Chapter Four - fire wars
FIRE WARS – THE BATTLE FOR FIRE IN NATURE
Prelude to Battle
The battle against 20th century total fire suppression in nature’s ecosystems, and for the use of controlled fire in nature, was the result of the convergence of two different perspectives on how nature should be managed. The convergence was between a few European educated United States government foresters with little ecological understanding, especially of fire’s role in nature, and a few old museum collectors who were evolving into ecologists to become the founders of the new emerging field of ecology.
The age of the collectors and taxonomists was ending and these old collectors and a rare academic or two found themselves founding the emerging field of ecology. Science was evolving rapidly in the 1800s and into the 20th century. This was especially true for those attempting to use the scientific method and principles to understand nature in what was called at the time the Natural Sciences. Collecting and classifying had begun in the Natural Sciences in earnest centuries before, even before the time of Darwin.
The 1700s, 1800s and early 1900s were the age of the collectors and taxonomists, because in order to study something like nature, you need to figure out what’s there to begin with. This requires collectors going out into the field to collect and preserve specimens and gather information on those plants and animals. It also requires that there be taxonomists in the museums who are trained to name and categorizing specimens in some kind of logical scientific manner.
In a similar manner, foresters were evolving from the 5th century monks who established a plantation of Stone Pine for use as a source of fuel and food in Byzantine Romagna on the Adriatic coast. Forestry practices were developed by the Visigoths in the 7th century when facing a shortage of wood. They passed laws concerned with the preservation of oak and pine forests. Systematic management of forests for sustainable timber began in the 14th century in Nuremberg and in 16th century Japan. Before all this the Chinese had a long history of forest management. According to Wikipedia:
“Schools of forestry were established beginning in the late 18th century in Hesse, Russia, Austria-Hungary, Sweden, France and elsewhere in Europe. In the late 19th and 20th century forest preservation programs were established in British India, the United States, and Europe. Many foresters were either from continental Europe (like Sir Dietrich Brandis), or educated there (like Gifford Pinchot).”
This is a very important piece of information because it had a very big impact on the creation of United States government forest fire suppression policies in the early part of the 20th century. [88] The reason that this is so important to understand is that for hundreds of years European forests were being removed to make way for farming and grazing as Europe’s population skyrocketed due to advancements in farming and later the industrial revolution. Much of this destruction started as hunter and gathers were being replaced by farmers for thousands of years and it was sped up by advancements in technology and new crops that could support more and more people. It started with rotational slash and burn agriculture that became permanent when the soil could be tilled easily by animals pulling plows.
We can be sure that the emerging modern foresters were horrified in the 1800s at the near total destruction of much of Europe’s forests as Europe industrialized, and it was natural to blame the local inhabitants and fire for this destruction. Today this same process is happening in the Amazon, Africa, and Southeast Asia. We can see this same kind of knee jerk reaction here as elsewhere by called “educated people” without ecological training.
When these “educated” foresters without ecological training rose up in government ranks in the early part of the 20th century, they were horrified as they experienced huge catastrophic fires that were devastating the forests in the United States along with great loss of life and property. Like generations of foresters before them, they saw forests going up in smoke right before their eyes repeating in the United States what had already happened before in Europe. But because they did not have ecological training or a proper understanding of fire in nature, they saw fire as the enemy, not the widespread logging and loss of the Native American light fire managers.
Well, they were about to get that ecological training because in the Southeastern United States their new fire exclusion policies ran up against some newly emerging collectors turned ecologists. These very stubborn scientists and land managers associated with the game plantations around Thomasville Georgia knew that this total fire suppression was wrong and very damaging to natural ecosystems and they were not about to roll over even when threatened with jail time by “educated” foresters for their burning the woods.
The so called “educated forestry scientists” were soon to get an education by some real scientists, who over decades proved through scientific studies that the idea that fire was bad for nature was an ecological destructive myth. As it turned out, the government foresters had built their anti-fire propaganda on little or bad science, but it took decades to begin to undo the damage of United States Forest Service propaganda. The job is far from over even today as forests weighed down by huge fuel loads accumulated by the suppression of light cleansing fires blow up into unstoppable catastrophic fires, not only in the Western United States, but in the rest of the world as well.
There was yet another factor that the fire exclusion foresters failed to understand and that was the value of a close relationship with nature as shown by native peoples all over the world. These early “educated” foresters had a real contempt for native peoples and their understanding of fire, and a way to high opinion of themselves, as was commonly held until the middle of the 20th century.
Contrary on what you might view on Wikipedia, the transition and battle for prescribed fire was anything but reasoned and dispassionate. The anti-fire opposition was so full of professional and academic hubris that they were right, and with no scientific studies to back them up, resorted to demonizing and ridiculing anybody who stood in their way. One needs no better example of the mood and tactics of the anti-fire forces even as late as 1940 in regards to scientists and local people alike. Psychologist, United States Forest Service John Shea, writes in 1940 in an article Our Pappies Burnt the Woods: [89]
“Outsiders visiting or motoring in the South during burning seasons, however, are shocked and appalled by the miles of fire running free in the woodlands and the palls of smoke that dull the sun and often make motoring hazardous. “Why,” they demand, “cannot these fires be stopped or controlled?””
“WOODS burnin’ ‘s right. We allus done it. Our pappies burned th’ woods and’ their pappies afore’ em. It war right fer them an’ it’s right fer us.” So spoke a lean resident of the piney woods—one of hundreds I interviewed in the course of a six months’ study last year during which as a psychologist I was supposed to find the “inner-most” reason why inhabitants of the forest lands of the South cling persistently to the custom of burning the woods. “Fires do a heap of good,” continued my “patient.” “Kill th’ boll weevil, snakes, ticks an’ bean beetles. Greens up the grass.””
“The extent of the annual burnings, the harm they do and the barrier they raise to successful forest culture throughout the South are well known to federal, state and private forest agencies.” “Seeking a new educational approach, the federal Forest Service last summer decided to delve deeper into the human or social roots of the woods-burning problem. It was hoped that here might be found a point of vaccination that with an improved educational serum would reach the germs of the woods-burning desires.”
There was a least one forester that did not cave to anti-fire hysteria in the Forest Service. James Barnett comments: [90]
“Fire protection became a moral crusade and early Forest Service researchers were generally proponents for complete control of fire. However, based on his research with the Urania Lumber Company, H.H. Chapman became a proponent of controlled use of fire as a means of controlling wildfires and, more importantly, stimulating forest regeneration of southern pines. In a 1912 article, Chapman argued that to keep fire entirely out of southern pine lands might result in complete destruction of the forests. Later, in 1926, he issued his famous Yale University School of Forestry Bulletin 16 which caused controversy among southern foresters because he called for the use of fire in longleaf pine regeneration.”
“Chapman was a charismatic, but forceful character. He published more than 20 papers between 1909 and the early 1940s dealing with southern pines and their relationship to fire. His work showed that most winter fires do not kill all longleaf pine seedlings; but they helped establish pine stands, suppress pine and other hardwood competitors, and reduce hazardous fuel accumulations.” Chapman recommended use of fire in longleaf pine every three years. For his pioneering work, he has been termed the "father of controlled burning for silvicultural purposes".
In a sense, the new ecologists grew up among native peoples as they went about their collecting duties for museums like my Dad and Uncle Roy, or had been brought up in their early years on the land and close to nature as had Herb Stoddard and Leon Neel. Of course don’t get me wrong, there were some government foresters who caught on pretty quick, as decades of fire suppression led to huge wildfires in Florida in 1943. By the time I was born in 1948 I fell right into the thick of things. :-)
Prelude to Battle
The battle against 20th century total fire suppression in nature’s ecosystems, and for the use of controlled fire in nature, was the result of the convergence of two different perspectives on how nature should be managed. The convergence was between a few European educated United States government foresters with little ecological understanding, especially of fire’s role in nature, and a few old museum collectors who were evolving into ecologists to become the founders of the new emerging field of ecology.
The age of the collectors and taxonomists was ending and these old collectors and a rare academic or two found themselves founding the emerging field of ecology. Science was evolving rapidly in the 1800s and into the 20th century. This was especially true for those attempting to use the scientific method and principles to understand nature in what was called at the time the Natural Sciences. Collecting and classifying had begun in the Natural Sciences in earnest centuries before, even before the time of Darwin.
The 1700s, 1800s and early 1900s were the age of the collectors and taxonomists, because in order to study something like nature, you need to figure out what’s there to begin with. This requires collectors going out into the field to collect and preserve specimens and gather information on those plants and animals. It also requires that there be taxonomists in the museums who are trained to name and categorizing specimens in some kind of logical scientific manner.
In a similar manner, foresters were evolving from the 5th century monks who established a plantation of Stone Pine for use as a source of fuel and food in Byzantine Romagna on the Adriatic coast. Forestry practices were developed by the Visigoths in the 7th century when facing a shortage of wood. They passed laws concerned with the preservation of oak and pine forests. Systematic management of forests for sustainable timber began in the 14th century in Nuremberg and in 16th century Japan. Before all this the Chinese had a long history of forest management. According to Wikipedia:
“Schools of forestry were established beginning in the late 18th century in Hesse, Russia, Austria-Hungary, Sweden, France and elsewhere in Europe. In the late 19th and 20th century forest preservation programs were established in British India, the United States, and Europe. Many foresters were either from continental Europe (like Sir Dietrich Brandis), or educated there (like Gifford Pinchot).”
This is a very important piece of information because it had a very big impact on the creation of United States government forest fire suppression policies in the early part of the 20th century. [88] The reason that this is so important to understand is that for hundreds of years European forests were being removed to make way for farming and grazing as Europe’s population skyrocketed due to advancements in farming and later the industrial revolution. Much of this destruction started as hunter and gathers were being replaced by farmers for thousands of years and it was sped up by advancements in technology and new crops that could support more and more people. It started with rotational slash and burn agriculture that became permanent when the soil could be tilled easily by animals pulling plows.
We can be sure that the emerging modern foresters were horrified in the 1800s at the near total destruction of much of Europe’s forests as Europe industrialized, and it was natural to blame the local inhabitants and fire for this destruction. Today this same process is happening in the Amazon, Africa, and Southeast Asia. We can see this same kind of knee jerk reaction here as elsewhere by called “educated people” without ecological training.
When these “educated” foresters without ecological training rose up in government ranks in the early part of the 20th century, they were horrified as they experienced huge catastrophic fires that were devastating the forests in the United States along with great loss of life and property. Like generations of foresters before them, they saw forests going up in smoke right before their eyes repeating in the United States what had already happened before in Europe. But because they did not have ecological training or a proper understanding of fire in nature, they saw fire as the enemy, not the widespread logging and loss of the Native American light fire managers.
Well, they were about to get that ecological training because in the Southeastern United States their new fire exclusion policies ran up against some newly emerging collectors turned ecologists. These very stubborn scientists and land managers associated with the game plantations around Thomasville Georgia knew that this total fire suppression was wrong and very damaging to natural ecosystems and they were not about to roll over even when threatened with jail time by “educated” foresters for their burning the woods.
The so called “educated forestry scientists” were soon to get an education by some real scientists, who over decades proved through scientific studies that the idea that fire was bad for nature was an ecological destructive myth. As it turned out, the government foresters had built their anti-fire propaganda on little or bad science, but it took decades to begin to undo the damage of United States Forest Service propaganda. The job is far from over even today as forests weighed down by huge fuel loads accumulated by the suppression of light cleansing fires blow up into unstoppable catastrophic fires, not only in the Western United States, but in the rest of the world as well.
There was yet another factor that the fire exclusion foresters failed to understand and that was the value of a close relationship with nature as shown by native peoples all over the world. These early “educated” foresters had a real contempt for native peoples and their understanding of fire, and a way to high opinion of themselves, as was commonly held until the middle of the 20th century.
Contrary on what you might view on Wikipedia, the transition and battle for prescribed fire was anything but reasoned and dispassionate. The anti-fire opposition was so full of professional and academic hubris that they were right, and with no scientific studies to back them up, resorted to demonizing and ridiculing anybody who stood in their way. One needs no better example of the mood and tactics of the anti-fire forces even as late as 1940 in regards to scientists and local people alike. Psychologist, United States Forest Service John Shea, writes in 1940 in an article Our Pappies Burnt the Woods: [89]
“Outsiders visiting or motoring in the South during burning seasons, however, are shocked and appalled by the miles of fire running free in the woodlands and the palls of smoke that dull the sun and often make motoring hazardous. “Why,” they demand, “cannot these fires be stopped or controlled?””
“WOODS burnin’ ‘s right. We allus done it. Our pappies burned th’ woods and’ their pappies afore’ em. It war right fer them an’ it’s right fer us.” So spoke a lean resident of the piney woods—one of hundreds I interviewed in the course of a six months’ study last year during which as a psychologist I was supposed to find the “inner-most” reason why inhabitants of the forest lands of the South cling persistently to the custom of burning the woods. “Fires do a heap of good,” continued my “patient.” “Kill th’ boll weevil, snakes, ticks an’ bean beetles. Greens up the grass.””
“The extent of the annual burnings, the harm they do and the barrier they raise to successful forest culture throughout the South are well known to federal, state and private forest agencies.” “Seeking a new educational approach, the federal Forest Service last summer decided to delve deeper into the human or social roots of the woods-burning problem. It was hoped that here might be found a point of vaccination that with an improved educational serum would reach the germs of the woods-burning desires.”
