Longleaf From Below

Abstract

Ecological foreboding and ecological fascination are both on the rise. As uncontrolled wildfires rage across parts of the globe, many are increasingly and anxiously aware of the destructive capacity of fire. At the same time, a “multispecies turn” is underway across multiple academic disciplines, aiming to de-exceptionalize the human, bring renewed appreciation for the more-than-human world, and find hope in the ecology of “blasted landscapes.” Scholars have been particularly charmed by soil microbial communities including mycorrhizae, popularly represented as underground networks of resource sharing. This article brings together these currents of fear and fascination in environmental thinking by exploring longleaf pine savanna, a once-vast fire-prone ecosystem across the North American coastal plain decimated by colonial practices of logging, agriculture, and fire suppression. What state scientists in the 19th century saw as a “smoking desert of pine trunks” and nutrient-poor soils hosted, at the understory level, incredible small-scale plant diversity and high rates of endemism. Metabolic rift, a key concept in environmental thinking, describes the loss of ecological conditions necessary for human flourishing due to unsustainable production. In the case of longleaf pine ecosystems, it is not fire but its suppression, alongside racialized and gendered oppression, that has driven such loss. A feminist approach to the surviving landscape, I argue, must consider these joint histories and aim toward full social-ecological repair rather than ceding the possibility of such renewal.