Plant Succession
Pine flat woods had been the dominant environment in pre-civilized Florida. Florida has been above sea level for at least ten million years. Gradually the sea receded, creating dry land around the Highland Ridge than runs from what is today Lake Wales south to today's Lake Placid. Florida plant succession would have begun with scrub land. Pine flatwoods and other environments such as bogs and cypress swamp would have followed. The original Florida would have been scrub, followed by scrub with pine flatwoods taking over more and more territory. In the last couple of million years hammocks developed: islands of hardwood trees, some deciduous, and palm trees, taking over moist low lying but not swampy ground.
The common pine of Florida is the slash pine. Slash pine, when Morgan and Flagler developed Florida (once the US army had cleared inconvenient humans aside for them) covered 60% or more of the territory. Hammocks range from just a few trees to a forest as large as Highlands Hammock, here on the west side of Sebring. The health and continuing identity of a pine flatwoods depended on natural fire. Periodic natural fire kills off the oak trees growing up as "weeds" amid the pines, burns off ground fuel, permits light to penetrate to the under-story. Slash pine seeds cannot germinate without light. (Scrub pine seeds cannot germinate till fire has opened the cones!)
Human Recession
Humans have lived in Florida for some time, but not in large numbers prior to Morgan and Flagler. Once Florida was developed, pine flatwoods was the common environment, so pine flatwoods was the environment to be superceded by human settlement. Humans at first employed fire for slash and burn farming, but post-Flagler humans repressed fire. Oaks persevered. Pine seeds got shaded into sterility. Ground fuel accumulated: so when fire did come there was danger of it building a momentum that the slash pine had insufficient resistance to. Thus sea bed gives way to scrub, scrub gives way to pine flatwoods, pine flatwoods shares borders with hammock, with swamp, with bog, with bay head, and then to human settlement, and then ... to catastrophe: potential catastrophe anyway.
Jan has lived on her lake in Sebring for a decade or so. A number of slash pine that made the property seem like something out of James Fennimore Cooper fell in that time. Today there are a half dozen magnificent pines, 75 to 85 or 90 feet tall, but only a half dozen. Today there is one fewer than yesterday. Note: there are no new pines growing up!
Plant life grows toward light. Dig a canal, clear a road, trees lean into the clearing. In Florida the soil is young, thin, poor in nutrients. When there's wind, and in Florida there's wind a plenty, and at more than one time of the year, the trees slip their moorings, fall into the road, into the canal. In 1990 I gave the history and ecology tours at Highlands Hammock State Park. I'd drive the tram along the canal built by the CCC in the 1930s at what was then the south border of the park. The south canal is bordered by hammock, by bog, by bay head, by pine flatwoods. Every day trees would have fallen into the canal, across the road: mostly red maples. Everyday the rangers would Vroom out to the south canal in their trucks with chain saws, and RRRR, RRRR cut the trees into logs and shove them to the side of the berm. Everyday, when I could, I would go out to the south canal, with a community service slave (or two) (when I could get them), and throw the logs off into the bay head so that the public, on the tour, would see an illusion of naturalness. Weekends, with a slave or three, I'd drag limbs and boles out of the canal and haul them off into the bay head, out of sight of "my" tour: cosmetics pretending to be natural. If I hadn't, the chances of the public spotting an alligator, or a cooter, let alone an otter, were negligible (despite the canal being way over-populated with alligators: once stretch sometimes had three dozen baby alligators visible in a compound "nursery": big mama also commonly visible. (The males, ten, sometimes fourteen feet, were visible to me when I ventured on foot into the side canals: we saw few big males along the south canal.))
At Jan's lake side a couple of grand pines lean westward, out over the lake. I hope their roots on the landward side are well anchored, because they visibly don't have much buttressing on their "weak" side. This set of facts in this case casts no blame on human behavior: the lake was there before the railroad blossomed Sebring's population, and before a widened Highway 27 exploded it, especially on the west side of 27, west of Lake Jackson. Certainly no blame can be laid at Jan's door: or at mine: I, who pick up the fallen pine cones for her, so that her "lawn" is unobstructed, imitating an English lawn, where the squire didn't contend with slash pine, "English" "landscape" having been concocted by human development over centuries, not just decades. (Isn't it amazing that humans mistake fingerprints of our activities as "nature"! schools doing nothing to correct us!) (There's been little nature in England for a long time: except insofar as everything is nature: including our interference.) But: everything else is evidence of the interference of development. The pine population isn't just waning; it's disappearing. A dozen pines become six, become four, become one, become none.
Ah, but we "gain." Everything is covered with potato-vines! The sky is blackout out by a superabundance of Spanish moss: indigenous to Florida but not common in unmolested pine flatwoods. That is, Jan's grounds were covered with vines and moss until I yanked most of it down and burned it on the beach.
I also clear ground fuel from her borders: and beyond her borders. Jan's property is beautiful in itself, both deep and wide, lush with growth, and on the lake. See some of my posts on her home at the PaulKnatz blog, 2010 September: a dozen and a half such posts, with views of the beach, and so forth. Southward, her property is bordered by a right of way the neighbors can use to access the lake. Further south the land is "jungle": unmaintained by the widow in residence. To the north Jan's lot is bordered by a lot wholly undeveloped. There the pines completely disappeared under the potato-vines: or had, till I cleared ten or twenty feet inward, improved Jan's view: and protecting Jan's home from fire, reducing the ground fuel.
Please allow for my preference for the possibility of a mankind governed by restraint, by good sense and good manners; while I am an enemy of unbridled human id. (I unbridle my own id, but that's just me; 6 billion of us are another matter. And if I thought it would help, I'd bridle my own!) I'm not for forest and against human settlement: until human settlement proves incompatible with forest: then I'm for forest and against human settlement. Humans in groups could have lived on earth for millions of years into the future (barring an unknown, perhaps unknowable, calamity). As it is I think I future is truncated, foreshortened.
details and exposition will be added over time
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