There was a least one forester that did not cave to anti-fire hysteria in the Forest Service. James Barnett comments: [90]
“Fire protection became a moral crusade and early Forest Service researchers were generally proponents for complete control of fire. However, based on his research with the Urania Lumber Company, H.H. Chapman became a proponent of controlled use of fire as a means of controlling wildfires and, more importantly, stimulating forest regeneration of southern pines. In a 1912 article, Chapman argued that to keep fire entirely out of southern pine lands might result in complete destruction of the forests. Later, in 1926, he issued his famous Yale University School of Forestry Bulletin 16 which caused controversy among southern foresters because he called for the use of fire in longleaf pine regeneration.”
“Chapman was a charismatic, but forceful character. He published more than 20 papers between 1909 and the early 1940s dealing with southern pines and their relationship to fire. His work showed that most winter fires do not kill all longleaf pine seedlings; but they helped establish pine stands, suppress pine and other hardwood competitors, and reduce hazardous fuel accumulations.” Chapman recommended use of fire in longleaf pine every three years. For his pioneering work, he has been termed the "father of controlled burning for silvicultural purposes".
In a sense, the new ecologists grew up among native peoples as they went about their collecting duties for museums like my Dad and Uncle Roy, or had been brought up in their early years on the land and close to nature as had Herb Stoddard and Leon Neel. Of course don’t get me wrong, there were some government foresters who caught on pretty quick, as decades of fire suppression led to huge wildfires in Florida in 1943. By the time I was born in 1948 I fell right into the thick of things. :-)
The Field of Battle
The reader might wonder just why did the battle for fire begin and catch hold in the Southeastern United States, and in particular, the area in Southwest Georgia around Thomasville, when fire exclusion was being implemented across the United States in the 1920s? What was so unique about Southwest Georgia? In order to answer that question I need to provide some history of the area.
The Red Hills of South Georgia and North Florida formed geologically when the sea level was higher and a great river flowed down into the shallow waters of the ocean. This river carried clay erosion down from the Appalachian Mountains, when they were much younger and rugged than today, and deposited it into an alluvial plain under water. When the sea level fell, this clay was eroded into what are called the Red Hills of today. The unique thing about the Red Hills is that this red clay based soil holds water and nutrients unlike the surrounding area of the sandy coastal plain. Trees and vegetation grow much better here than in the local sandy soils where the water and nutrients soon drain away.
This is important because as the cotton farmers before the Civil War used up the land farther north, they migrated south looking for fertile soils in which to build new cotton plantations and they found just what they wanted in the Red Hills. Of course, the Indians that they displaced were using these same fertile soils for at least a thousand years to build up large farming populations of people.
This of course was before they died of disease, when the first Europeans arrived, or were finally displaced by the cotton farmers in the region in the 1820s and 1830s. Previous to this, Jackson had invaded the Southeast with his Cherokee allies pressuring a melding of what was left of several different tribes called the Seminoles out of the area. Jackson’s men brought back word about the good soils available to the cotton farmers back north.
When the South lost the Civil War, most of these cotton farmers were bankrupted in the depression that followed the Civil War. The railroad traveling down the eastern seaboard had been extended and ended in Thomasville, Georgia. Wealthy northern businessmen and their families had begun working their way south in the winters looking for recreation and hunting in the South to escape the northern winters. They found that hunting quail and other game in the Southeast was as sporting as could be found in Europe.
First these wealthy northerners stayed in Thomasville hotels and just rented land to hunt from the local farmers whose lands were falling out of cultivation in the depression. These lands were naturally seeding into second growth pine-grassland savannas. The farmers that maintained these old fields with fire on an annual burning cycle had created just the habitat for the best Bobwhite Quail hunting.
By the late 1800s the wealthy elite business families from the north were buying up the land around Thomasville building homes or remodeling the old plantation houses that survived Sherman’s march through the South. They put the old farms together into plantation hunting lands managed for both wildlife and timber. They discovered that a well-managed pine forest, selectively cut over a hundred year rotation simulating natural thinning, could provide income. Additionally the simulated thinning served to continuously improve the stands of timber, by culling out the weak damaged trees, leaving only the tallest straightest trees.
Often the businessmen hired as the farm managers the people who before them had owned and managed the land. In such a manner they had people with lifelong intimate knowledge and experience, living on and managing the land with fire. When the local fire manager died or became disabled a son might even take over having been trained in management as an apprentice.
In January of 1894, Henry L. Beadel came to Tallahassee with his father and brother. In his article in the First Annual Tall Timbers Fire Proceedings, Henry recounts his first experiences in the area. His father’s intent was to shoot quail and Henry’s purpose was to shoot quail and also get some schooling. At that time Tallahassee’s population was only 2500-3000 people. Henry and his father and brother hunted in an area about 10 miles north of town with the help of a two horse power hunting wagon and a black driver named Charley. His first experience with fire was in late February when it seemed the whole of the land was on fire and he and his brother became quite upset until Charley explained what was going on.
“Nothing in its aspect suggested to us that the land had ever been burned off. So our ingrained northern notions about fire suffered a shock when one day toward the end of the quail season, in late February, we saw the whole country on fire, which within a few minutes left the ground black and bare except for scattered clumps of bushes. The country looked to us irretrievably ruined, and the quail doomed, until our trusty Charley informed us that this burning took place regularly every spring as far back as his great-grandpapa could remember. Our alarm thus somewhat abated when a few calmer squints through the smoke showed all the trees still standing, and we even found that we could walk behind the flames without scorching our boots.
In 1895, Henry’s uncle Edward Beadel bought Tall Timbers Plantation on Lake Iamonia about 15 miles north of Tallahassee. Henry says that during his uncle’s ownership controlled burning continued. From the period between 1897 – 1912 Henry was not able to come hunting but in 1913 onward he came and hunted with his uncle every winter until he took over the plantation in 1919 and made it his home and carried out the burning for another few years.
In his Tall Timbers Conference paper, Henry gives a rare account of the contribution to burning done by black workers on his and other plantations in the area. All too often, it has been the whites that got credit for burning the woods and fields of the old south, but much of the time the burning was left to the black slaves during slavery times and as sharecroppers, after they were freed.
It should be kept in mind that at this time there were many freed slaves still alive. It also should be noticed that like in Indian times there were no firebreaks and everybody just got out and burned their area unconcerned about the fire burning adjoining properties. “On the last day of the quail season our head Negro “made a narration” to the tenants giving them permission to “put out the fire,” which, the buildings and fences having already been raked around, they promptly did, “putting the fire” to everything that would burn. That night, on every hand, lines of flames crept or raced across fields, flickered through pine woods, here and there flaring high over the heaver clumps of weeds, accompanied by cracklings of brush, bangs like pistol shots, and clouds of eye and nose-stinging smoke.”
Those were the first night fires I had seen close up or so to speak from the middle, and they were vastly more impressive than day fires. Fascinating spectacles they were. Yet they conveyed the sense of menace which any wildfire, though known to be merely skimming the soil harmlessly, is apt to inspire, particularly in one like me, who has camped and hunted in northern woods where some soils unlike ours are vulnerable to fire, and where any fire not under absolute control can cause widespread destruction of both soil and timber. Anyway the sight of those night fires increased my dislike for burning more than was strictly necessary and led to speculation as to whether we still needed to burn as often (that was yearly) as the early settlers found to be best; or whether, under present conditions, we could get along with less frequent burning without seriously affecting the ecology.”
So in order to settle the question Henry set us some experiments plowing fire lines around his property and into sections. Henry says by this time 1926, Fire Control, was primarily for preventing fire from invading adjoining property and had become fairly standard practice. The frequency-of-burning experiments were just to keep fire out of plots from one to three years. He says three years of exclusion was enough to convince him that the old time settlers knew very well, in fact better than people like him do now, what they were about when the burned yearly.
The reader might wonder just why did the battle for fire begin and catch hold in the Southeastern United States, and in particular, the area in Southwest Georgia around Thomasville, when fire exclusion was being implemented across the United States in the 1920s? What was so unique about Southwest Georgia? In order to answer that question I need to provide some history of the area.
The Red Hills of South Georgia and North Florida formed geologically when the sea level was higher and a great river flowed down into the shallow waters of the ocean. This river carried clay erosion down from the Appalachian Mountains, when they were much younger and rugged than today, and deposited it into an alluvial plain under water. When the sea level fell, this clay was eroded into what are called the Red Hills of today. The unique thing about the Red Hills is that this red clay based soil holds water and nutrients unlike the surrounding area of the sandy coastal plain. Trees and vegetation grow much better here than in the local sandy soils where the water and nutrients soon drain away.
This is important because as the cotton farmers before the Civil War used up the land farther north, they migrated south looking for fertile soils in which to build new cotton plantations and they found just what they wanted in the Red Hills. Of course, the Indians that they displaced were using these same fertile soils for at least a thousand years to build up large farming populations of people.
This of course was before they died of disease, when the first Europeans arrived, or were finally displaced by the cotton farmers in the region in the 1820s and 1830s. Previous to this, Jackson had invaded the Southeast with his Cherokee allies pressuring a melding of what was left of several different tribes called the Seminoles out of the area. Jackson’s men brought back word about the good soils available to the cotton farmers back north.
When the South lost the Civil War, most of these cotton farmers were bankrupted in the depression that followed the Civil War. The railroad traveling down the eastern seaboard had been extended and ended in Thomasville, Georgia. Wealthy northern businessmen and their families had begun working their way south in the winters looking for recreation and hunting in the South to escape the northern winters. They found that hunting quail and other game in the Southeast was as sporting as could be found in Europe.
First these wealthy northerners stayed in Thomasville hotels and just rented land to hunt from the local farmers whose lands were falling out of cultivation in the depression. These lands were naturally seeding into second growth pine-grassland savannas. The farmers that maintained these old fields with fire on an annual burning cycle had created just the habitat for the best Bobwhite Quail hunting.
By the late 1800s the wealthy elite business families from the north were buying up the land around Thomasville building homes or remodeling the old plantation houses that survived Sherman’s march through the South. They put the old farms together into plantation hunting lands managed for both wildlife and timber. They discovered that a well-managed pine forest, selectively cut over a hundred year rotation simulating natural thinning, could provide income. Additionally the simulated thinning served to continuously improve the stands of timber, by culling out the weak damaged trees, leaving only the tallest straightest trees.
Often the businessmen hired as the farm managers the people who before them had owned and managed the land. In such a manner they had people with lifelong intimate knowledge and experience, living on and managing the land with fire. When the local fire manager died or became disabled a son might even take over having been trained in management as an apprentice.
In January of 1894, Henry L. Beadel came to Tallahassee with his father and brother. In his article in the First Annual Tall Timbers Fire Proceedings, Henry recounts his first experiences in the area. His father’s intent was to shoot quail and Henry’s purpose was to shoot quail and also get some schooling. At that time Tallahassee’s population was only 2500-3000 people. Henry and his father and brother hunted in an area about 10 miles north of town with the help of a two horse power hunting wagon and a black driver named Charley. His first experience with fire was in late February when it seemed the whole of the land was on fire and he and his brother became quite upset until Charley explained what was going on.
“Nothing in its aspect suggested to us that the land had ever been burned off. So our ingrained northern notions about fire suffered a shock when one day toward the end of the quail season, in late February, we saw the whole country on fire, which within a few minutes left the ground black and bare except for scattered clumps of bushes. The country looked to us irretrievably ruined, and the quail doomed, until our trusty Charley informed us that this burning took place regularly every spring as far back as his great-grandpapa could remember. Our alarm thus somewhat abated when a few calmer squints through the smoke showed all the trees still standing, and we even found that we could walk behind the flames without scorching our boots.
In 1895, Henry’s uncle Edward Beadel bought Tall Timbers Plantation on Lake Iamonia about 15 miles north of Tallahassee. Henry says that during his uncle’s ownership controlled burning continued. From the period between 1897 – 1912 Henry was not able to come hunting but in 1913 onward he came and hunted with his uncle every winter until he took over the plantation in 1919 and made it his home and carried out the burning for another few years.
In his Tall Timbers Conference paper, Henry gives a rare account of the contribution to burning done by black workers on his and other plantations in the area. All too often, it has been the whites that got credit for burning the woods and fields of the old south, but much of the time the burning was left to the black slaves during slavery times and as sharecroppers, after they were freed.
It should be kept in mind that at this time there were many freed slaves still alive. It also should be noticed that like in Indian times there were no firebreaks and everybody just got out and burned their area unconcerned about the fire burning adjoining properties. “On the last day of the quail season our head Negro “made a narration” to the tenants giving them permission to “put out the fire,” which, the buildings and fences having already been raked around, they promptly did, “putting the fire” to everything that would burn. That night, on every hand, lines of flames crept or raced across fields, flickered through pine woods, here and there flaring high over the heaver clumps of weeds, accompanied by cracklings of brush, bangs like pistol shots, and clouds of eye and nose-stinging smoke.”
