When E.O. Wilson died December 26th, many here may not have recognized how he changed Alabama in the eyes of the world.

Those impressed by celebrity will be interested to know that Ed Wilson was likely the most famous Alabamian of his generation. There are plenty of people worldwide – in Europe, in South America, in China or Africa or much of North America — who would scratch their heads if you mentioned a football coach, but they’d know immediately that E.O. Wilson was among the  most widely recognized and influential scientists of the 20^thcentury. 

Ed was famous because – in his research, in his many books and TV appearances — he gave the world a new way of thinking and talking about life. Ed made his entrance as the “ant man” – the world’s preeminent authority on ants. But the discovery and celebration of what Ed called “biodiversity” was central to his work. Nature for Ed wasn’t just beautiful scenery, or some philosophical ideal. Nature was first and foremost its components, its species, each and every one. 

Just as Ed gave people new ways of thinking about the world, he gave the world a new way of thinking about Alabama.

It may seem odd that the modern concept of biodiversity was born in a place that has often been notorious for disregarding its own diversity.

But perhaps that’s why Ed, more than any writer of the last century, explored how people could and should interact with diversity. I think he believed Alabama could become a model of that relationship, because he understood the profound effects that state’s exceptional natural riches had on him as he was growing up. Concepts like biophilia were his way of articulating the impulses that drove him as a boy to feel the muscular resistance of snakes in his hands, to arrange the wings of butterflies, to study how the minute habits of ants could rock an entire forest.

I think he felt that understanding the biodiversity of Alabama could shape the future of the state, even as it had shaped his future, and as it would shape the world.

If people see Alabama differently in this century, it won’t be because of Mercedes or Toyota or Airbus or those other things we import into Alabama. It will be the result of Ed’s effort to get the world to finally see Alabama for what it is, a great cauldron of life, a global center of biodiversity.

As Ed often ruminated, he had to go up north to find work – at Harvard University where he spent much of his life. But he was always ambivalent about leaving the state that taught him so much. And in the latter half of his life he came back at every opportunity. That’s how I got to know him. 

He had access to every great natural area in the world, but he brought teams of scientists to study the insect life of the Red Hills in the center of oak and magnolia diversity in Monroe County and to survey one of the global centers of carnivorous plant diversity in Splinter Hill Bog in north Baldwin County. He declared that the Paint Rock Valley in northeast Alabama should become a world center of research into how forests and ecosystems work.

And for his 88^th birthday, he decided he wanted nothing in the world more than a chance to prospect for ants in the Mobile-Tensaw Delta. He swatted his net through the reeds with surprising force, chuckling as he gathered ants that seemed to appear out of nowhere, filing them in vials for identification.

It might have seemed like some serious scientific endeavor, as I pontificated about plants and Ed theorized why we might find ants here, and not over there. Perhaps it was. But on that day we were just two happy boys tromping through the swamp, discovering Alabama diversity as if for the first time.

At Paint Rock, we’re launching E.O. Wilson’s moonshot

On Half Earth Day last week, E.O. Wilson gave the world its marching orders, the same marching orders he gave the Paint Rock Forest Research Center when he visited and helped us conceptualize it.

As he told David Attenborough during the Half Earth Day Plenary session, we need to do more than a few feel good nature projects, faced as we are with a triple apocalypse of climate change, freshwater loss and biodiversity collapse. We need a moonshot, he says. That’s the Half Earth vision, the idea that if we’re going to make this planet sustainable, safe and comfortable for people, we need to give half of it to nature. 

That may seem like a monumental task, but because of Ed’s influence, we’ve made Paint Rock a centerpiece of that Half Earth vision. Our research is designed to identify and understand all species and their interactions, from the genetic level through the entire community.  If you thjink we already understand the important species, you’re mistaken: Ed estimates some 80 percent of species have yet to be described. We’re demonstrating that at Paint Rock, where we’re already uncovering key species that have been hiding in plain sight, waiting for researchers to more carefully assess what holds our world together.

And that research, in turn, will play a critical role in how we implement the Half Earth vision – first in Paint Rock Valley, where more than half the broadleaf forests are already “given to nature;” then through the Southern Cumberlands, with its millions  of acres of mostly intact forest systems; and then around the country and the globe, sharing what we’ve learned and demonstrated. Yes, there are big gaps in knowledge and conservation we must fill. We’re struggling to restore our lost grassland savanna forests; we know that restoring devastated bottomland forests, canebrakes and meadows requires that we learn how to better address human needs in those places.

