IT IS IMPORTANT to pause briefly to understand why things are the way they are. Which is history.
OSCEOLA was proclaimed a national forest on July 10, 1931. It is 158,225 acres, managed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service.
OKEFENOKEE, the largest freshwater swamp in the United States (not counting the Everglades and Atchafalaya), currently covers 438,000 acres, or 660 square miles. In the late 1830s the last of its Creek and Seminole inhabitants were killed or ousted, and until 1889 it belonged to the people of Georgia. In that year Georgia sold the swamp to the Suwannee Canal Company for fourteen and a half cents an acre; Atlanta capitalist Harry Jackson intended to drain it. That project died with Jackson, and in 1908 the swamp was sold to Hebard Lumber Company, which proceeded to log it. In the late 1930s Jean Harper, wife of naturalist Francis Harper, who first entered the swamp with a Cornell University biological expedition in May 1912 and who returned to live for months at a time with his family there, beseeched President Franklin D. Roosevelt to purchase Okefenokee Swamp in order to spare it. Jean Harper was an acquaintance of the president, having tutored his children. In 1937 Roosevelt declared Okefenokee Swamp a national wildlife refuge, to be managed by the Department of the Interior’s Fish and Wildlife Service. Ninety percent of Okefenokee, a portion of which extends into Florida, is official wilderness, the largest area east of the Mississippi.
Connected to Okefenokee on its north end is 35,708-acre DIXON MEMORIAL STATE FOREST, encompassing 15,000 acres of the swamp around the area of Cowhouse Island. Dixon, a wildlife management area, is managed by the Georgia Forestry Commission. The state forest, purchased in 1955, contains about 1,200 acres of natural pine stands, 2,000 to 3,000 acres of hardwood bottomlands, and 18,000 acres of planted pine. The timber is cut in forty-year rotations, 250 to 300 acres a year, with no cut bigger than 70 acres. Laura S. Walker State Park, deeded to the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, is entirely within the boundaries of the state forest—it is devoted to recreation and includes a golf course.
So Dixon is cut. So it contains a golf course. Bears breed there in the heads and thickets. If Dixon Memorial State Forest is wild enough for bears, it’s wild enough for me.
Osceola’s 158,225 plus Okefenokee’s 438,000 equals 596,225. Add Dixon’s 35,708 and the total is 631,933. Count what’s saved so far in Pinhook—about 120,000 acres—and we have a wild land corridor with a grand total of 751,933 acres.
Seven hundred fifty-one thousand nine hundred thirty-three acres. Heading toward a million. Bigger than the land area of Rhode Island. A million acres for river otters, black-crowned night herons, hoary bats, two-toed amphiumas, eastern chicken turtles, round-tailed muskrats, and Cooper’s hawks. For sandhill cranes and black bears. For the possibility of red wolves, whooping cranes, and Florida panthers.
Pinhook models a large contiguous conservation corridor for the nation. O to O. O2O.
Give me a moment here to applaud, to whoop and holler, to skip out from behind my writing desk and do a little dance in the study.
I’d like to get to the middle of all that ground and lie down and rest awhile.