Those were the first night fires I had seen close up or so to speak from the middle, and they were vastly more impressive than day fires. Fascinating spectacles they were. Yet they conveyed the sense of menace which any wildfire, though known to be merely skimming the soil harmlessly, is apt to inspire, particularly in one like me, who has camped and hunted in northern woods where some soils unlike ours are vulnerable to fire, and where any fire not under absolute control can cause widespread destruction of both soil and timber. Anyway the sight of those night fires increased my dislike for burning more than was strictly necessary and led to speculation as to whether we still needed to burn as often (that was yearly) as the early settlers found to be best; or whether, under present conditions, we could get along with less frequent burning without seriously affecting the ecology.”
So in order to settle the question Henry set us some experiments plowing fire lines around his property and into sections. Henry says by this time 1926, Fire Control, was primarily for preventing fire from invading adjoining property and had become fairly standard practice. The frequency-of-burning experiments were just to keep fire out of plots from one to three years. He says three years of exclusion was enough to convince him that the old time settlers knew very well, in fact better than people like him do now, what they were about when the burned yearly.
The Battle Begins
So we can see things were proceeding along just fine until the early 1920s when the Forest Service anti-fire propaganda machine rolled into town and convinced some of the plantation owners to make their managers stop using fire. Henry Beadel was smart because he innately knew one of the major precepts that applies to fire and other experimentation as well, start small, and if the experiment works scale up.
In Henry’s case he saved himself a lot of trouble and equipment expense by doing his fire experiments on a small scale first. Other less savvy plantation owners stopped their burning altogether with serious consequences for years to come to get their properties “back-in-shape’. It only took two or three years for the land to start growing up in brush under the pines where it was increasingly difficult to drive their hunting wagons across the land, let alone see the dogs. Even worse, the quail disappeared almost overnight being adapted to annual fires.
Most of these wealthy owners were not stupid, and quickly realized their error and allowed burning again, but they realized that if there was no scientific work backing up the need for fire, the government would soon force them to quit burning and they would lose the hunting value of their plantation. In a clear case of accountability in the organizational structure of the plantations they unlike government bureaucracies could put off the consequences of fire suppression. They also could not increase fire suppression for decades with little accountability as could the public land management agencies.
Powerful and wealthy men such John Hay Whitney, were not about to roll over and lose their winter recreation easily. They came together and they soon devised a plan to finance a scientific study of the Bobwhite Quail that would scientifically prove that frequent fire was beneficial to the Bobwhite quail and other game. This study would serve as a foundation helping to protect their investment in their forests and game from wildfire devastation. It was a good thing they did, because the government propaganda operations were moving into the area big time with the Dixie Crusaders.
In Col. Thompson’s long house hunting lodge, plantation owners and their girlfriends could escape their wives, under the manly hunting pretense. In front of the large blazing fireplace here on Meridian Road, on cold winter evenings, the Southwest Georgia and North Florida plantation owners would conspire to bring Herb Stoddard, a taxidermist and field collector, to scientifically prove why their hunting population of Bobwhite Quail had collapsed. Scientific evidence they knew would undermine the powerful Smokey the Bear propaganda operations of the Forest Service soon to give rise to the 1928 invasion of the Dixie Crusaders into the Deep South. Rooney writes: [91]
"A fleet of special trucks-equipped with generators, (many of the hamlets visited lacked electricity) and motion-picture projectors, and manned by articulate young southern foresters-headed for the woods in September 1928. Between then and June 1931, the Dixie Crusaders, as they came to be known, preached the gospel of fire prevention to three million people in Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina."
After these informal meetings between plantation owners at Sherwood Plantation, a formal meeting was held at the Links Club in New York City. Following this meeting negotiations were begun between the Committee of the Cooperative Quail Investigation and the chief of the Biological Survey, and an agreement signed on February 5, 1924. Field headquarters were to be Col. L.S. Thompson’s hunting plantation on Meridian Road where Herb was invited to stay and run the investigation.
Herb Stoddard’s scientific, rigorous and expansive book The (Bobwhite Quail) was the final report of the Committee that began work on March 17, 1924 and ended June 30, 1929 and was published in 1932. In this exhaustive book is a watered down chapter on fire. The book was only published after Herb threatened to publish the book himself, if he was forced to dilute the fire chapter any further by the Bureau of Biological Survey, United States Department of Agriculture.
This quail book firmly established Herb Stoddard as a founder in the newly emerging field of ecology and fire ecology. Herb was a good friend of another more well know father of ecology, Aldo Leopold, the author of The Sand County Almanac. A third founder of the ecological field was Dr. Alee who mentored my Dad while he studied at the University of Chicago before Dad went to work for Herb in the early 1930s.
Aldo Leopold was aware of the importance of fire where he lived and wrote his classic book the Sand County Almanac in the prairie country of the north central United States. He also recognized as did Herb the importance of native peoples fire knowledge. In a paper in 1924 he stated:
“Previous to the settlement of the country, fires started by lightning and Indians kept the brush thin, kept the juniper and other woodland species decimated, and gave the grass the upper hand with respect to the possession of the soil. In spite of periodic fires, this grass prevented erosion. Then came the settlers with their great herds of stock. These ranges had never been grazed and the grazed them to death, thus removing the grass and automatically checking the possibilities of widespread fires. The removal of the grass relieved the brush species of root competition and of fire damage and thereby caused them to spread and “take the country.”
At the end of the paper that Herb Stoddard gave at the First Annual Tall Timbers Fire Ecology Conference called Some Techniques of Controlled Burning in the Deep Southeast, he said:
"I know a paper like this may be just the “a” of the alphabet to many of those in attendance, but I thought a little reiteration doesn’t hurt when you’re talking about fire; we don’t want to take any chances with a tool as dangerous as fire. Almost all tools that are effective in land handling can do great damage if wrongly used. An inexperienced operator with a bulldozer, in a young stand of pine, can do just about as much damage as a wildfire. I’m inclined to agree with some others here that we can learn a great deal from primitive man if we are humble enough."
In 1943 came the revolution in U.S. Forest Service thinking in Florida after decades of fire suppression, even when some foresters and landowners were becoming very alarmed by the buildup of fuel in their forests making them increasingly prone to wildfire. Even while Smokey the Bear anti-fire proponents were still firmly in control of government fire policy, there was rebellion in the ranks. R. A. Bonninghausen, Chief of Forest Management of the Florida Forest Service, writes in the 1962 First Annual Fire Conference Proceedings:
“In 1943 “came the revolution.” Prolonged drought throughout the south coastal plain area brought about the most disastrous fires that any of us had experienced in the history of protection in the South. I think the biggest fire was on the Osceola National Forest. As I recall, it was 70,000 to 80,000 acres.
It was a tremendous thing. I was working for a paper company near Gainesville as resident manager
and a pall of smoke hung over that area for days. We sat sleepless, worrying about our own piece of timber because things were so dry and the accumulation of rough was so great in many parts of the forest. In our Gulf County unit, which is a Florida Forest Service protective unit, I believe 20,000 acres burned over in one fire.
In that same year there was a conference called at Lake City by the Forest Farmer’s Association and it was a conference on fire. To the best of my knowledge that was the first one that was called in this area concerned principally with a discussion by foresters as well as people who were intimately acquainted with the use of fire in the woods. At that conference, in looking over an old program which I dug out of the files, I found these names: H.H. Chapman, H.L. Stoddard, Frank Heyward, John Currey, Claude Bickford, Hux Coulter and many others that we recognize today as having had a great deal
of influence on these changes.”
Herb Stoddard, one of the major players in the pro-fire wars family, moved to Florida in 1893 and lived there until 1900 where he developed an early understanding of the importance of fire from the local settlers. He then settled in Chicago where he worked as a taxidermist for the Chicago Field Museum. As it turns out another major player in the pro-fire wars, my father Ed Komarek Sr., came from Chicago where his father had emigrated at the turn of the century and started a vegetable business and later got into construction.
With the great depression hit, Dad’s father was wiped out and he had to quit college where he was being mentored by Dr. Alee. Dad grew up in a suburb of Chicago that still had some wildland and as a
boy he had a strong interest in nature especially birds. He had soon ingratiated himself to the taxonomists at the Chicago Field Museum that worked down in the basement.
One of these sniffed this white power and Dad learned later that this friend was the doctor for Al Capone. It must have been here that he was taught to skin and stuff small birds and mammals with cotton to be put into museum trays for study. I suspect he was also doing some collecting for the taxonomists in the local area because when he had to quit college he landed a job with the Field Museum for 50 dollars a month and the use of a vehicle to go collecting mammals in what was to become the Great Smokey Mountain National Park. Later, as things got even worse in Chicago where Dad saw bread lines, his mother asked that he take his younger brother under his wing and get him out of town. They were to work together as a team for the rest of their lives.
At the time Dad had no contact with Herb. Herb showed me as a boy some of his pictures when he was involved in cleaning out and mounting rhinos and elephants by digging into the insides of these huge animals and carving out the meat and bones to leave the hide for mounting. It was only later that Dad heard about Herb and his work where he lived on Meridian Road in Southwest Georgia. Dad first met Herb on a small mammal collecting trip south to Florida and he and Herb became good friends. The brothers went on down into Florida where Roy stayed for a while living and working closely with the Seminole Indians in what was then a fire savanna grassland occupied and burned by
cattlemen.
Dad then went to work for Herb as his assistant in the Cooperative Quail Association study in the 1930s. After being mentored by Herb on fire he was soon converted and enthusiastically embraced controlled burning or prescribed fire as it is now called. Ed begins his Fire Ecology paper of 1962 with this line:
“In presenting this paper on Fire Ecology I find myself in somewhat of a quandary for I have spent about half of my life influenced, taught and educated against fire in nature and then I have spent the other half of it using fire and trying to understand it.”
By the 1940s, Dad quit his low paying work as Herb’s assistant, did some consulting, and then went to work for the multi-millionaire John H. Whitney to manage his 10,000 acre quail plantation near Thomasville, Georgia. Leon Neel took over from Ed, and Herb and Leon went into the timber consulting business together after the Quail Association ended. Dad told me that he got the job at Greenwood in the following manner. (Leon was to become another of the founders of Tall Timbers Research Inc. and a player in the pro-fire wars up until the time he left the board a few years ago to write his book on the Art of Prescribed Fire. He is the only one still alive today of the original founders of Tall Timbers Research.)
Major Beard, who was managing Greenwood at the time, decided to look Dad up and traveled to Birdsong Plantation. It happened that Major Beard was struggling to modernize and make the transition from mule power to modern equipment power on Greenwood. When Major Beard finally found Dad, he was a sight to behold as he emerging in spectacular fashion out of a thicket of brush 15 feet high. Ed was driving his iron spiked wheeled tractor pulling a heavy drum brush cutter that was dwarfed by the brush he was chopping down. This was how Ed, along with fire and some bulldozer work cleared our Birdsong Plantation’s fields to raise cattle and timber.
If I recall correctly, Dad was offered the Greenwood job on the spot by the very impressed Major Beard who was having brush problems on Greenwood. Dad finally began to make enough money to build up the family’s Birdsong Plantation next to Sherwood Plantation to its final size of 565 acres. Even more important he had an agreement with Mr. Whitney that his scientific work would be considered part of his regular work at Greenwood as long as things were operating smoothly.
Soon Dad brought in his brother Roy to work at Greenwood under this same agreement and both after a few years had things running so well that they could devote most of their time to fire research. Dad with the backing of Roy, had the ability, the financial resources and time to organize the first fire conferences filled with speakers from all over the world as well as pull together the founders to organize Tall Timbers itself in the late 1950’s.
I was born in 1948 and by the age of five I was already being mentored by my father and Herb in the use of fire. I learned the basics very early and at this age was sitting on my father’s lap learning to drive the tractors and the family’s 1947 Willy’s jeep, one of the first civilian jeeps in the area. I was brought up around the top ecological scientists of the day and learned by example. I was laying fire with a rake at least as far back as I can remember helping my father burn the woods.
So we can see things were proceeding along just fine until the early 1920s when the Forest Service anti-fire propaganda machine rolled into town and convinced some of the plantation owners to make their managers stop using fire. Henry Beadel was smart because he innately knew one of the major precepts that applies to fire and other experimentation as well, start small, and if the experiment works scale up.
In Henry’s case he saved himself a lot of trouble and equipment expense by doing his fire experiments on a small scale first. Other less savvy plantation owners stopped their burning altogether with serious consequences for years to come to get their properties “back-in-shape’. It only took two or three years for the land to start growing up in brush under the pines where it was increasingly difficult to drive their hunting wagons across the land, let alone see the dogs. Even worse, the quail disappeared almost overnight being adapted to annual fires.
Most of these wealthy owners were not stupid, and quickly realized their error and allowed burning again, but they realized that if there was no scientific work backing up the need for fire, the government would soon force them to quit burning and they would lose the hunting value of their plantation. In a clear case of accountability in the organizational structure of the plantations they unlike government bureaucracies could put off the consequences of fire suppression. They also could not increase fire suppression for decades with little accountability as could the public land management agencies.
Powerful and wealthy men such John Hay Whitney, were not about to roll over and lose their winter recreation easily. They came together and they soon devised a plan to finance a scientific study of the Bobwhite Quail that would scientifically prove that frequent fire was beneficial to the Bobwhite quail and other game. This study would serve as a foundation helping to protect their investment in their forests and game from wildfire devastation. It was a good thing they did, because the government propaganda operations were moving into the area big time with the Dixie Crusaders.
