State

By Marci DeWolf Brunswick County’s Green Swamp is rich in plant life, ecologically diverse — and shrinking. find ourselves on the entrance of a i ml plain? which extends west 60-70 wiles... a forest of great longleaved pine, the earth coverrd with... plants, and embellished with extensive savannas, always green, sparkling with ponds of water..., " —from Travels Through the Carolinas, /79/ Once stretching almost unbro¬ ken from Virginia to Texas, the nation's hugest longleaf pine forest encompassed 60- 70 million acres of coastal plain. Today, less than a million acres of old-growth pine remain in their rapidly depleting natural surroundings. Symbolic of this fragile, endangered environment is the Green Swamp Preserve. It comprises 16,000 acres in Brunswick County, just five miles north of Supply on N.C. 21 1. and it’s open to die public. John Bartram of Philadelphia. America’s The Great Green Swamp first great botanist, declared the Green Swamp "the pleasantest place that I ever saw in my life.” Bai train was taken by the broad expanse of glistening water, the huge, moss-draped cypress trees, the wilds and mosquitoes, and the rich diversity of plant and animal life. He saw vast forests of cypress, gum. beech, maple, ash. poplar, white cedar and longleaf pine, which served as a habitat for black lx*ar, cougar, white-tailed deer, wild turkey and a host of odicr wildlife. The Green Swamp, featuring the most outstanding examples of pine savannas, bay forests and pocosins in die Southeast, has major biological significance. In 1974. the U.S. Department of the Interior desig¬ nated 24.800 acres of die swamp a national natural landmark. In 1977, the Federal Paper Board Corporation donated 13,850 acres of die property to die Nature Conser¬ vancy for the people of North Carolina. But today the Green Swamp — the last remnant of what was once the largest ecosystem in the Southeast — stands in silent testimony to the systematic destruc¬ tion of millions of forest lands throughout the world. The swamp is losing 2.000 acres a year to tree farms managed by the U.S. Forest Service. “It’s an environmental tragedy." says Carol Mayes, director of science and stew¬ ardship for the North Carolina Nature Conservancy. This area is literally disap¬ pearing before our eyes." The Carrboro4>ascd conservation orga¬ nization manages the Green Swamp Pre¬ serve, the hugest preserve under its super¬ vision in the state. The Green Swamp affords the o|> portunity to see longleaf pine in its natural setting and to observe several species of plant and animal life that cannot lx* seen elsewhere." Mayes says. At one time, longleaf pine forests were the Western prairies of die Southeast. The The State/October 1991 l*»o. b, Rrtxn Cramrt. VWBmb Вш,л Rtn. ini Gw, nn Mtor 15