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 ForestNorth America’s Forests: Page 2 It would probably shock most residents of suburban New York City to know that 150 years ago, wild Gray Wolves preyed on White‑tailed Deer, Eastern Bison and Elk in the dense virgin forests now occupied by their neatly clipped green lawns, while overhead the flight of millions of Passenger Pigeons darkened the sky. The Eastern United States is undergoing a "Europeanization" in which natural forest is being lost to housing tracts, highways and urbanization. This sprawl consumes the second-growth forests, some of which had become excellent wildlife habitat, and the new residents often contaminate the water and soil with pesticides and herbicides to maintain green lawns. The natural world and its fauna and flora are fast disappearing.
Just as they are disappearing, discoveries about the medical potential of eastern forest trees are being made. Recently a fungus was discovered that is a missing link in the life cycle of a mold that produces the billion-dollar drug cyclosporin, used to prevent the rejection of transplanted organs (Yoon 1996). The forest of the Finger Lakes Land Trust in Ithaca, New York, where Cornell University students found the fungus, has established the nation's first reserve set aside specifically for chemical prospecting outside the tropics (Yoon 1996).
Most of the Great Lakes region was originally covered in ancient pines. During the logging boom of the late 1800s, mills of one Great Lakes port alone, Ashland, Wisconsin, cut 500 million board feet of lumber a year (a board foot is equal to wood 1 foot square and 1 inch thick), enough for 50,000 houses (Johnson 1997). Timber barons shipped the lumber to rebuild Chicago after the great fire of 1871, and the logged-over area, covered in broken branches, stumps and discarded trees, ignited a series of fires, one of which killed 1,152 people in the town of Peshtigo, Wisconsin (Johnson 1997). These fires charred millions of acres, leaving a wasteland (Jonas 1993). By the end of the 19th century, the majority of these forests had been clearcut by commercial loggers (Jonas 1993). There remains a scarcity of timber, and in 1996 a treasure trove of 20,000 to 30,000 old-growth tree trunks was found by divers on the bottom of Lake Superior; they had sunk more than a century after being cut and floated to mills (Johnson 1997). Old-growth timber is extremely valuable. It has tight grain resulting from slow growth, unlike the grain in the trees grown on tree farms. These logs are worth many millions of dollars, and a company is bringing the logs to the surface, selling them for ten times the price of new wood (Johnson 1997). These are the last remnants of a once vast forest.
Early in the 20th century, Weyerhauser, the German timber magnate, having logged out the old growth of the Great Lakes area, turned to the forests of the Southeast. Forests dominated by Longleaf (Pinus palustris) and Shortleaf Pines (Pinus echinata), which have the world's greatest diversity of forest floor plants, dominated northern Florida west to Louisiana and north to central Georgia. Longleaf Pine forest once covered 90 million acres from Virginia to Texas. These forests also harbored Loblolly (Pinus taeda), Virginia (Pinus virginiana), Pond (Pinus serotina) and Pitch Pines (Pinus rigida), which grew in various types of soil and climatic conditions. Loggers decimated this ecosystem, cutting millions of board feet, and by the 1930s, these forests had been reduced to a fraction of their original extent. Today, only about 2 percent of the Longleaf Pine forests remain, making them the most endangered forest ecosystem in North America. For the most part, these forests have been replanted with other species, predominantly commercial tree farm monocultures.
Much of the remaining virgin pine forests of the Southeast lie on national forest land, and they are being heavily logged. On December 15, 1995, this destruction was fought by the Biodiversity Legal Foundation and the Alabama Wilderness Alliance, which filed suit in Federal District Court against the US Forest Service challenging the legality of the Forest Service decision to open a series of massive salvage timber sales of trees blown down by a hurricane, along with some healthy standing trees, on 15,000 acres of the Conecuh National Forest in Alabama. The Biodiversity Legal Foundation hired biologists and other experts, who testified that Forest Service management of the forest violated its own environmental regulation relating to logging near waterways and had planted non-native trees instead of the native species that are preferred by the Red‑cockaded Woodpecker (Dendrocopus borealis), an endangered resident of this forest. This lawsuit was settled in favor of the conservation organizations.
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