In the Pines, In the Pines: An Excerpt from Looking for Longleaf: The Fall and Rise of an American Forest, by Lawrence S. Earley
A longleaf pine forest on a bright day is a light and sound show.
There's the verdant ground cover, mostly grasses that sway to each
hint of breeze. The forest is open with widely scattered trees, and
the early morning sun casts angled shadows from the pine trunks; by
midday each tree will be standing in its own small pool of shadow.
Here and there, dense groups of young pine saplings gather and the
tufts of infant pines are nearly indistinguishable from the
wiregrass. Above, the sky burns azure. The sound emanates from the
treetops, a low and constant tone like the surf crash of a distant
sea. Even on a perfectly still day you may hear this roar in the
distance, as if somewhere an individual tree was gathering and
amplifying some ambient sound. The great eighteenth-century explorer
William Bartram described it as "the solemn symphony of the
steady Western breezes, playing incessantly, rising and falling
through the thick and wavy foliage."
Looking for Longleaf: The Fall and Rise of an American
Lawrence S. Earley
The University of North
Carolina Press, $27.50
Connect With Us:
An early peek at each new issue, with descriptions of feature articles, columns, and more. Issues contain links to everything in the latest issue's table of contents.News of book reviews published in American Scientist and around the web, as well as other noteworthy happenings in the world of science books.
To sign up for automatic emails of the American Scientist Update and Scientists' Nightstand issues, create an online profile, then sign up in the My AmSci area.
Receive notification when new content is posted from the entire website, or choose from the customized feeds available.
JSTOR, the online academic archive, contains complete back issues of American Scientist from 1913 (known then as the Sigma Xi Quarterly) through 2005.
The table of contents for each issue is freely available to all users; those with institutional access can read each complete issue.
View the full collection here.