In Col. Thompson’s long house hunting lodge, plantation owners and their girlfriends could escape their wives, under the manly hunting pretense. In front of the large blazing fireplace here on Meridian Road, on cold winter evenings, the Southwest Georgia and North Florida plantation owners would conspire to bring Herb Stoddard, a taxidermist and field collector, to scientifically prove why their hunting population of Bobwhite Quail had collapsed. Scientific evidence they knew would undermine the powerful Smokey the Bear propaganda operations of the Forest Service soon to give rise to the 1928 invasion of the Dixie Crusaders into the Deep South. Rooney writes: [91]
"A fleet of special trucks-equipped with generators, (many of the hamlets visited lacked electricity) and motion-picture projectors, and manned by articulate young southern foresters-headed for the woods in September 1928. Between then and June 1931, the Dixie Crusaders, as they came to be known, preached the gospel of fire prevention to three million people in Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina."
After these informal meetings between plantation owners at Sherwood Plantation, a formal meeting was held at the Links Club in New York City. Following this meeting negotiations were begun between the Committee of the Cooperative Quail Investigation and the chief of the Biological Survey, and an agreement signed on February 5, 1924. Field headquarters were to be Col. L.S. Thompson’s hunting plantation on Meridian Road where Herb was invited to stay and run the investigation.
Herb Stoddard’s scientific, rigorous and expansive book The (Bobwhite Quail) was the final report of the Committee that began work on March 17, 1924 and ended June 30, 1929 and was published in 1932. In this exhaustive book is a watered down chapter on fire. The book was only published after Herb threatened to publish the book himself, if he was forced to dilute the fire chapter any further by the Bureau of Biological Survey, United States Department of Agriculture.
This quail book firmly established Herb Stoddard as a founder in the newly emerging field of ecology and fire ecology. Herb was a good friend of another more well know father of ecology, Aldo Leopold, the author of The Sand County Almanac. A third founder of the ecological field was Dr. Alee who mentored my Dad while he studied at the University of Chicago before Dad went to work for Herb in the early 1930s.
Aldo Leopold was aware of the importance of fire where he lived and wrote his classic book the Sand County Almanac in the prairie country of the north central United States. He also recognized as did Herb the importance of native peoples fire knowledge. In a paper in 1924 he stated:
“Previous to the settlement of the country, fires started by lightning and Indians kept the brush thin, kept the juniper and other woodland species decimated, and gave the grass the upper hand with respect to the possession of the soil. In spite of periodic fires, this grass prevented erosion. Then came the settlers with their great herds of stock. These ranges had never been grazed and the grazed them to death, thus removing the grass and automatically checking the possibilities of widespread fires. The removal of the grass relieved the brush species of root competition and of fire damage and thereby caused them to spread and “take the country.”
At the end of the paper that Herb Stoddard gave at the First Annual Tall Timbers Fire Ecology Conference called Some Techniques of Controlled Burning in the Deep Southeast, he said:
"I know a paper like this may be just the “a” of the alphabet to many of those in attendance, but I thought a little reiteration doesn’t hurt when you’re talking about fire; we don’t want to take any chances with a tool as dangerous as fire. Almost all tools that are effective in land handling can do great damage if wrongly used. An inexperienced operator with a bulldozer, in a young stand of pine, can do just about as much damage as a wildfire. I’m inclined to agree with some others here that we can learn a great deal from primitive man if we are humble enough."
In 1943 came the revolution in U.S. Forest Service thinking in Florida after decades of fire suppression, even when some foresters and landowners were becoming very alarmed by the buildup of fuel in their forests making them increasingly prone to wildfire. Even while Smokey the Bear anti-fire proponents were still firmly in control of government fire policy, there was rebellion in the ranks. R. A. Bonninghausen, Chief of Forest Management of the Florida Forest Service, writes in the 1962 First Annual Fire Conference Proceedings:
“In 1943 “came the revolution.” Prolonged drought throughout the south coastal plain area brought about the most disastrous fires that any of us had experienced in the history of protection in the South. I think the biggest fire was on the Osceola National Forest. As I recall, it was 70,000 to 80,000 acres.
It was a tremendous thing. I was working for a paper company near Gainesville as resident manager
and a pall of smoke hung over that area for days. We sat sleepless, worrying about our own piece of timber because things were so dry and the accumulation of rough was so great in many parts of the forest. In our Gulf County unit, which is a Florida Forest Service protective unit, I believe 20,000 acres burned over in one fire.
In that same year there was a conference called at Lake City by the Forest Farmer’s Association and it was a conference on fire. To the best of my knowledge that was the first one that was called in this area concerned principally with a discussion by foresters as well as people who were intimately acquainted with the use of fire in the woods. At that conference, in looking over an old program which I dug out of the files, I found these names: H.H. Chapman, H.L. Stoddard, Frank Heyward, John Currey, Claude Bickford, Hux Coulter and many others that we recognize today as having had a great deal
of influence on these changes.”
Herb Stoddard, one of the major players in the pro-fire wars family, moved to Florida in 1893 and lived there until 1900 where he developed an early understanding of the importance of fire from the local settlers. He then settled in Chicago where he worked as a taxidermist for the Chicago Field Museum. As it turns out another major player in the pro-fire wars, my father Ed Komarek Sr., came from Chicago where his father had emigrated at the turn of the century and started a vegetable business and later got into construction.
With the great depression hit, Dad’s father was wiped out and he had to quit college where he was being mentored by Dr. Alee. Dad grew up in a suburb of Chicago that still had some wildland and as a
boy he had a strong interest in nature especially birds. He had soon ingratiated himself to the taxonomists at the Chicago Field Museum that worked down in the basement.
One of these sniffed this white power and Dad learned later that this friend was the doctor for Al Capone. It must have been here that he was taught to skin and stuff small birds and mammals with cotton to be put into museum trays for study. I suspect he was also doing some collecting for the taxonomists in the local area because when he had to quit college he landed a job with the Field Museum for 50 dollars a month and the use of a vehicle to go collecting mammals in what was to become the Great Smokey Mountain National Park. Later, as things got even worse in Chicago where Dad saw bread lines, his mother asked that he take his younger brother under his wing and get him out of town. They were to work together as a team for the rest of their lives.
At the time Dad had no contact with Herb. Herb showed me as a boy some of his pictures when he was involved in cleaning out and mounting rhinos and elephants by digging into the insides of these huge animals and carving out the meat and bones to leave the hide for mounting. It was only later that Dad heard about Herb and his work where he lived on Meridian Road in Southwest Georgia. Dad first met Herb on a small mammal collecting trip south to Florida and he and Herb became good friends. The brothers went on down into Florida where Roy stayed for a while living and working closely with the Seminole Indians in what was then a fire savanna grassland occupied and burned by
cattlemen.
Dad then went to work for Herb as his assistant in the Cooperative Quail Association study in the 1930s. After being mentored by Herb on fire he was soon converted and enthusiastically embraced controlled burning or prescribed fire as it is now called. Ed begins his Fire Ecology paper of 1962 with this line:
“In presenting this paper on Fire Ecology I find myself in somewhat of a quandary for I have spent about half of my life influenced, taught and educated against fire in nature and then I have spent the other half of it using fire and trying to understand it.”
By the 1940s, Dad quit his low paying work as Herb’s assistant, did some consulting, and then went to work for the multi-millionaire John H. Whitney to manage his 10,000 acre quail plantation near Thomasville, Georgia. Leon Neel took over from Ed, and Herb and Leon went into the timber consulting business together after the Quail Association ended. Dad told me that he got the job at Greenwood in the following manner. (Leon was to become another of the founders of Tall Timbers Research Inc. and a player in the pro-fire wars up until the time he left the board a few years ago to write his book on the Art of Prescribed Fire. He is the only one still alive today of the original founders of Tall Timbers Research.)
Major Beard, who was managing Greenwood at the time, decided to look Dad up and traveled to Birdsong Plantation. It happened that Major Beard was struggling to modernize and make the transition from mule power to modern equipment power on Greenwood. When Major Beard finally found Dad, he was a sight to behold as he emerging in spectacular fashion out of a thicket of brush 15 feet high. Ed was driving his iron spiked wheeled tractor pulling a heavy drum brush cutter that was dwarfed by the brush he was chopping down. This was how Ed, along with fire and some bulldozer work cleared our Birdsong Plantation’s fields to raise cattle and timber.
If I recall correctly, Dad was offered the Greenwood job on the spot by the very impressed Major Beard who was having brush problems on Greenwood. Dad finally began to make enough money to build up the family’s Birdsong Plantation next to Sherwood Plantation to its final size of 565 acres. Even more important he had an agreement with Mr. Whitney that his scientific work would be considered part of his regular work at Greenwood as long as things were operating smoothly.
Soon Dad brought in his brother Roy to work at Greenwood under this same agreement and both after a few years had things running so well that they could devote most of their time to fire research. Dad with the backing of Roy, had the ability, the financial resources and time to organize the first fire conferences filled with speakers from all over the world as well as pull together the founders to organize Tall Timbers itself in the late 1950’s.
I was born in 1948 and by the age of five I was already being mentored by my father and Herb in the use of fire. I learned the basics very early and at this age was sitting on my father’s lap learning to drive the tractors and the family’s 1947 Willy’s jeep, one of the first civilian jeeps in the area. I was brought up around the top ecological scientists of the day and learned by example. I was laying fire with a rake at least as far back as I can remember helping my father burn the woods.
One of the ways I had a front row seat in the fire wars debates was at the weekly meetings on Sunday that started around ten in the morning in our home’s living room before and after mother had the big plate glass bird window put in. Herb was the first to show up for morning coffee and popcorn served by my mother and sometimes by my sister and me.
I was usually watching out and greeted him as he was like a grandfather to me teaching me how to skin and mount birds and he even gave me his climbing spurs as he aged. He always walked with a limp from a tree climbing accident where he fell out of a tree most likely using those same climbing spurs that severely damaged his knee. It almost happened to me a couple of times too. :-)
Next Roy, my father, Sonny Stoddard Herb’s son, Leon Neel and anybody else that happened to be around showed up. The land management discussions would get very heated, so much so that my mother would walk out of the house upset. Then soon afterward they would be best of friends again and could not understand why my mother was getting upset as they were just blowing off steam as they put it. :-)
I understand that the same heated discussions carried over to the Tall Timbers Board meetings. In a sense these informal meetings every Sunday morning at Birdsong, became de facto board meetings before and after Tall Timbers was organized. I never sat in on Tall Timbers board meetings as a kid but I always looked forward to Sunday and to participate in the lively Sunday morning discussions. Everybody else felt the same way who attended.
Roy lived first in Thomasville and later moved onto Birdsong and from the very beginning was like a second father. My sister and I always ran out and greeted him hugging his legs just as we did with our Dad and Mother. In fact Roy threw out his back for several weeks playing horse with me and my sister on the living room floor.
Developments in ecology and other topics that were going on that week were usually on the agenda of these friendly gatherings. Ed would often come up with an idea that Roy being the conservative of the pair would try to shoot down, only to have Ed go along with the idea anyhow and Roy would fall in behind to make sure the idea was implemented properly.
There was another critical player in the early days of the pro-fire debates and that was “Cowboy Stevens” who lived on his plantation near Tifton Georgia about two hour’s drive away. Our family would go to Tifton once a year to be with the Steven’s family and stay at their cottage on the plantation. Mr. Stevens, best I can recall, spent a lot of time in the 1920s collecting fire grasses for the Tifton Experiment Station to improve cattle grazing in the South. In fact, my father planted the cow fields on Birdsong with Argentina Bahia grass that really improved cattle production in the South. Importantly, Mr. Stevens spend a lot of time in Africa and told Dad a lot about fire in Africa and had pro-fire contacts that Dad later brought to speak at the Fire Conferences. (In the above picture we see Dad back center with Stevens and Beadel to the right I think, and Herb to the left of Dad. Sonny, Herb's son is to the right of my sister Betsy and I in front.)
I was usually watching out and greeted him as he was like a grandfather to me teaching me how to skin and mount birds and he even gave me his climbing spurs as he aged. He always walked with a limp from a tree climbing accident where he fell out of a tree most likely using those same climbing spurs that severely damaged his knee. It almost happened to me a couple of times too. :-)
Next Roy, my father, Sonny Stoddard Herb’s son, Leon Neel and anybody else that happened to be around showed up. The land management discussions would get very heated, so much so that my mother would walk out of the house upset. Then soon afterward they would be best of friends again and could not understand why my mother was getting upset as they were just blowing off steam as they put it. :-)
I understand that the same heated discussions carried over to the Tall Timbers Board meetings. In a sense these informal meetings every Sunday morning at Birdsong, became de facto board meetings before and after Tall Timbers was organized. I never sat in on Tall Timbers board meetings as a kid but I always looked forward to Sunday and to participate in the lively Sunday morning discussions. Everybody else felt the same way who attended.
Roy lived first in Thomasville and later moved onto Birdsong and from the very beginning was like a second father. My sister and I always ran out and greeted him hugging his legs just as we did with our Dad and Mother. In fact Roy threw out his back for several weeks playing horse with me and my sister on the living room floor.
Developments in ecology and other topics that were going on that week were usually on the agenda of these friendly gatherings. Ed would often come up with an idea that Roy being the conservative of the pair would try to shoot down, only to have Ed go along with the idea anyhow and Roy would fall in behind to make sure the idea was implemented properly.
