Armadillos are migrating around 28 miles per year. They affect the understory due to their
rooting behavior. We are looking at setting up exclosures to monitor their impact. People
are worried about their gardens, leprosy; but they eat spiders, ants.
Aldo Leopold said “intelligent tinkering requires that you keep all the pieces.” We want to
maintain as much of the biodiversity as possible. There are lots of unknowns and we best
be cautious about simplifying our ecosystem by allowing invasives to do so.
Looking back historically can give us some idea of how the Plateau ecosystems work. There
was anthropogenic fire for thousands of years. The forest probably is very resilient. It may
make sense to bring in these fire managed systems in some places.
We are getting seed stock of longleaf montane pine from 200 miles south of here to aid
migration north in case it may have trouble moving as climate change occurs. We are doing
some experimental plots to explore this.
White pine here seems more shade tolerant than up north. We’re on the southern most
point of its range. How much should we allow it to dominate the understory? Its ability to
photosynthesize is more limited in warm temperatures than are yellow pines.
We are managing for the “bowl.” We think that maintaining a complex ecosystem gets us
further in terms of keeping a big bowl so we can survive in future unknown situations. We
also like the species we have, so there’s that element, too. We need to be careful we don’t
just manage for what we like or are used to.
We need to localize our impact on natural resources so we can see and thereby realize the
impact of our consumption. For instance, the Sewanee Inn has a large ecological footprint.
Although we did use a lot of wood from the Domain, we also used “picked stone” instead of
cut stone. Picked stone is just picked off the forest floor and not quarried. To get it requires
lots of roads and hand labor and causes a lot of erosion/soil loss and disruption of the
forest floor. We used it because it is cheaper. Cut stone is more costly but has a smaller
ecological footprint. If we had obtained the “picked stone” off the Domain, we would have
realized the impact of our actions. Instead those impacts occurred elsewhere and are off
our radar screen. By using local resources we can educate ourselves and our students
about the impacts of our decisions. This is most viscerally true with agriculture, but is also
true for forestry. Few of us now grow food or harvest trees, so we don’t know what
happens when we buy food or lumber. Engaging in those activities here now is crucial as
part of our educational process. A liberal arts education requires us to understand what it
means to be human in our world’s ecosystems.