Imagine a great mountain forest teeming with biodiversity, laced with trails, and stretching across the entire southern Appalachians. That’s the vision articulated in a landmark document published by Southern Appalachian Forest Coalition and its member groups called Return the Great Forest: A Conservation Vision for the Southern Appalachian Region. It describes a future where the Appalachian landscape serves both natural and human communities. But it’s more than just a vision; it’s also a detailed blueprint on how to achieve this vision within the next century.

The Great Forest vision proposes an interconnected network of natural areas throughout the Southern Appalachian region, built upon the existing foundation of public lands. Such an integrated landscape would sustain healthy populations of native species, generate clean water and clean air, provide a high quality of life, and satisfy the increasing demands for backcountry recreation.

Since Return the Great Forest was published in 2002, over 250 prominent organizations and individuals have endorsed it, including Republicans for Environmental Protection, the Religious Campaign for Forest Conservation, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, former U.S. Forest Service Chief Michael Dombeck, Jane Goodall, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (You can read, download or order a copy of the conservation vision at www.safc.org).

Achieving this vision is neither an easy or short-term task, and there are many forces lined up to prevent it from happening. What specifically can be done to move toward this vision? What are the first steps to make the vision a reality?

by Hugh Irwin

1. Protect What He Already Have. Step one is to safeguard the South's remaining natural areas that are intact and are least affected by development-including the region’s rich inventory of roadless areas. A decades-long struggle to keep these areas protected and free from roads and logging has rallied remarkable public support, but the Bush Administration has continued to undermine protection, and a court ruling or agency rulemaking at any time could open these areas to development.

2. Enact legislation. The National Forest Roadless Area Conservation Act recently introduced in Congress would make roadless protection permanent. In addition, wilderness bills are starting to be introduced in Congress that would designate some of these roadless areas as wilderness, one of the strongest levels of protection. The Virginia Ridge and Valley Act currently making its way through Congress would permanently protect many of the roadless areas in Jefferson National Forest. The Chattahoochee National Forest Act of 2007 would add to existing wilderness in northern Georgia as well as protect the Mountaintown roadless area as a National Scenic Area.

3. Purchase critical conservation lands. There are many important conservation tracts in the Southern Appalachians that have never been purchased, even though they are adjacent to or surrounded by national forest lands and increasingly face the threat of development. There hasn’t been the commitment of funds to complete these purchases even though private owners are willing to sell these tracts in many cases.

The Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF) was established for this type of purchase. LWCF funds, which come from off-shore oil and gas leases, were intended to give back a conservation legacy to the American people to offset the environmental impacts that off-shore drilling caused. Forest Service acquisitions using LWCF funds were intended to be primarily in the East where the task of completing the national forest system still remained incomplete. However, the funds that should go to LWCF have rarely been fully allocated by Congress, and the East and the Southern Appalachians have rarely received their share of LWCF funds. LWCF must be fully funded by Congress and that the Southern Appalachians must receive funds to address acquisition needs here.

4. Reduce logging and restore biodiversity of public lands. Southern Appalachia's forests have shown remarkable resiliency in recovering from industrial logging in the early twentieth century. They are regaining the diversity of species and structure expected in an old growth forest. Sadly, these healthy old growth and ecologically maturing forests are being targeted by the U.S. Forest Service for logging projects because these forests contain the trees that bring the most money for the timber program. Logging curtails the recovery of our forests and keeps much of our public lands in an unnatural even-aged condition that lacks species and structural diversity. The Forest Service should focus on restoration rather than timber production, which will require reform throughout the agency and will require restructuring the incentives and funding that Congress provides the agency.

5. Promote renewable energy. The forests of the Southern Appalachians are interdependent with the global environment, as are all ecosystems. Global climate change is nothing new. Our Southern Appalachian ecosystems have adapted to climate variations for at least 65 million years because of the unique geography of the region and because of resilience of the ecosystems. However, human-induced climate change threatens fundamental changes in our forests and ecosystems. The current climate change could bring such profound changes so quickly that the elasticity of our forests could be challenged. We must demand of our politicians that they address global climate change by promoting sustainable and renewable energy that minimizes carbon going into the atmosphere.

6. Keep forests wild. We also must demand that our native forests be used for their highest good as biological and carbon reserves. Our ecosystems can contribute to solutions for global climate change. Not only do our forests provide the best water quality, the highest diversity, and the best recreation potential when they are allowed to mature, but this is also the state where they sequester the most carbon, thus contributing to reducing the ultimate cause of global climate change.

Hugh Irwin has worked for 25 years on public lands issues in the Southern Appalachians. He is the principal author of Return the Great Forest: A Conservation Vision for the Southern Appalachian Region.