There was another critical player in the early days of the pro-fire debates and that was “Cowboy Stevens” who lived on his plantation near Tifton Georgia about two hour’s drive away. Our family would go to Tifton once a year to be with the Steven’s family and stay at their cottage on the plantation. Mr. Stevens, best I can recall, spent a lot of time in the 1920s collecting fire grasses for the Tifton Experiment Station to improve cattle grazing in the South. In fact, my father planted the cow fields on Birdsong with Argentina Bahia grass that really improved cattle production in the South. Importantly, Mr. Stevens spend a lot of time in Africa and told Dad a lot about fire in Africa and had pro-fire contacts that Dad later brought to speak at the Fire Conferences. (In the above picture we see Dad back center with Stevens and Beadel to the right I think, and Herb to the left of Dad. Sonny, Herb's son is to the right of my sister Betsy and I in front.)
By the 1940s and 1950s, Dad found his true calling in the struggle to stop Smokey the Bear propaganda and misguided government fire suppression policies. In the late 1950’s, he organized and was one of the founders of Tall Timbers Research Inc. His intent was to undermine U.S. Forest Service propaganda with facts and to use the organization to distribute that information not just in the United States but around the world.
In the late 1950’s Herb was getting into his later years and had a timber consulting business to run, but was very involved with the bird kills on the WCTV television tower and the fire plots on Tall Timbers. Herb agreed to be president of the new organization to bring in funds because he was so well respected by plantation owners for his lifetime of work in the area.
Leon Neel was also a founder of Tall Timbers and served on the board after Ed and Roy were gone. As of this writing, Leon is 90 years old by still going strong and I have had him critique this book for suggestions and to correct any errors of fact I may have made. However, the real power and most of the work in the early years at Tall Timbers was done for free by Ed and Roy with Dad firmly in control as the institution’s executive secretary. He pretty much used the institution and Roy to turn his ideas into reality and to fight Smokey the Bear tooth and nail, not just locally but all over the world. :-)
I guess I should point out that Ed and Sonny Stoddard had a kind of sibling rivalry, because in the early years Ed and Herb had become so close. They could not be in the same room with each other without acting like a couple of roosters joking around trying to get the better of each other. Later in life Sonny criticized Ed for his salesmanship, but Ed’s charisma and salesmanship allowed him to promote fire and Tall Timbers in a beneficial way. He used his TV program (Rural Report) to promote seed corn along with his ecological initiatives locally.
Ed also used his salesmanship and his passionate pro-fire activism to extend Tall Timber’s reach globally, making Tall Timbers under his leadership, a global organization. Ed also developed creative ways of salesmanship as is often the case when one does not have enough funds to promote ones work and efforts.
Mother claimed she came up with the idea to give away small bags of the new Dixie 18 seed corn to the agriculture 4H groups, but Dad made good use of this idea. When the sons and daughters of the farmers planted this free corn their parents saw the advantages of Dixie 18 right away, and began ordering large amounts of seed corn from Greenwood. Dixie 18 was very successful in putting Greenwood Seed corn on the map in the south and was very profitable to begin with. The seed is still around as I have heard from a local farmer friend who planted some recently. The Company eventually went out of business when the national seed companies began to develop specific regional strains.
This kind of creative salesmanship and promotion also spilled over to the fight against Smokey the Bear propaganda operations. Ed made the early Tall Timbers Fire Conference Proceedings free worldwide and this immediately put Tall Timbers on the map as being the leader in fire ecology research, lasting till the end of Dad’s tenure at Tall Timbers.
As pointed out by Jack Rudloe, Ed like Herb before him mentored many people. In fact, I have taken a chapter out of Ed’s playbook by making my activist books free on the Internet to reach the largest possible audience. While Dad used snail mail and world travel before the Internet to organize and promote, I do the same with the Internet and the social networks today. This has been very necessary for my work just as making the first Proceedings free were for Ed and Tall Timbers. When one has little money, one is forced to become very efficient and to think outside of the box.
I used to think as I was growing up that Dad and Roy were obsessed with fire, only to learn later in life that it takes this incredible focus of attention, passion and personal resources to change human consciousness in an extensive way. This small group of men and women independently, financially backed by savvy plantation owners, found themselves on a mission to restore fire to its rightful place in the global environment. The battle to put light fire back into light fire ecosystems is far from over and I hope this book will make a small contribution to that battle by following up on my father and his associate's work.
Dad and Herb like many naturalists and ecologists were quite spiritual in their own way. To Dad the tall Longleaf Pines at Greenwood Plantation where he worked were the pillars of nature’s cathedral. Because of this spiritual connection to the natural world, he really felt very passionately on a deep visceral and personal level, the incredible damage being visited on fire environments all over the world, by government misguided fire exclusion policies. Passion, rather than paycheck, is a very important aspect of all kinds of activism. Passion drives a person to overcome obstacles that paychecks cannot do.
Ecology and Fire Ecology evolved out of the natural sciences where many of the field collectors like Ed, his brother Roy and Herb noticed that creatures were in dynamic interaction with each other. The transition was not easy for many, especially the museum taxonomists who sorted and catalogued museum specimens. Dad used to argue with these men in the basement of the Chicago Field Museum. They would say there is no basis for ecology because there is no such thing as a relationship that cannot be touched, smelled, tasted or seen.
In fact the early ecologists had a pretty hard go of it. Most people thought it down right strange and quirky to not just watch birds and mammals in the early part of the 20th century, but to skin and stuff them with cotton to be sent to museums! Many of my friends think I am quirky to have an interest in the
paranormal and wonder how I became that way. They have no further to look than my scientific background. :-) Those who follow the path of truth worry little what others think of them.
Think what it must have been like to the average person who might have met Ed and Roy on muddy Meridian Road as they traveled to meet Herb in the late 20s or early 1930s. The Model T or Model A Ford collecting vehicle would be stuffed with the tools of the collecting trade. In the late twenties and early thirties, roads were mostly unpaved, muddy, slippery and rutted so the vehicle most likely was covered with mud as it slips and slides down muddy Meridian Road after a heavy afternoon shower.
A collector had to often sleep outdoors and live off the land. Inside the vehicle might be found some
usual items such as canvas tent, sleeping bags, tarps, food supplies and cooking utensils, warm clothes, matches, flashlights and the ever useful shovel and axe. Scattered amongst the usual items were the more unusual tools of the collecting trade. There would be rat traps, mouse traps, mole traps, pocket gopher traps, steel traps, collecting guns, pistols, snakes in cloth bags, butterfly nets and poison jars to kill the butterflies without damaging their wings. There would be jars of formaldehyde and alcohol full of the insides of critters that contained a variety of unusual parasites, fetuses and worms.
One can well imagine the variety of sights and smells that such strange cargo held. Perhaps the most interesting and intriguing would be a bucketful of maggot looking creatures that crawled and squirmed around in the sawdust in the bottom of the bucket. This seething mass of creatures could be seen busily eating away the flesh on two or three mammal skulls that had been dropped into the bucket several days before. When the dermastids were through with their grizzly task, the skulls would be clean and ready to ship north to the Chicago Museum of Natural History. Sent along with the skins to the museum would be the skulls of the hapless creatures to which the skins had once belonged.
Other collecting tools would be the Eastman Kodak Auto Graflex box camera enclosed in its alligator hide case. When in use, the top opened up into a pyramid where one peered down into a mirror and through the lens while preparing to take pictures. The film came in plates that would be peeled then pushed down into the back of the camera. Cameras were important to collectors because they could be used to record the habitat of the creatures being collected.
My father also carried an over-under Gamegitter collecting pistol manufactured by Marble Safety Axle Company. This versatile long barreled pistol had a 22 rifle barrel on top and a 44 shotgun barrel below. There was also a 410 shotgun pistol that was also easy to carry in a backpack. The Gamegitter was really good because depending on the critter and the situation the damage to the skin could be limited by which barrel he shot the animal with.
The skins from a large animal would usually be sent back to the Chicago Museum of Natural History as a flat skin unless it was for a taxidermy display. The skin would be slit open on the belly from head to tail and front leg to front leg and hind leg to hind leg. It was then peeled off the body. The skin was scraped and dusted for preservation, then tacked out on a wall or a board to dry. This was also the manner in which fur trappers preserved and shipped their skins for hundreds of years. The preservation of the smaller mammal skins was different.
Think what it must have been like for a farmer or hunter happening upon Ed and Roy encamped by a stream with both working on small portable tables to skin and stuff specimens. :-) A small tray was the platform used for this type of work and it was set on the lap, or on some small table while working. In the tray were an assortment of surgeon’s tools such as scalpels, tweezers, clippers, scissors, along with cotton and wire.
Borax was liberally scattered all over the bottom of the tray to soak up blood to protect the fur or feathers of the skin. A small slit would be made with a surgeon’s scalpel on the belly of the animal’s body and the creature would be skinned through this small opening in the belly. The skin was then peeled back and rolled inside out in borax or arsenic for preservation, then turned right side in.
Finally, the critter's skin with the fur or feathers side out would be stuffed with cotton and wire, then stitched up to resemble the live animal or bird with maybe a stick sticking out of the specimen’s behind.
With birds this was particularly true as the specimen could be picked up and rotated without touching or messing up the feathers. The specimens would be stored away to dry in trays in a special box carried in the back of the collector’s car until ready for shipment. One could well have observed close by, the carcass of the animal or bird if it was eatable, roasting over the campfire for supper. :-)
In this strange and curious way, the field of ecology slowly evolved out of the natural sciences, mentored by passionate, quirky, individualistic people desiring to understand nature and natural processes. These were people who were close to nature, as were farmers, hunters and fishermen, but who had at least some scientific training either formally or were self-educated.
Only later would academia make claim to the field as its own, and flesh out in greater detail the ecological concepts of fire research and management, but often without the passion that drives change. The problem with academia is that it is an indoctrination process whose structure evolved out of the Church, but with today’s scientific dogma. It is no accident that academia still has much of the structure,
indoctrination and ritual of the Roman Catholic Church.
Academia still uses Latin names for plants and animals and is constructed autocratically around courses, diplomas, degrees, and graduation all part of priest class society going even further back in time to Egypt and Sumer. It is also true, in spite of what is insinuated, that academia no more owns science, than the Church owned religion in centuries past. Much of cutting edge science that is of a generalist nature was developed by non-academics, and only later fleshed out by academic specialists.
In fact, academia can be quite toxic to the generalist because of the specialized nature on the indoctrination process. Fortunately, these free thinkers called by the Latin name heretics who rejected Church dogma, are no longer burned at the stake, but are still degraded, marginalized and snubbed by ivory academics of today’s scientific establishment. No wonder exceptional free thinkers like Jack Rudloe had such violent early confrontations with Academia
Dad had to be tough and thick skinned because the opposition from government agencies was really great. I remember once Dad even threatened to contact his Senators and Congressmen when the United States Forest Service would not even allow one of their members to come speak at a fire conference with the way being paid for by Tall Timbers.
It’s obvious that by the 1930s and 1940s the battle for American and global ecosystems was fast heating up with men like Herb Stoddard using scientific research and truth against government power and propaganda operations. By the time I had grown up in the 1970s, the truth was out in the public domain, and the importance of fire in nature scientifically known all over the world.
Still, it must be understood that to get to even where we are today in fire management, it took not only scientific research on fire, but strong fire activism to combat Smokey the Bear. The battle still wages in the Western United States and Australia showing that even huge amounts of science and truth are not enough to overcome the inertial of decades of fire suppression propaganda and special interest money in public land bureaucracies and political offices.
In the late 1950’s Herb was getting into his later years and had a timber consulting business to run, but was very involved with the bird kills on the WCTV television tower and the fire plots on Tall Timbers. Herb agreed to be president of the new organization to bring in funds because he was so well respected by plantation owners for his lifetime of work in the area.
Leon Neel was also a founder of Tall Timbers and served on the board after Ed and Roy were gone. As of this writing, Leon is 90 years old by still going strong and I have had him critique this book for suggestions and to correct any errors of fact I may have made. However, the real power and most of the work in the early years at Tall Timbers was done for free by Ed and Roy with Dad firmly in control as the institution’s executive secretary. He pretty much used the institution and Roy to turn his ideas into reality and to fight Smokey the Bear tooth and nail, not just locally but all over the world. :-)
I guess I should point out that Ed and Sonny Stoddard had a kind of sibling rivalry, because in the early years Ed and Herb had become so close. They could not be in the same room with each other without acting like a couple of roosters joking around trying to get the better of each other. Later in life Sonny criticized Ed for his salesmanship, but Ed’s charisma and salesmanship allowed him to promote fire and Tall Timbers in a beneficial way. He used his TV program (Rural Report) to promote seed corn along with his ecological initiatives locally.
Ed also used his salesmanship and his passionate pro-fire activism to extend Tall Timber’s reach globally, making Tall Timbers under his leadership, a global organization. Ed also developed creative ways of salesmanship as is often the case when one does not have enough funds to promote ones work and efforts.
