Opening -- Part Two
Barbara Kingsolver
When I was little, I just understood that there were all these processes, all of these systems that were intertwined that went though their seasons, went through their years without people. You could watch, or you could not watch. It was still going on. The birds still showed up from their migration, they still did their singing and their nest building, and their rearing of their young, and whether you're there to witness it or not, that life is proceeding.
Planet Earth and Opening Title Sequence:
APPALACHIA: A History of Mountains and People
Part Two -- NEW GREEN WORLD
Narrated by Sissy Spacek
Narration #1 -- Appalachia Introduction
The region we call Appalachia is a mosaic of hills, mountains, valleys, swift creeks, narrow hollows, and spendid rivers stretching from Pennsylvania to north Alabama. Here a generous, unhurrying nature perfected Earth's finest expression of what botanists call a mixed temperate forest. In the vast expanse of its tangled history, the enormous woodland adopted every plant and creature time and climatic change brought to it. This mountainous domain is larger than all of Great Britain, and is home to more than 100,000 species of plant and animal. For thousands of millenia it has been the cradle of North American bio-diversity. When Europeans first found their way to Appalachia more than three centuries ago, they were simply astounded.
Opening Voice-Over -- European Visitor
Should this country once come into the hands of Europeans, they will call it the American Canaan, for it will answer fully to all methods of European culture. The country is so remarkably fertile that the Indian women alone do all the laborious tasks of agriculture. It is one continuous forest and the woods abound with fruits, flowers, and medicinal plants -- particularly one called ginseng. The mountains contain rich mines of gold. silver, lead, and copper. The fountains too have many virtues. There are likewise an incredible number of buffaloes, bears, deer, panther, wolves, foxes, racoons, and opossums. In summary, this country seems longing for the hands of industry to receive its hidden treasures, which nature has been collecting since the beginning, ready to deliver them up.
-- European Visitor, 1730
Ron Eller
I think the story of Appalachia is essentially the story of America. There are some distinct roads that Appalachia took that set it apart from many other reagions of the country. But the fundamental story of Appalachia is the story of a people engaging in a landscape, a people learning how to be part of that landscape, how to live with and in that landscape. It's the story of some people defining progress very differently from other people.
Narration #2 --- The Europeans, the New Lands
In the year 1700, Europeans in America numbered perhaps 300,000 inhabitants, all clustered within 50 miles of the shore. By 1730 the population had doubled; by 1750. it had reached a million. Major ports such as Philadelphia, New York, and Charlestown, South Carolina, had achieved the status of small cities. The starving colonies of the 1600’s were now firmly-established, energetic, even prospering. New immigrants werecoming from England, Germany, France, Wales, Ireland, and Holland, as well as involuntary immigrants from Africa, — and easily obtainable land was in short supply.
New land was past the waterfalls, in the mountains and over the mountains, where lay the great and ancient Appalachian forest.
Bob Zahner
Well, you’ve probably heard the saying that a squirrel could have climbed a tree on the coast and found his way all the way to the Mississippi River without touching the ground, and I believe that. In fact, he could have gone north and south probably too, He’d have to dodge around Indian villages and places where they had disturbed it, and maybe worked his way around some blow-downs and things, but it was solid forest. The great forest. The great Eastern forest.
Narration # 3 -- The Forest Community
One of the outstanding scientific discoveries of the Twentieth Century was the complexity of the land organism — the manner in which rock, soil, water, light, plants and animals, interact to form stable communities, such as the rich, beautiful, ancient Appalachian forest. And it is said that only those who know the most about it can truly appreciate how little is still known. Certainly the European pioneers had no way of understanding the true nature of the place they were about to enter. But they were ready to begin.
The Forest Community and how it works:
E.O. Wilson
If I could explain to you how a forest is put together and how it’s maintained down to fine detail, I guess that I’d be one of the most far-seeing and successful scientists of all time.
Bob Zahner
You're talking about the great Eastern deciduous forest. A deciduous forest means the oaks and hickories, and the maples and birches and those that will lose their leaves in the winter.
Barbara Kingsolver
One of the defining features of a deciduous forest is its complexity.
E.O. Wilson
We may have a couple hundred tree and shrub species living there and they are in an intimate relationship with one another--who gets to live where. Which species of shrub needs the shade of a particular canopy
Barbara Kingsolver
We look at a forest and just see trees, but to the earth, the forest is kind of a pelt on this animal that is the soil. Soil is living. It's living stuff.
Bob Zahner
It starts out, of course, with sunlight. Of course, the sun comes in and through photosynthesis you tie up all this energy in sugars and other compounds and the leaves bring those down to the ground and they decompose and that energy goes into all the plants and animals which start with basically the forest floor.
George Constanz -- in Kilmer Forest
So, in the fall they leaves come off in a big slug, a big pulse. And then the leaf of each species decays at its own rate. So that means that throughout the course of the year the nutrients and energy are evenly released as opposed to a big pulse. So even though the leaves come in a big pulse the nutrients and energy are available evenly throughout the whole year. It's important in a stream too. The most important energy and nutrient that power the ecosystem of a stream are the leaves from the surrounding forest.
Barbara Kingsolver
It's a whole community down there. It's like New York City down there. They're bustling around and they're moving nutrients into the plants. It's packed with millions of microbes, of insects, even small mammals. And it's a biochemically living system, and it's probably the most fascinating eco-system there is.