But Paint Rock was designed to address Ed’s moonshot. You want to hear more about it? Check out these Links

If only Alabama knew how to get rich on its own gold.

Every time I start counting through the state’s stores of gold – blooming everywhere in fall fields – I wonder how in the world we have failed to cash in on our own Fort Knox, our native sunflowers.
No, not the cultivated sunflowers you buy in a seed packet from California or Michigan, not the sunflower seeds rodents chew on around your birdfeeders. I mean the sunflowers native to Alabama, the ones that have been coming up wild here in Alabama for hundreds of thousands of years. 
From all I can tell, Alabama is the center of sunflower diversity globally. There are 50 to 60 species and recognized subspecies of sunflowers in the world. Half of those are native to Alabama – including at least 25 known species, and another double handful of subspecies and common hybrids.  No other state comes close – not Georgia, not Texas, not California, not the Carolinas, not Florida. The number of sunflower species native outside North America can be counted on one hand. 

It’s as if Alabama is at the center of a nuclear explosion of sunflower species. Study them for any length of time, and you’ll recognize that there are sunflowers in Alabama like nothing ever described before. Alabama sunflowers continue to explore what it’s like to be sunflowers, experimenting with new forms of flowers, new kinds of seeds, new chemistries — until they learn to master every opportunity in our diverse landscape.
They’re all different. Some are confoundingly different, like the waist-high longleaf sunflower which is almost entirely restricted to northeast Alabama, or the rayless sunflowers of coastal savannas, which lack any trace of yellow petals and show off midnight purple discs dotted with gold stars. But most bear some resemblance to the manufactured sunflowers we buy in seed packets, with flowers that can be as wide as your hand or as small as your thumb, with petals that range from deep buttery gold to pale lemon yellow, and center discs that can be yellow, red or purple. 

They’re all beautiful, as if they’re desperate to be seen.
What have we done with this abundance of sunflower riches? 
Nothing. Not a thing. 
What could we have done? A single sunflower species native to the western prairies has become one of the world’s most important food plants, ranking among the top 5 oil-producing plants in the world. In that single sunflower species, scientists have found chemicals that have potential as anti-microbials, as antioxidants that can prevent damage to cells and tissues, with hypertensive qualities that can be used to treat cardiovascular disease. They can be used as preservatives, for wound healing, even for herbicides.

The same western species has become one of North America’s most widely cultivated “wildlife” species, mistakenly planted by bird feeders and deer feeders alike — even though the artificially enlarged seeds are designed to be processed by machines rather than wildlife. I am stunned when I watch my hunting club buddies mow down native sunflowers that deer and turkey have been using for millennia – and replace them with sunflowers designed to be digested by machines, not wildlife. Perplexing, isn’t it?
 I wonder what we might find if we studied the human benefits in Alabama’s 25 or so distinctive species, which as far as I can tell have never been analyzed? How would quail and grouse and turkeys and goldfinches respond if we made sure they had access to the wild Alabama sunflower seeds they evolved to eat, rather than force-feeding them the fatty seeds we engineered to cook French fries?
Alabama is sitting on a gold mine. Look for a field of Alabama native sunflowers, and invest yourself in it.

Bill Finch

Two young men from Local Motives visited Alabama for the first time and got a very good lesson in biodiversity and why this state is so important. It is a short video. Just click HERE.

Bachman’s Warbler once filled the canebrakes in Alabama.

Bachman's Warbler Protocol Photo 205

Of the 10 mainland North American species declared extinct by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service this week, all but one were from Alabama.

The spirit bird of the Southeast, the ivory bill, once had its stronghold in Alabama pinelands and swamps. It was the tenor sax of the forest band. Its loss is deafening in all the forests where we work. You should try to imagine what it sounded like when you walk through the woods, just so you understand that no forest in Alabama will be the same without it.

Bachman’s warbler is just as heartbreaking. It followed in the steps of the Carolina parakeet and many other species that likely used or depended on native bamboo forests in the Southeast. Bamboo canebrake is one of Alabama’s most ignored landscapes – though many believe the very name Alabamu (the thicket gatherers) is a reference to how important canebrake once was to the people of the state.  We should prioritize the restoration of canebrakes on the Alabama River and the Paint Rock River, where cane and species like Bachman’s warbler were once abundant.

