NORTH CAROLINA
Forest residents rekindle ‘fire culture’ to restore longleaf pine tree
BY JAMES POLLARD ASSOCIATED PRESS WEST END, N.C. | Jesse Wimberley burns the woods with his neighbors.
Using new tools to revive a communal tradition, they set fire to wiregrasses and forest debris with a drip torch, corralling embers with leaf blowers.
Mr. Wimberley, 65, gathers groups across eight North Carolina counties to starve future wildfires by lighting leaf litter ablaze. The burns clear space for longleaf pine, a tree species whose seeds won’t sprout on undergrowth blocking bare soil.
Since 2016, the fourth-generation burner has fueled a burgeoning movement to formalize these volunteer ranks.
Prescribed burn associations are proving key to conservationists’ efforts to restore a longleaf pine range forming the backbone of forest ecology in the American Southeast. Volunteer teams, many working private land where participants live or make a living, are filling service and knowledge gaps one blaze at a time.
Prescribed fires, the intentional burning replicating natural fires crucial for forest health, require more hands than experts can supply. In North Carolina, the practice sometimes ends with a barbecue.
“Southerners like coming together and doing things and helping each other and having some food,” Mr. Wimberley said. “Fire is not something you do by yourself.”
More than 100 associations exist throughout 18 states, according to North Carolina State University researchers, and the Southeast is a hot spot for new ones.
Mr. Wimberley’s Sandhills Prescribed Burn Association is considered the region’s first, and the group reports having helped up to 500 people clear land or learn to do it themselves.
The proliferation follows federal officials’ push in the past century to suppress forest fires.
The policy sought to protect the expanding footprint of private homes and interrupted fire cycles that accompanied longleaf evolution, which Indigenous people and early settlers simulated through targeted burns.
“Fire is medicine and it heals the land. It’s also medicine for our people,” said Courtney Steed, outreach coordinator for the Sandhills Prescribed Burn Association and a Lumbee Tribe member. “It’s putting us back in touch with our traditions.”
The longleaf pine ecosystem spans just 3% of the 140,000 square miles it encompassed before industrialization and urbanization.
But some pockets remain, from Virginia to Texas to Florida. The system’s greenery still harbors the bobwhite quail and other declining species. The conifers are especially resistant to drought, a hazard growing more common and more severe due to climate change