Mother claimed she came up with the idea to give away small bags of the new Dixie 18 seed corn to the agriculture 4H groups, but Dad made good use of this idea. When the sons and daughters of the farmers planted this free corn their parents saw the advantages of Dixie 18 right away, and began ordering large amounts of seed corn from Greenwood. Dixie 18 was very successful in putting Greenwood Seed corn on the map in the south and was very profitable to begin with. The seed is still around as I have heard from a local farmer friend who planted some recently. The Company eventually went out of business when the national seed companies began to develop specific regional strains.
This kind of creative salesmanship and promotion also spilled over to the fight against Smokey the Bear propaganda operations. Ed made the early Tall Timbers Fire Conference Proceedings free worldwide and this immediately put Tall Timbers on the map as being the leader in fire ecology research, lasting till the end of Dad’s tenure at Tall Timbers.
As pointed out by Jack Rudloe, Ed like Herb before him mentored many people. In fact, I have taken a chapter out of Ed’s playbook by making my activist books free on the Internet to reach the largest possible audience. While Dad used snail mail and world travel before the Internet to organize and promote, I do the same with the Internet and the social networks today. This has been very necessary for my work just as making the first Proceedings free were for Ed and Tall Timbers. When one has little money, one is forced to become very efficient and to think outside of the box.
I used to think as I was growing up that Dad and Roy were obsessed with fire, only to learn later in life that it takes this incredible focus of attention, passion and personal resources to change human consciousness in an extensive way. This small group of men and women independently, financially backed by savvy plantation owners, found themselves on a mission to restore fire to its rightful place in the global environment. The battle to put light fire back into light fire ecosystems is far from over and I hope this book will make a small contribution to that battle by following up on my father and his associate's work.
Dad and Herb like many naturalists and ecologists were quite spiritual in their own way. To Dad the tall Longleaf Pines at Greenwood Plantation where he worked were the pillars of nature’s cathedral. Because of this spiritual connection to the natural world, he really felt very passionately on a deep visceral and personal level, the incredible damage being visited on fire environments all over the world, by government misguided fire exclusion policies. Passion, rather than paycheck, is a very important aspect of all kinds of activism. Passion drives a person to overcome obstacles that paychecks cannot do.
Ecology and Fire Ecology evolved out of the natural sciences where many of the field collectors like Ed, his brother Roy and Herb noticed that creatures were in dynamic interaction with each other. The transition was not easy for many, especially the museum taxonomists who sorted and catalogued museum specimens. Dad used to argue with these men in the basement of the Chicago Field Museum. They would say there is no basis for ecology because there is no such thing as a relationship that cannot be touched, smelled, tasted or seen.
In fact the early ecologists had a pretty hard go of it. Most people thought it down right strange and quirky to not just watch birds and mammals in the early part of the 20th century, but to skin and stuff them with cotton to be sent to museums! Many of my friends think I am quirky to have an interest in the
paranormal and wonder how I became that way. They have no further to look than my scientific background. :-) Those who follow the path of truth worry little what others think of them.
Think what it must have been like to the average person who might have met Ed and Roy on muddy Meridian Road as they traveled to meet Herb in the late 20s or early 1930s. The Model T or Model A Ford collecting vehicle would be stuffed with the tools of the collecting trade. In the late twenties and early thirties, roads were mostly unpaved, muddy, slippery and rutted so the vehicle most likely was covered with mud as it slips and slides down muddy Meridian Road after a heavy afternoon shower.
A collector had to often sleep outdoors and live off the land. Inside the vehicle might be found some
usual items such as canvas tent, sleeping bags, tarps, food supplies and cooking utensils, warm clothes, matches, flashlights and the ever useful shovel and axe. Scattered amongst the usual items were the more unusual tools of the collecting trade. There would be rat traps, mouse traps, mole traps, pocket gopher traps, steel traps, collecting guns, pistols, snakes in cloth bags, butterfly nets and poison jars to kill the butterflies without damaging their wings. There would be jars of formaldehyde and alcohol full of the insides of critters that contained a variety of unusual parasites, fetuses and worms.
One can well imagine the variety of sights and smells that such strange cargo held. Perhaps the most interesting and intriguing would be a bucketful of maggot looking creatures that crawled and squirmed around in the sawdust in the bottom of the bucket. This seething mass of creatures could be seen busily eating away the flesh on two or three mammal skulls that had been dropped into the bucket several days before. When the dermastids were through with their grizzly task, the skulls would be clean and ready to ship north to the Chicago Museum of Natural History. Sent along with the skins to the museum would be the skulls of the hapless creatures to which the skins had once belonged.
Other collecting tools would be the Eastman Kodak Auto Graflex box camera enclosed in its alligator hide case. When in use, the top opened up into a pyramid where one peered down into a mirror and through the lens while preparing to take pictures. The film came in plates that would be peeled then pushed down into the back of the camera. Cameras were important to collectors because they could be used to record the habitat of the creatures being collected.
My father also carried an over-under Gamegitter collecting pistol manufactured by Marble Safety Axle Company. This versatile long barreled pistol had a 22 rifle barrel on top and a 44 shotgun barrel below. There was also a 410 shotgun pistol that was also easy to carry in a backpack. The Gamegitter was really good because depending on the critter and the situation the damage to the skin could be limited by which barrel he shot the animal with.
The skins from a large animal would usually be sent back to the Chicago Museum of Natural History as a flat skin unless it was for a taxidermy display. The skin would be slit open on the belly from head to tail and front leg to front leg and hind leg to hind leg. It was then peeled off the body. The skin was scraped and dusted for preservation, then tacked out on a wall or a board to dry. This was also the manner in which fur trappers preserved and shipped their skins for hundreds of years. The preservation of the smaller mammal skins was different.
Think what it must have been like for a farmer or hunter happening upon Ed and Roy encamped by a stream with both working on small portable tables to skin and stuff specimens. :-) A small tray was the platform used for this type of work and it was set on the lap, or on some small table while working. In the tray were an assortment of surgeon’s tools such as scalpels, tweezers, clippers, scissors, along with cotton and wire.
Borax was liberally scattered all over the bottom of the tray to soak up blood to protect the fur or feathers of the skin. A small slit would be made with a surgeon’s scalpel on the belly of the animal’s body and the creature would be skinned through this small opening in the belly. The skin was then peeled back and rolled inside out in borax or arsenic for preservation, then turned right side in.
Finally, the critter's skin with the fur or feathers side out would be stuffed with cotton and wire, then stitched up to resemble the live animal or bird with maybe a stick sticking out of the specimen’s behind.
With birds this was particularly true as the specimen could be picked up and rotated without touching or messing up the feathers. The specimens would be stored away to dry in trays in a special box carried in the back of the collector’s car until ready for shipment. One could well have observed close by, the carcass of the animal or bird if it was eatable, roasting over the campfire for supper. :-)
In this strange and curious way, the field of ecology slowly evolved out of the natural sciences, mentored by passionate, quirky, individualistic people desiring to understand nature and natural processes. These were people who were close to nature, as were farmers, hunters and fishermen, but who had at least some scientific training either formally or were self-educated.
Only later would academia make claim to the field as its own, and flesh out in greater detail the ecological concepts of fire research and management, but often without the passion that drives change. The problem with academia is that it is an indoctrination process whose structure evolved out of the Church, but with today’s scientific dogma. It is no accident that academia still has much of the structure,
indoctrination and ritual of the Roman Catholic Church.
Academia still uses Latin names for plants and animals and is constructed autocratically around courses, diplomas, degrees, and graduation all part of priest class society going even further back in time to Egypt and Sumer. It is also true, in spite of what is insinuated, that academia no more owns science, than the Church owned religion in centuries past. Much of cutting edge science that is of a generalist nature was developed by non-academics, and only later fleshed out by academic specialists.
In fact, academia can be quite toxic to the generalist because of the specialized nature on the indoctrination process. Fortunately, these free thinkers called by the Latin name heretics who rejected Church dogma, are no longer burned at the stake, but are still degraded, marginalized and snubbed by ivory academics of today’s scientific establishment. No wonder exceptional free thinkers like Jack Rudloe had such violent early confrontations with Academia
Dad had to be tough and thick skinned because the opposition from government agencies was really great. I remember once Dad even threatened to contact his Senators and Congressmen when the United States Forest Service would not even allow one of their members to come speak at a fire conference with the way being paid for by Tall Timbers.
It’s obvious that by the 1930s and 1940s the battle for American and global ecosystems was fast heating up with men like Herb Stoddard using scientific research and truth against government power and propaganda operations. By the time I had grown up in the 1970s, the truth was out in the public domain, and the importance of fire in nature scientifically known all over the world.
Still, it must be understood that to get to even where we are today in fire management, it took not only scientific research on fire, but strong fire activism to combat Smokey the Bear. The battle still wages in the Western United States and Australia showing that even huge amounts of science and truth are not enough to overcome the inertial of decades of fire suppression propaganda and special interest money in public land bureaucracies and political offices.
How and Why Did Tall Timbers Drop the Ball?
We can see from the increasing catastrophic fires around the globe today that fire research is not enough and fire activism is required. Tall Timbers was organized by my Father not just to do research, but to involve itself in fire activism.
When he ran the organization, he and the other founders used Tall Timbers as a tool for fire activism as well as research. He made sure that the organization was funded primarily with private funds so that public institutions could not
attack its funding when they came under fire for poor fire management.
The fire battle has not been won with man caused catastrophic fire still continuing to increase, even when government land management agencies now know that man not fire is the real cause of catastrophic fire in light fire ecosystems. The science has been done to a large degree since my father’s time and I believe that the focus now should be to apply what we already know. We can’t expect to solve political problems with science alone, because political problems often require political solutions such as strong citizen activism. I would apply this to Tall Timbers as well. :-)
Since the 1980s new leadership of Tall Timbers has reorganized and shifted the focus away from fire research and activism nationally and globally into land conservation, a favorite cause of local plantation owners. This shift has been ongoing since Dad’s influence began to wane in the late 1970s and ended in the 1980s, and is indicated by a change of the name of the institution from Tall Timbers Research Inc. to Tall Timbers Research and Land Conservancy.
In my opinion, several plantation owners saw an opportunity to takeover Tall Timbers as the founding board died out and became weak and to fundamentally change its vision to that of land trust. Fire, plant and wildlife research is still being done of course at Tall Timbers, but in my opinion Tall Timbers has been fast losing its cutting edge leadership role in the field of fire ecology and fire activism, even as the fire battles have shifted to the Western United States and Australia. One old timer told me that in his opinion Tall Timbers is simply repeating most of the research that has already been done.
I of course, would like to see an institutional course correction back to the founder’s original intent, more global fire research and fire activism, but I don’t think there is much hope of that. It’s going to be up to other groups and institutions to pick up the fire activism and public relations ball and run with it now. With the new plantation board members fully in control, I think that they will continue to downplay fire research and activism in favor of even more land trust activity.
Those that are interested in how this evolution of Tall Timbers as an institution progressed from being a cutting edge leader in national and global fire research and activism, to becoming a leader in local land conservation have only to study Crawford & Brueckheimer’s The Legacy of a Red Hills Hunting Plantation.
It becomes very evident that the focus of the institution under new management has shifted away from fire research and activism as chronicled after Chapter 5 in this history of Tall Timbers. It is also evident that Tall Timbers influence and leadership in global fire research and activism has declined drastically with the focus on local land conservation to protect large tracts of plantation land.
I am not that concerned about the reduced emphasis on national and global fire research at Tall Timbers because a brief review of the Internet shows that researchers all over the world have picked up the ball that Tall Timbers dropped. My concern is the need for a huge public relations operation to promote the application of that research on a national and global basis to end catastrophic wildfire in light fire ecosystems once and for all.
The current out of control situation in the West and Australia is outrageous and intolerable and in my opinion Tall Timbers changed course at a time they should have carried the fight beyond the Southeastern United States. Just because the pressure of fire exclusion is off the backs of the plantation owners, is no reason not to pursue the fire battle to West and around the globe until the battle is won.
I have to put some of this responsibility for the shift of focus on Ed and the rest of the founder’s board because as Ed’s mental and physical health began to deteriorate with old age, he became distracted from the battle against fire exclusion. He and the board also made the mistake of putting local plantation people on the board replacing the founders when they died for funding purposes, and not for a vision true to the founder’s intent.
What they did not understand was that these plantation owners had a very different vision than the founders. Yes, the founders did have an interest in land conservation to some degree, but I do not think they intended Tall Timbers to become fundamentally a land trust conglomerate either. In my opinion because of the lack of good board leadership, fire ecology is taking a back seat, especially fire activism.
Dad was fond of saying that the research is important, but one must not study something to death as many academics tend to do, but to put that knowledge to work in a very practical way. In my opinion the shift to become primarily a land trust, has overridden and submerged the founder's original intent and Ed and Roy’s past work in fire ecology research and global activism.
Today it is widely accepted by many in the government land management bureaucracies that fire is
an important part of global ecosystems. One has no further to look than into what the U.S. National Wildland Fire Training Programs are teaching about the need for prescribed fire. I was fortunate to have been invited to sit in on one of the classes of the Prescribed Fire Training Center here in Tallahassee, Florida in 2013. [92]
However, even here the fire expert who gave a lecture and slideshow to the class was discouraged and felt that the fight for prescribed fire was losing ground especially in the Western United States. He stressed the importance to the students that as they rose up into the ranks with influence over policy, that it would be an uphill battle for them to get the kinds of resources and funding for fuel reduction and prescribed fire necessary to even put a dent in catastrophic wildfire.
