HISTORY

The origins of modern poverty in southern Georgia and on the southern Coastal Plains began with the destruction of the Longleaf ecosystem.

Today the majority of counties at the bottom of per capita income list in Georgia are situated in the former Longleaf Pine belt. Streams and rivers are polluted by agricultural runoff, feedlot waste and industrial pollution. To say it is a wasteland would be an exaggeration given its natural beauty despite its abuse, but the future of present and future generations doesn't look bright.

To understand how we got here, we must understand the history of the forest and its earliest peoples.

For more than three centuries following its exploration by Hernando de Soto in 1540, southern Georgia remained a largely unchanged landscape of pine trees and wiregrass. Natural barriers, including poor sandy soil and isolation from the coastline, prevented the region from joining commercial, industrial and urban frontiers that were changing the coastline. By 1860 the regions people had shaped an economy based upon self-sufficient farming, livestock herding, and timber cutting and rafting, all adapted to the ecology of the coastal plains south.

Deforestation ended their self-sufficiency and the sustainable nature of their lives and all but destroyed the forest once celebrated for its natural beauty by naturalists, poets, painters and writers. One early southern ecologist called it “one of the major social crimes of American history.”

The seemingly endless search for commodity crops—especially cotton and tobacco and corn and soybeans of the twentieth century to name a few—led those still on the land—landowners and tenants—down the path of high input farming with fossil fuels, chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and ultimately, “dead” soil. The tenant and sharecroppers were the first to go and by the 1960s many of them were gone. To survive farmers had to “get big”, buy more land, more equipment, and irrigation equipment, most of it funded with bank loans. The farming crisis of the late twentieth century saw many of them leave as well.

Today, if you look hard enough, you can see remnants of the forest in corners of the Atlantic and Gulf coastal plains. Look on government military installations and private hunting preserves, look behind the walls and under the floors and roofs of late 19th and early 20th century building and warehouses. Look and you will find the remnant forest holding up their burdens as floor joists and rafters. What remains of the forest forms less than 3% of the original forest ecosystem’s 92 million acres. This lost forest stretched from southeastern Virginia to eastern Texas until it was fragmented beyond recognition.