Action | Student News

Traveling to Georgia to Stand Among the Pines and Learn About Greatness

Story and photos by Scottee Cantrell

Mom’s Kitchen in Plains, Ga., is not a fancy place. It’s a cinderblock, home-cooked food kind of place, with wooden ladderback chairs and plastic tablecloths.The tea is thick and sugared. And they have buttermilk.

That’s what President Jimmy Carter wanted. So Mark Tukman MEM’95 got it for him. It was a little hard to believe: Here were Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter sitting with some 20 Nicholas School students, alums and friends chatting like they’d known everyone for years.

  The president fixed a vegetable plate for himself and Rosalyn from behind the counter, apologized for having to eat-and-run and for being dressed up—they had to go to a funeral. They talked about their daughter, Amy, and how she was doing in Atlanta, and about Jimmy’s book tour, and about living in Plains. Then the president stood up and talked about living on and preserving the land. It was one of those rare moments in a lifetime, when greatness reaches out and touches you.

   It would be one of several amazing moments the group on the Traveling Forestry Seminar would experience on this trip in October to look at how Georgians manage longleaf pine plantations and to visit with the Carters.

  Blake Sullivan MF’89 of Sullivan Forestry Consultants hosted the group in Plains and took them on a tour of the Carter Historic Homeplace and the Carter Farm in Webster County, which he manages. The students stooped to eat peanuts from the fields as Sullivan talked to them about converting farmland into timberland and managing a property the Carters want to remain natural. They also got to see the pond where Jimmy Carter was supposedly attacked by a rabbit while fishing during his presidency and saw a remarkable stand of exotic Paulownia trees.

   The weather remained rather “drippy” wet throughout the trip, but it didn’t dampen the group’s enthusiasm. The students spent two nights at the Joseph Jones Ecological Center at Ichauway getting a tour from Mark Melvin and Lynne Boyd MEM’02, who gave them a look at the ecology and management of the longleaf pine system and its ecosystem and its wildlife. They ventured out while they were at Ichauway to International Paper’s Southland Experimental Forest for a trip with another alumnus, Craig W. Hedman MF’85, manager of IP’s forest ecology and water resources. The highlight of this trip was a stop at a red-cockaded woodpecker mitigation bank where they learned about management challenges.

   On the last day, the group went to the historic Greenwood Plantation in Thomasville, Ga. Managed by The Nature Conservancy, it is one of the most ecologically significant privately-held properties in the southeastern United States because of its extensive collection of unspoiled old-growth longleaf pine.

  Standing among the whispering pines in what is called the Big Woods— a 1,000-acre old-growth section where the trees are from 200 to 500 years old—the group met legendary forester Leon Neel. Tall with regal white hair, Neel talked about his single-tree selection management techniques that have helped to perpetuate this old-growth forest. Neel could have made a substantial amount of money if he had chosen to oversee the cutting of those old monuments of Nature. He refused.

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