The 1960s, 1970s and 1980s were a time for growing activism and scientific research. This was a really tough time and many battles were fought with the leadership of government agencies. My father got used to being criticized, obstructed and attacked by anti-fire activists embedded in the leadership of these government agencies in the United States mostly in the Western United States. He said before he died that one of the reasons he made headway was because these activists were older and he outlived them and their illusions about fire.
As I just discussed, Ed and the other founders toward the end of their lives also ran into some political problems within the organization as they aged. There was an internal power struggle after the founders Henry Beadel, Herb and finally Roy had died, involving Ed, then Leon. After Roy died Ed with his judgment slipping, was pushed out and later Leon by new people. Leon told me personally that he had been pressured out many years later. Jack Rudloe and others from the early years were well aware of this power struggle and the effect it had on the direction of Tall Timbers. Jack reminisces:
“Thinking back, Ed and I share a character flaw, we both annoy people. In his old age he got on the wrong side of a several powerful plantation owners as they sought to gain control over Tall Timbers by forcing out the still surviving founders. But without his personality, charisma and knowledge that attracted people from around the world to his fire ecology conferences and his experiments in land management, Tall Timbers would not be the wonderful and scientifically valuable organization that it is, and the field of fire ecology as advanced as it is today.”
Tall Timbers' main building was named after Herb Stoddard rather than Ed, apparently with lobbying by Herb’s son Sonny Stoddard, and the old wooden barn converted into a science center was named after Ed. By this time Ed’s mental health and physical health due to a car accident was failing so our family went along with this, but the message was clear, and what was done was wrong, mean spirited and creates a false impression as who was central to Tall Timbers in the early days. Ed was also being threatened by at least one of these plantation owners if he did not resign.
The truth is, Ed backed up by Roy, were the central organizing figures in the early years of Tall Timbers not Herb, and having Herb’s name on the building gives both the public and employees the mistaken impression that Herb was the central organizing figure of Tall Timbers. I certainly do not want to diminish Herb Stoddard’s huge lifelong contributions to ecology and specifically fire ecology, and in this case knowing Herb, I am sure he would have agreed with me on this. Herb had already died previous to this. Herb like Dad always put the truth first in their lives and the same was for Roy Komarek as well.
I found out that Dad really had been affected more than he let on by all his political battles when he broke down as he accepted his honorary PHD at FSU for his life time fire research. He had conditioned himself to have a thick skin toward criticism from friends and foe alike, but was not used to praise and recognition. After so many years of fighting powerful individuals and centralized bureaucracy’s ineptitude and incompetence, praise and recognition was a long time coming.
Robert Crawford and William Brueckheimer’s book, The Legacy of a Red Hills Hunting Plantation – Tall Timbers Research Station & Land Conservancy, did a good job of setting the record straight. But using a term Dad used to like, it really “sticks in my craw” about the naming of the main administration building and putting Ed in the barn symbolizing Ed as a peripheral figure in Tall Timbers history.
For me this is not about ego, this is about the importance of accurate institutional memory and its effect on the present and the future actions of an organization. Suppressing Ed and Roy’s global contributions to fire research and activism may have helped in the shift to a land trust, but it also hurt Tall Timbers as leader in global fire research and activism.
I wrote an op-ed piece published in the Tallahassee Democrat about Tall Timbers and Ed’s contributions to Tall Timbers and the world, but I have held back about discussing these internal politics until now, but I want to clear up the historical record on this in print before I die. Here is the op-ed:
How Tall Timbers Came To Be
By Ed Komarek
"Tall Timbers Research Station recently had its 50th anniversary celebration at its headquarters north of Tallahassee and I had been asked to attend to represent the Komarek family in the celebration. Both the Governors from Florida and Georgia were slated to attend, but only Governor Perdue showed up. As I set in the warm sun of a beautiful winter day listening to Georgia’s Governor praise Tall Timbers, I could not help but reminisce as to how Tall Timbers came into existence and had developed to the point it had today. My father Dr. Ed Komarek would have been proud.
It had been my father Dr. Ed Komarek Sr. that was the central organizing figure in the creation and development of Tall Timbers for its first 20-30 years of operation. As a boy and young man I was fortunate to have had a front row to the events that lead to the creation of Tall Timbers under the watchful eye and strong hand of my very charismatic father.
My father was fond of calling himself and his friends and associates mavericks, an old cowboy term for a cow or bull that did not run with the herd. It was no small feat for him to organize, backed up by his brother Roy, the very independent and contentious founders to Tall Timbers. My father had his own very popular local TV show called Rural Report with WCTV in Thomasville Georgia that he used to make ecology and weather understandable to local farmers and fishermen. He also used this program to organize and pull these mavericks together under the Tall Timbers umbrella.
Now only was I fortunate to have a front row seat as to the envisioning, founding and early development of Tall Timbers I was even more fortunate to have been in on the early development of the newly emerging field of ecology. Herb Stoddard and Aldo are considered to be the founders of ecology, a new field that emerged out of the old natural sciences, which included many early museum collectors and taxonomists. Herb Stoddard was my father’s mentor and treated him like a son and I like his grandson. Herb’s Sherwood Plantation and our Birdsong Plantation adjoined each other and as a young boy I beat a trail through the woods to Herb’s long house where he taught me natural history.
Old museum collectors like Herb Stoddard, Ed Komarek and my uncle Roy Komarek were quick to grasp the fundamentals of ecology because they were in close touch with nature, while the taxonomists who mostly resided in museum basements were not able to make the jump. Ecology is involved in the study of relationships between plants and animals as well as the plants and animals themselves. Dad used to tell me of the arguments he used to have with his taxonomist friends, who would exclaim. “Show us a relationship and then we will believe in ecology, there is no such thing as a relationship!”
After the anniversary celebration I was given a short tour of the renovated and expanded central Tall Timbers building. It was striking and a bit disturbing to me as I walked the halls that there was really very little there that related to my father, and what was, portrayed him in the background. This was indeed strange because I knew my father to have been the central figure, the man that pulled together the vision, organized the founders and made that vision reality through the wise use of his organizational abilities combined with a very powerful and charismatic personality.
As I left the building I drove home reflecting that institutions just like people forget and distort their past history as they age. Over time institutions lose their founders who either die or are pushed out to make room for newcomers who do not have the memories of how things really came to be. The second
generation of institutional leaders without the early memories become vulnerable to internal politics, as special interests inside and outside the institution pressure for the rewriting of history.
I take comfort from the fact that institutions at some point do turn back to rediscover their lost roots and in so doing find a reality check as historians wade through the archives of the institution to sort out fact from fiction. History will show that Dr. Ed Komarek was the one individual that was indispensable to the envisioning, the creation, and the early development of Tall Timbers. My father was not just a founder on the sidelines quietly residing in the background. He was the heart and soul of the institution in its early years."
The larger issue being raised here is the issue of Tall Timbers' focus and direction under the plantation leadership of two or three very influential and wealthy people. Tall Timbers is a non-profit that should in my mind be accountable to the people, its members and other interested parties of which I am one. :-) Fortunately this book is not published or sanctioned by Tall Timbers, so I am free to say a few things that others can’t do.
Now don’t get me wrong, I am very supportive of Tall Timbers in general, but I also don’t want the institution to become risk adverse as it ages, playing it safe, resting on its laurels so to speak. Strong external citizen oversight is important to the good health of institutions. I also must express some concern over issues involving some unintended consequences, or maybe even intended ones, involving land conservation easements to protect land in the Red Hills, not addressed in the history of Tall Timbers. The founders of Tall Timbers had like the founders of this Nation, had a very strong sense of private property and the need for good government oversight as I still do to this day.
Decades ago I founded an activist group locally in South Georgia called the Citizens Oversight Group. The group’s activities centered about private property issues and civil liberty issues. The founding fathers believed that private property was an extension of an individual liberty, as do I and my local friends.
I have run into problems when individuals representing Tall Timbers came into Grady County and lobbied the County Commission for more land and property restrictions on the citizens of the county, centered about the issue of land use and zoning. Hearings were held around the county and zoning was defeated with about nine to one against zoning.
Zoning is an important part of the UN Agenda 21 initiative, a powerful top down mechanism of social control. The International Chamber of Commerce through its national and local branches drives this New World Order agenda into local government, often very deceptively and without citizen oversight. Economic development and environmental protections are often used as ruses for more social control over people far and beyond what is absolutely necessary.
The other beef I have with this plantation control over the Tall Timbers board of directors is the use of environmental restrictions on private property to indirectly shift the local property tax burden off the wealthy landowners on to small landowners and other property owners. There is a very definite conflict
of interest here in my opinion.
Taxes have to be raised and paid by somebody, and small property owners like myself, don’t want to give up their property rights, or have to put up with hassles of getting involved in these Tall Timber’s sponsored environmental land use programs that are perceived to favor the wealthy. My feeling is that conservation is a good thing, but that if small landowners and property owners are going to have to pay indirectly for land conservation that favors the wealthy, they should be consulted and be part of the process.
I am willing to bet, knowing the founders, that they would want Tall Timbers to have a special fire activist branch or division, in the Western United States and maybe even in Australia, or at least Dad would have had if he had not run out of time. Such a branch or branches would lobby the public, press and government to replace the fire suppression culture once and for all with a pro-fire management culture. The idea is to finally put an end to or at least reduce the destruction of light fire ecosystems in the West and in Australia.
Since the early 1980’s I have pretty much been out of the knowledge loop in the struggle to put fire back in its rightful place in earth’s ecosystems until I became involved again in writing this book. It’s obvious to me because of increasing global catastrophic fire, that the pro-fire battle has yet to be won and is even begun to backslide in some areas. The public just can’t let this battle be lost for the sake of nature and humanity and neither can local plantation owners! :-)
It troubles me today that experienced controlled burners or fire managers in government land
management agencies are having trouble moving to the highest levels of the these bureaucracies because of fire politics and public ignorance. Even when these bureaucracies try to control burn the fires get out of control (like happened in Yellowstone National Park and Los Alamos), leveling the places to the ground with catastrophic fire.
Excuses are always the best defense of the incompetent! One of the first laws of control burning is to experiment and make mistakes on a small scale in fire safe environments before ramping up to mess
around with hundreds of thousands of acres. If you are not ready or experienced enough, you must put misplaced hubris aside and bring in fire managers with a lifetime of experience and a safe proven track record of keeping fires under control even on very large acreages.
Another problem is central planning and control in fire management bureaucracies. In the USSR it was proven that large scale economic central planning was a disaster. People were moved from the land where they had lived and farmed for generations and put into farming collectives and the same happened with industry and this resulted in the dissolution of the USSR. Central planning seems to work for military style operations for which fire suppression is similar, but central planning is turning out to be a disaster for fire and land management on public lands.
I think these huge government bureaucracies have to be decentralized into locally controlled franchises like we see in the business community or even in the plantation community. After a lot of thought while writing this book, I will share some of my ideas in the next chapter as to how this could be done to integrate a little “folk wisdom” into institutional fire management policies.
We can see from the increasing catastrophic fires around the globe today that fire research is not enough and fire activism is required. Tall Timbers was organized by my Father not just to do research, but to involve itself in fire activism.
When he ran the organization, he and the other founders used Tall Timbers as a tool for fire activism as well as research. He made sure that the organization was funded primarily with private funds so that public institutions could not
attack its funding when they came under fire for poor fire management.
The fire battle has not been won with man caused catastrophic fire still continuing to increase, even when government land management agencies now know that man not fire is the real cause of catastrophic fire in light fire ecosystems. The science has been done to a large degree since my father’s time and I believe that the focus now should be to apply what we already know. We can’t expect to solve political problems with science alone, because political problems often require political solutions such as strong citizen activism. I would apply this to Tall Timbers as well. :-)
Since the 1980s new leadership of Tall Timbers has reorganized and shifted the focus away from fire research and activism nationally and globally into land conservation, a favorite cause of local plantation owners. This shift has been ongoing since Dad’s influence began to wane in the late 1970s and ended in the 1980s, and is indicated by a change of the name of the institution from Tall Timbers Research Inc. to Tall Timbers Research and Land Conservancy.
In my opinion, several plantation owners saw an opportunity to takeover Tall Timbers as the founding board died out and became weak and to fundamentally change its vision to that of land trust. Fire, plant and wildlife research is still being done of course at Tall Timbers, but in my opinion Tall Timbers has been fast losing its cutting edge leadership role in the field of fire ecology and fire activism, even as the fire battles have shifted to the Western United States and Australia. One old timer told me that in his opinion Tall Timbers is simply repeating most of the research that has already been done.
I of course, would like to see an institutional course correction back to the founder’s original intent, more global fire research and fire activism, but I don’t think there is much hope of that. It’s going to be up to other groups and institutions to pick up the fire activism and public relations ball and run with it now. With the new plantation board members fully in control, I think that they will continue to downplay fire research and activism in favor of even more land trust activity.
Those that are interested in how this evolution of Tall Timbers as an institution progressed from being a cutting edge leader in national and global fire research and activism, to becoming a leader in local land conservation have only to study Crawford & Brueckheimer’s The Legacy of a Red Hills Hunting Plantation.
