The Appalachian mixed mesophytic forest, which still covers five-sixths of the Cumberland Plateau, evolved without disturbance for hundreds of million of years, because the glaciers never got this far south.  Genetically distinct populations of plants, salamanders, and other organisms arose in the hollows, coves, and gulfs that pleat the plateau.  There are nine endemic species of lungless plethodon salamander here.  But amphibians are among the first victims of deforestation and of the dessication and silting up of streams that ensue. The plateau also boasts 20 mussel and 40 crayfish species that evolved here and are found nowhere else. Even more diverse are the fish: 231 species, of which 67 are endemic: 16 minnows, five suckers, two cave springfish, one killifish, one pygmy sunfish, one sculpin, and an incredible 41 darters, and new ones are being discovered all the time. Others are probably being wiped out before they can even be identified. 

      The Cumberland Plateau has the highest concentration of caves and of cave-dwelling invertebrate species in North America. Three species of bat are endangered or threatened, and 12 of rodent. The plateau is also a major nexus for migratory birds, a pit stop for many species as they wend their way back and forth from South America or the Caribbean to the Canadian boreal, as well as the home of many year-round inhabitants. 

       The original forest still stands in only a few places on the plateau. Starting in the l870’s, as the Northeast was industrializing and its cities were mushrooming, there was a great demand for wood. The agents of coal and timber corporations came down and hornswoggled the local unschooled people of the Cumberlands out of their trees, paying 40 cents (in the coin of the day) for a 175-foot-tall tulip poplar, offering a new squirrel gun for 3,000 acres of timber rights. Pretty much every decent-sized tree, except the ones in the most inaccessible coves and hollows, was sawed down and floated down the Cumberland or Sequatchie rivers, or beginning in the l890’s, taken out by rail. The logging boom ended in l901. Then they went after the coal, and in the seventies, when most of that was gone, they started in on the trees again. 
 
 

      HUME BROUGHT HIS CESSNA DOWN at a small air strip belonging to the University of the South, in Sewanee, 50 miles south of the Triangle of Destruction. The university has a 10,000-acre campus that includes most of Shakerag Hollow, where some of the last virgin, old-growth forest in the state survives.   We picked our way down a steep trail into it with Jonathan Evans, a plant ecologist at the university, and his colleague David Haskell, who is an animal ecologist.

      David, a lanky, long-bearded Englishman who looked like the young Alfred Russell Wallace, or one of the other Victorian naturalists, said he’d like to get his hands on the local fishermen who came down into the hollow with buckets and filled them with salamanders for bait. Mountain dusky, spotted, marbled and slimy salamanders live here.  A dozen or so large, dazzling butterflies were flapping around: pipevine swallowtails, red-spotted purples, tiger swallowtails, a gulf fritillary, and a lone monarch fueling up for the long flight it would soon be taking to its winter hibernaculum in the volcanic highlands of central Mexico. 

       A hundred feet down we paused on a ledge under an overhanging, algae-greened wall of sandstone, whose cracks David said were home to  “a mysterious green plethodon.”  Jon pointed out a rare perennial fern,  Silene rotundifolia. Another 30 feet down we came upon several pawpaw trees. Papaw must be one of the least- known fruits in America— it tastes like a cross between papaya, banana, avocado, and mango—as well as one of the few that can ripen without direct sunlight. It needs to be shaded by bigger trees; its future depends on the survival of the hardwood forest. 

       As we continued our descent, the trees began to get very tall, 150, even 200 feet high or more: soaring, pencil-straight red oaks, tulip poplars, black walnuts, buckeyes, sugar maples, mockernut, pignut, and shagbark hickories. Some were cabled with grape vines so thick you couldn’t enclose them with your hands. 

