending it with a strong, informed voice animates this instructive memoir. Offering lessons on how to fight for our fundamental right to clean water, Bethea and her colleagues take on powerful corporate and government polluters. They strengthen environmental policies and educate children, reviving the great river from a century of misuse.

Northern Appalachia is one of the most biodiverse regions on Earth and home to a broad range of ecological and human cultures. With A Literary Field Guide to Northern Appalachia, editors Todd Davis and Noah Davis recognize and celebrate this diversity and the fact that humans are storytelling creatures who develop relationships with their landscapes at the intersection of art and science. A companion volume to A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia, this guide introduces the reader to seventy indigenous species found in Northern Appalachia, a region comprising parts of Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. As a hybrid literary and natural history anthology, the book consists of descriptions and notes on habitat, range, and ecology provided by six scientists with expertise in the region’s flora and fauna. In addition, eleven artists and seventy poets have provided original artwork and poetry that illuminate the lives of the greater-than-human world. Defying easy stereotypes, the guide presents trees, shrubs, wildflowers and mammals, birds and fish, reptiles and amphibians, and invertebrates and fungi. Love and wonder for these ancient mountains and their ever-evolving residents flood the pages of this book, inviting the reader into a deeper way of knowing a place and the lives dependent on it.

After many years of limited commitments to people or places, writer and naturalist John Lane married in his late forties and settled down in his hometown of Spartanburg, in the South Carolina piedmont. He, his wife, and two stepsons built a sustainable home in the woods near Lawson’s Fork Creek. Soon after settling in, Lane pinpointed his location on a topographical map. Centering an old, chipped saucer over his home, he traced a circle one mile in radius and set out to explore the area. What follows from that simple act is a chronicle of Lane’s deepening knowledge of the place where he’ll likely finish out his life. An accomplished hiker and paddler, Lane discovers, within a mile of his home, a variety of coexistent landscapes—ancient and modern, natural and manmade. There is, of course, the creek with its granite shoals, floodplain, and surrounding woods. The circle also encompasses an eight-thousand-year-old cache of Native American artifacts, graves of a dozen British soldiers killed in 1780, an eighteenth-century ironworks site, remnants of two cotton plantations, a hundred-year-old country club, a sewer plant, and a smattering of mid- to late twentieth-century subdivisions. Lane’s explorations intensify his bonds to family, friends, and colleagues as they sharpen his sense of place. By looking more deeply at what lies close to home, both the ordinary and the remarkable, Lane shows us how whole new worlds can open up.