It becomes very evident that the focus of the institution under new management has shifted away from fire research and activism as chronicled after Chapter 5 in this history of Tall Timbers. It is also evident that Tall Timbers influence and leadership in global fire research and activism has declined drastically with the focus on local land conservation to protect large tracts of plantation land.
I am not that concerned about the reduced emphasis on national and global fire research at Tall Timbers because a brief review of the Internet shows that researchers all over the world have picked up the ball that Tall Timbers dropped. My concern is the need for a huge public relations operation to promote the application of that research on a national and global basis to end catastrophic wildfire in light fire ecosystems once and for all.
The current out of control situation in the West and Australia is outrageous and intolerable and in my opinion Tall Timbers changed course at a time they should have carried the fight beyond the Southeastern United States. Just because the pressure of fire exclusion is off the backs of the plantation owners, is no reason not to pursue the fire battle to West and around the globe until the battle is won.
I have to put some of this responsibility for the shift of focus on Ed and the rest of the founder’s board because as Ed’s mental and physical health began to deteriorate with old age, he became distracted from the battle against fire exclusion. He and the board also made the mistake of putting local plantation people on the board replacing the founders when they died for funding purposes, and not for a vision true to the founder’s intent.
What they did not understand was that these plantation owners had a very different vision than the founders. Yes, the founders did have an interest in land conservation to some degree, but I do not think they intended Tall Timbers to become fundamentally a land trust conglomerate either. In my opinion because of the lack of good board leadership, fire ecology is taking a back seat, especially fire activism.
Dad was fond of saying that the research is important, but one must not study something to death as many academics tend to do, but to put that knowledge to work in a very practical way. In my opinion the shift to become primarily a land trust, has overridden and submerged the founder's original intent and Ed and Roy’s past work in fire ecology research and global activism.
Today it is widely accepted by many in the government land management bureaucracies that fire is
an important part of global ecosystems. One has no further to look than into what the U.S. National Wildland Fire Training Programs are teaching about the need for prescribed fire. I was fortunate to have been invited to sit in on one of the classes of the Prescribed Fire Training Center here in Tallahassee, Florida in 2013. [92]
However, even here the fire expert who gave a lecture and slideshow to the class was discouraged and felt that the fight for prescribed fire was losing ground especially in the Western United States. He stressed the importance to the students that as they rose up into the ranks with influence over policy, that it would be an uphill battle for them to get the kinds of resources and funding for fuel reduction and prescribed fire necessary to even put a dent in catastrophic wildfire.
The 1960s, 1970s and 1980s were a time for growing activism and scientific research. This was a really tough time and many battles were fought with the leadership of government agencies. My father got used to being criticized, obstructed and attacked by anti-fire activists embedded in the leadership of these government agencies in the United States mostly in the Western United States. He said before he died that one of the reasons he made headway was because these activists were older and he outlived them and their illusions about fire.
As I just discussed, Ed and the other founders toward the end of their lives also ran into some political problems within the organization as they aged. There was an internal power struggle after the founders Henry Beadel, Herb and finally Roy had died, involving Ed, then Leon. After Roy died Ed with his judgment slipping, was pushed out and later Leon by new people. Leon told me personally that he had been pressured out many years later. Jack Rudloe and others from the early years were well aware of this power struggle and the effect it had on the direction of Tall Timbers. Jack reminisces:
“Thinking back, Ed and I share a character flaw, we both annoy people. In his old age he got on the wrong side of a several powerful plantation owners as they sought to gain control over Tall Timbers by forcing out the still surviving founders. But without his personality, charisma and knowledge that attracted people from around the world to his fire ecology conferences and his experiments in land management, Tall Timbers would not be the wonderful and scientifically valuable organization that it is, and the field of fire ecology as advanced as it is today.”
Tall Timbers' main building was named after Herb Stoddard rather than Ed, apparently with lobbying by Herb’s son Sonny Stoddard, and the old wooden barn converted into a science center was named after Ed. By this time Ed’s mental health and physical health due to a car accident was failing so our family went along with this, but the message was clear, and what was done was wrong, mean spirited and creates a false impression as who was central to Tall Timbers in the early days. Ed was also being threatened by at least one of these plantation owners if he did not resign.
The truth is, Ed backed up by Roy, were the central organizing figures in the early years of Tall Timbers not Herb, and having Herb’s name on the building gives both the public and employees the mistaken impression that Herb was the central organizing figure of Tall Timbers. I certainly do not want to diminish Herb Stoddard’s huge lifelong contributions to ecology and specifically fire ecology, and in this case knowing Herb, I am sure he would have agreed with me on this. Herb had already died previous to this. Herb like Dad always put the truth first in their lives and the same was for Roy Komarek as well.
I found out that Dad really had been affected more than he let on by all his political battles when he broke down as he accepted his honorary PHD at FSU for his life time fire research. He had conditioned himself to have a thick skin toward criticism from friends and foe alike, but was not used to praise and recognition. After so many years of fighting powerful individuals and centralized bureaucracy’s ineptitude and incompetence, praise and recognition was a long time coming.
Robert Crawford and William Brueckheimer’s book, The Legacy of a Red Hills Hunting Plantation – Tall Timbers Research Station & Land Conservancy, did a good job of setting the record straight. But using a term Dad used to like, it really “sticks in my craw” about the naming of the main administration building and putting Ed in the barn symbolizing Ed as a peripheral figure in Tall Timbers history.
For me this is not about ego, this is about the importance of accurate institutional memory and its effect on the present and the future actions of an organization. Suppressing Ed and Roy’s global contributions to fire research and activism may have helped in the shift to a land trust, but it also hurt Tall Timbers as leader in global fire research and activism.
I wrote an op-ed piece published in the Tallahassee Democrat about Tall Timbers and Ed’s contributions to Tall Timbers and the world, but I have held back about discussing these internal politics until now, but I want to clear up the historical record on this in print before I die. Here is the op-ed:
How Tall Timbers Came To Be
By Ed Komarek
"Tall Timbers Research Station recently had its 50th anniversary celebration at its headquarters north of Tallahassee and I had been asked to attend to represent the Komarek family in the celebration. Both the Governors from Florida and Georgia were slated to attend, but only Governor Perdue showed up. As I set in the warm sun of a beautiful winter day listening to Georgia’s Governor praise Tall Timbers, I could not help but reminisce as to how Tall Timbers came into existence and had developed to the point it had today. My father Dr. Ed Komarek would have been proud.
It had been my father Dr. Ed Komarek Sr. that was the central organizing figure in the creation and development of Tall Timbers for its first 20-30 years of operation. As a boy and young man I was fortunate to have had a front row to the events that lead to the creation of Tall Timbers under the watchful eye and strong hand of my very charismatic father.
My father was fond of calling himself and his friends and associates mavericks, an old cowboy term for a cow or bull that did not run with the herd. It was no small feat for him to organize, backed up by his brother Roy, the very independent and contentious founders to Tall Timbers. My father had his own very popular local TV show called Rural Report with WCTV in Thomasville Georgia that he used to make ecology and weather understandable to local farmers and fishermen. He also used this program to organize and pull these mavericks together under the Tall Timbers umbrella.
Now only was I fortunate to have a front row seat as to the envisioning, founding and early development of Tall Timbers I was even more fortunate to have been in on the early development of the newly emerging field of ecology. Herb Stoddard and Aldo are considered to be the founders of ecology, a new field that emerged out of the old natural sciences, which included many early museum collectors and taxonomists. Herb Stoddard was my father’s mentor and treated him like a son and I like his grandson. Herb’s Sherwood Plantation and our Birdsong Plantation adjoined each other and as a young boy I beat a trail through the woods to Herb’s long house where he taught me natural history.
Old museum collectors like Herb Stoddard, Ed Komarek and my uncle Roy Komarek were quick to grasp the fundamentals of ecology because they were in close touch with nature, while the taxonomists who mostly resided in museum basements were not able to make the jump. Ecology is involved in the study of relationships between plants and animals as well as the plants and animals themselves. Dad used to tell me of the arguments he used to have with his taxonomist friends, who would exclaim. “Show us a relationship and then we will believe in ecology, there is no such thing as a relationship!”
After the anniversary celebration I was given a short tour of the renovated and expanded central Tall Timbers building. It was striking and a bit disturbing to me as I walked the halls that there was really very little there that related to my father, and what was, portrayed him in the background. This was indeed strange because I knew my father to have been the central figure, the man that pulled together the vision, organized the founders and made that vision reality through the wise use of his organizational abilities combined with a very powerful and charismatic personality.
As I left the building I drove home reflecting that institutions just like people forget and distort their past history as they age. Over time institutions lose their founders who either die or are pushed out to make room for newcomers who do not have the memories of how things really came to be. The second
generation of institutional leaders without the early memories become vulnerable to internal politics, as special interests inside and outside the institution pressure for the rewriting of history.
I take comfort from the fact that institutions at some point do turn back to rediscover their lost roots and in so doing find a reality check as historians wade through the archives of the institution to sort out fact from fiction. History will show that Dr. Ed Komarek was the one individual that was indispensable to the envisioning, the creation, and the early development of Tall Timbers. My father was not just a founder on the sidelines quietly residing in the background. He was the heart and soul of the institution in its early years."
The larger issue being raised here is the issue of Tall Timbers' focus and direction under the plantation leadership of two or three very influential and wealthy people. Tall Timbers is a non-profit that should in my mind be accountable to the people, its members and other interested parties of which I am one. :-) Fortunately this book is not published or sanctioned by Tall Timbers, so I am free to say a few things that others can’t do.
Now don’t get me wrong, I am very supportive of Tall Timbers in general, but I also don’t want the institution to become risk adverse as it ages, playing it safe, resting on its laurels so to speak. Strong external citizen oversight is important to the good health of institutions. I also must express some concern over issues involving some unintended consequences, or maybe even intended ones, involving land conservation easements to protect land in the Red Hills, not addressed in the history of Tall Timbers. The founders of Tall Timbers had like the founders of this Nation, had a very strong sense of private property and the need for good government oversight as I still do to this day.
Decades ago I founded an activist group locally in South Georgia called the Citizens Oversight Group. The group’s activities centered about private property issues and civil liberty issues. The founding fathers believed that private property was an extension of an individual liberty, as do I and my local friends.
I have run into problems when individuals representing Tall Timbers came into Grady County and lobbied the County Commission for more land and property restrictions on the citizens of the county, centered about the issue of land use and zoning. Hearings were held around the county and zoning was defeated with about nine to one against zoning.
Zoning is an important part of the UN Agenda 21 initiative, a powerful top down mechanism of social control. The International Chamber of Commerce through its national and local branches drives this New World Order agenda into local government, often very deceptively and without citizen oversight. Economic development and environmental protections are often used as ruses for more social control over people far and beyond what is absolutely necessary.
The other beef I have with this plantation control over the Tall Timbers board of directors is the use of environmental restrictions on private property to indirectly shift the local property tax burden off the wealthy landowners on to small landowners and other property owners. There is a very definite conflict
of interest here in my opinion.
Taxes have to be raised and paid by somebody, and small property owners like myself, don’t want to give up their property rights, or have to put up with hassles of getting involved in these Tall Timber’s sponsored environmental land use programs that are perceived to favor the wealthy. My feeling is that conservation is a good thing, but that if small landowners and property owners are going to have to pay indirectly for land conservation that favors the wealthy, they should be consulted and be part of the process.
I am willing to bet, knowing the founders, that they would want Tall Timbers to have a special fire activist branch or division, in the Western United States and maybe even in Australia, or at least Dad would have had if he had not run out of time. Such a branch or branches would lobby the public, press and government to replace the fire suppression culture once and for all with a pro-fire management culture. The idea is to finally put an end to or at least reduce the destruction of light fire ecosystems in the West and in Australia.
Since the early 1980’s I have pretty much been out of the knowledge loop in the struggle to put fire back in its rightful place in earth’s ecosystems until I became involved again in writing this book. It’s obvious to me because of increasing global catastrophic fire, that the pro-fire battle has yet to be won and is even begun to backslide in some areas. The public just can’t let this battle be lost for the sake of nature and humanity and neither can local plantation owners! :-)
It troubles me today that experienced controlled burners or fire managers in government land
management agencies are having trouble moving to the highest levels of the these bureaucracies because of fire politics and public ignorance. Even when these bureaucracies try to control burn the fires get out of control (like happened in Yellowstone National Park and Los Alamos), leveling the places to the ground with catastrophic fire.
Excuses are always the best defense of the incompetent! One of the first laws of control burning is to experiment and make mistakes on a small scale in fire safe environments before ramping up to mess
around with hundreds of thousands of acres. If you are not ready or experienced enough, you must put misplaced hubris aside and bring in fire managers with a lifetime of experience and a safe proven track record of keeping fires under control even on very large acreages.
Another problem is central planning and control in fire management bureaucracies. In the USSR it was proven that large scale economic central planning was a disaster. People were moved from the land where they had lived and farmed for generations and put into farming collectives and the same happened with industry and this resulted in the dissolution of the USSR. Central planning seems to work for military style operations for which fire suppression is similar, but central planning is turning out to be a disaster for fire and land management on public lands.
I think these huge government bureaucracies have to be decentralized into locally controlled franchises like we see in the business community or even in the plantation community. After a lot of thought while writing this book, I will share some of my ideas in the next chapter as to how this could be done to integrate a little “folk wisdom” into institutional fire management policies.