The aquatic losses in Alabama continue to be stunning. Four mussels lost were part of the larger Mobile drainage in this state (including the flat pigtoe, a fact overlooked in recent press releases). It’s worth remembering that just a few decades ago, scientists assured that these species would go extinct if lock and dam systems were built on their rivers – but federal officials deliberately delayed listing them so that the dams could be built.

Three of the lost mussels were from the Tennessee River where it sweeps through Alabama between Paint Rock and Muscle Shoals, probably once the most species rich mussel beds in the world. Sixty percent of the nation’s mussel diversity, and almost 25% of global diversity, was crammed into Alabama, an area representing just 1 percent of the country’s land mass.

Maybe you’ll have an easy time forgetting they are gone forever if you see only their dead shells. But imagine their “flowers” – the lures and other devices these mussels used to attract fish to move young from one section of a river to another. It was a relationship as complex, as beautiful, as significant to the whole riverine ecosystem as the relationship between bees and flowers.

It’s increasingly difficult to give a full accounting of species lost to extinction in Alabama, but the number is now more than 100 in just the past two centuries. That’s far higher than any other mainland state. It’s a reflection both of the extraordinary diversity of the area, and of the extraordinary lack of concern for what happens to biodiversity here.

Amazingly, in Paint Rock and elsewhere in the state, we are still discovering new, and exceedingly rare, species that are likely found only in small areas of Alabama. It’s hard to know whether to be joyful or fearful when we find one. It will be decades before they are ever listed as endangered or threatened, given how deliberately cumbersome we’ve made the listing process. Our track record indicates that many are likely to go extinct in the meantime.

Only a massive new effort to protect the future of all Alabama species, those we know and the many we don’t know, will save one of the world’s most important storehouses of biodiversity.  

Some would argue that Chris Blankenship is one of the most effective Commissioners of Conservation Alabama has ever known.

So when the Commissioner asks to come visit to find out what’s going on in Paint Rock Valley, you don’t hesitate. 
We met the commissioner and Thomas Reddick, The Nature Conservancy’s Director of Forest Management in Alabama, just as 8 to 10 inches of rain was finishing its run through the valley — it was a spectacular day of waterfalls and tree falls and slippery slopes.

 
But the commissioner took it all in like the Alabama boy he was, and offered us some real insights into conservation potential in the state, even as he peppered Thomas and the Paint Rock team with questions about the future of the Research Forest. He listened patiently to Thomas and Bill’s schemes to restore shortleaf pine savannas, and offered advice (and sympathy) on the challenges of managing large tracts like this one. He seemed as amazed as we are at the incredible diversity of this forest. 

It was a good day, a long day, the kind of day you sleep long and well after. We look forward to his return visit!

You can always tell when you have a really great group of interested people by their questions. This exceptional group of Venture America folks learned about biodiversity first hand in Bill’s lectures within the Paint Rock Forest. We even met up with the field crew working on their quadrats – it was a dynamic exchange of ideas and interests between exceptional young people. Miller Girvin brought her daughter Hamilton, who we immediately began to recruit for the field crew in 10 years. I think we will see them all up here again – I hope so.

The focus on biodiversity is happening from many corners now. Bill Finch did a talk to the Harvard Club of Alabama that you can see here about why diversity matters in Alabama.

The other thing that came to my attention recently was a video that two young men put together from photography a few years ago. They did a great job! Biodiversity matters, but it matters more in Alabama. You can see it here.

Just click to get past the ads.

All last summer Bill has methodically and consistently been collecting seeds of Gama grass, along with several ticks and chiggers. He sewed them in flats this winter, grew them out, and planted them at the Paint Rock Forest Research Center this summer. It is the beginning of a seed nursery. He has also collected and planted milk weed, penstemon as well as other native grasses, sunflowers and sylphiums he is raising at our house.

These grasses that once were everywhere along the road sides are now very rare. Highway departments are herbiciding the areas they just mowed so there is no chance anything will live along the roads. Unfortunately this also means native grasses and wildflowers that were using the road sides as a last refuge.