      Jon pointed out some wild yam, a yellow mandarin (in the lily family), rattlesnake ferns, a rack of ghostly-white oyster mushrooms on a fallen, rotting log. David identified curiously approaching Carolina chickadees and tufted titmice, the flirtatious tawee-tawee-tawee-tee-o   of a hooded warbler, the wheeze of Acadian flycatcher, and found a mountain dusky salamander and a green frog below a spring spurting out of the steep slope of the hollow. Jon picked up a stout, five-inch-long, green caterpillar, whose head was bristling with menacing red horns. This was the biggest caterpillar I had ever seen or imagined could exist. He said it was called a hickory horn devil, and would become a royal walnut silk moth. “We have the full complement of silk moths here,” he told us proudly. 

      I ducked behind a boulder that had broken off from the cliffs above to find a four-foot-long black rat snake frozen in mid-slither and staring at me intently. It looked as if it had just eaten something, probably another snake. Black rat snakes are expert climbers and spend much of their time in trees, looking for nestlings or bird eggs. They kill by constriction. Very agile and fast, they are also known as pilot black snakes, because they den with timber rattlesnakes and copperheads (also denizens of Shakerag Hollow) and lead them to safety when the den is threatened. We returned up the path a few minutes later and  peered behind the boulder where the snake had been. It was gone.

   The forest was so lush and teeming with life, I half-expected to see monkeys flinging themselves through the trees. Shakerag Hollow has one of the most riotously species-rich forests in the South. By contrast, the pine plantations that are rapidly replacing these fecund ecosystems have 95 percent fewer species, according to one estimate by Harvard biologist E.O.Wilson. Who in their right mind would sanction this devastation, I wondered. Why? So we can have more reading matter, more toilet paper? So the beetles can have another smorgasbord? Is this a reasonable trade-off, or a kind of blasphemy?
 
 

Spinning the Landscape 

        We had not come to Sewanee to take a walk in Shakerag Hollow. That was my idea: I wanted to get a clear picture of what is being lost. We had come to talk to Jon about the study he and his colleagues at the university’s Landscape Analysis Laboratory put out last year. Called “An Assessment of Forest Change on the Cumberland Plateau in Southern Tennessee.” It is the first scientifically rigorous quantification of the havoc that the paper industry has been wreaking, going back to l981, in the seven southernmost of the 16 counties on the Tennessee part of the plateau. Jon was the principle investigator. David assessed the impact on the birds and the salamanders. Not surprisingly, he found that the salamander populations in the clear-cuts were dramatically smaller, and that the bird communities in the native forest, which have some of the highest biodiversity in the Southeast, could not be supported by the pine plantations and residential areas taking its place. 

       Jon had come from Rice in l994, attracted by the size of the campus and the opportunities it offered to study natural forest change. One day, he went up in a plane to see what the forest looked like from the air, and he saw, as we just had, the clear-cuts on Bowater land bordering the campus. “It’s sickening, isn’t it?” he asked us. “I can’t go up there any more.  When we started our study, in the late 90’s, the plateau wasn’t on anybody’s radar. Zack Wamp, the congressman from Chattanooga, had been hearing from his constituents who were alarmed by what was going on, but the paper industry was spinning the landscape. It was saying there’s always been pine on the plateau, we aren’t doing anything up there.

        “So we put a macroscope on this landscape and showed it for the world to see,” Jon went on.  In numerous flyovers and by poring over satellite photos and aerial shots taken by various federal and state agencies, Jon and his colleagues studied a 616,000-acre area, comprising about 38 percent of the seven southernmost counties that had originally been plateau forest (as opposed to the less accessible cove forest like Shakerag Hollow). They discovered that 12 to 15 percent of their study area—or about 73,000 acres—had been converted to pine farms. They also found that the conversion rate had doubled in the last three years of the study, from l997 to 2000. Only three years prior to Jon’s study, the Tennessee Division of Forestry and the University of Tennessee Forestry Extension Service were maintaining that an extensive conversion of native forest to pine was not taking place.  Using state-of-the-art computer mapping, Jon’s data precisely documented, for the first time, the horrible reality. A veil that had been kept in place by industry, state foresters, and industry-friendly academics and number-crunchers, had finally been lifted.
 
 
 
 
 

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