Chris Bolgiano
There's really no idea of how many species of soil organism there are: bacteria, nematodes. They are estimating that they have between 8000 and 20,000 species of fungi alone. Just fungi, mushrooms, alone.
George Constantz -- in Kilmer Forest
So, a fungus in a forest like this--a moist eastern deciduous forest--is probably the most important part of the decomposition phase of the cycling of nutrients. Fungi of all sorts--whether they're shelf fungi on trunks or mushrooms coming up out of the ground — every where you look there will be fungi coming from these organic substraits. They break down this organic matter and make it available to other living things.
Barbara Kingsolver
Every part of the year there's some aspect of it that's sort of in a hurry to do what it needs to do. It's always changing. It's not static at all.
Bob Zahner
All the different parts cooperate because they have all evolved together. Each one is dependent on the other parts--it’s all connected.
E. O. Wilson
All of these form the great cycles that we refer to, the cycles of carbon, the cycles of nitrogen, the cycle of the lesser elements, the hydrologic cycle, the cycle of the water that is in delicate balance with the wholeness of that system.
Chris Bolgiano
We see the big things--the trees, the big animals. But as E.O. Wilson said, all the little things that run the world, we just don't have a clue about them.
E.O. Wilson
That system is many tens of thousands or millions of years old and that is operating there to our benefit, forming the watershed from which we get clean water, holding and creating rich soil. And it’s giving us these services for free.
Narration #4 --- Land
In 1750, no single word had more profound meaning for European colonists than the word: Land. Land was the ultimate social security; it was a magic talisman, Land was a many faceted concept that beckoned mysteriously from Appalachia's long wooded ridges — offering something for everyone — yeoman, gentry, merchant, or speculator. It was a source of independence, status, wealth, power, and influence. In America, there was an abundance of land, but it was frontier land in faraway places with names like Kentucky, Ohio, and Tennessee. And furthermore, the Iroquois, the Shawnee, the Catawba, the Delaware, the Creek and the Cherokee already claimed every square mile.
Wilma Dykeman
The vision of all of them was land. The land was what they wanted. And of course, the Cherokee never even thought of the land belonging to any one person...Everyone enjoyed the land and used the streams and the waters and the woods as was necessary. So this was a whole different kind of concept.
Bo Taylor
We've lived in these mountains for more than ten thousand years. And you don't live that long without learning something. We didn't need somebody coming across the ocean to tell us how to live our lives. We knew how to live our lives. The Creator gave us that knowledge.
Chris Bolgiano
The Native Americans understood the forest, understood the way it worked and the linkages among all the different plants and animals to a large extent, and they understood themselves to be a part of it.
Harvard Ayers --
They were not taking any more critters than could come back. I mean, it was a situation where the plants and animals were able to maintain a balance.
Theda Perdue
Cherokees understood that there was a kind of natural harmony, and they saw their role in the world as one of preserving that natural harmony.
Freeman Owle
Many times when they would go out into the forest and they were digging roots for medicine, they would only take, for example, the root on the east side of the ginseng plant, and that would leave the rest of the plant to regrow and give them something for another day.
Theda Perdue
Cherokees saw themselves as part of the natural world. And their job was to maintain harmony and balance in that world.
Wilma Dykeman
They were not separated from the great whole. It was the great whole of life from which nothing was separated. So that I think is just an important concept. We separate outselves. We’re much better than trees and animals and other parts of life, and we can destroy it as we wish.
Narration #5 -- Looking at the land
Communal use and harmony with nature stood in sharp contrast to the prevailing European ideas of private owership and conquest. Was land a possession to be owned, like a horse or a gun, or a common inheritance to be shared? These sharp differences contributed greatly to the furious enmity that came to exist between the two peoples.
Bo Taylor
In the 18th century it was a dramatic time for the Cherokees. It was a time when we were still full Cherokee. Our identity was not determined by other people. We had a strength about us. The thing about it is, we were being encroached so much, our land, our way of life. Cherokees are big on having a harmony among all things. At that time we were trying to talk to the Unegs, the white people, to find the balance there. It was hard.
Narration #6 -- First European Settlers
During the late 1740’s, the first white settlers trickled over the Blue Ridge and slipped quietly into the valleys of Appalachia. At first Native Americans were tolerant, even helpful. The peace-loving Cherokee chief, Attacullaculla, said he “Pittied the newcomers” and loaned them land. But warnings against encroachment and violent confrontations were also common.
Note: This could be a time for a video story with perhaps Bud Jeffries, the man who takes care of the Ingles cemetery and runs the outdoor drama The Long Way Home. I think it might be worth a try.
The first pioneer couple in Appalachia was Mary Draper and William Ingles, who came in 1748 from England and Ireland and began raising the first European family in the New River Valley in western Virginia. In July, 1755, however, a Shawnee raiding party kidnapped Mary Ingles and her two sons and carried them to the Ohio region five hundred miles away to adopt them into the tribe. After a year Mary escaped, and along with an old Dutch woman, she walked, scrambled, and scratched her way back to the New River cliffs, arriving naked and starving in a neighbor's cornfield. Such terrifying stories, however, slowed European migration into Appalachia not one bit.
George Constantz
Close your eyes and imagine where they were coming from. They were coming either from Europe or from the eastern seaboard, both places of concentrated human habitation. They cross the Blue Ridge, and they look out over this expanse and they see, literally to the horizon, a sea of trees. Because they probably did most of this exploration in the warmer months, it would have been a green sea. All these trees and wild animals and spaces available.