Are Rednecks the Unsung Heroes of Ecosystem Management?
Jan 7, 2010
Francis E. Putz (Wild Earth - Published by the Wildlands Project)
In the United States, correlates with fire suppression
and population explosions of game animals appear to me to
include the quality of reception of National Public Radio stations
as well as local densities of Volvos and other foreign cars.
Where fires are frequent and deer are scarce, densities of full-sized,
American-made pickups are high, a substantial proportion
of adult males lack formal employment, and per capita
tofu consumption is below detectable levels. A composite
independent variable that captures the essence of these relationships
is the local density of what are referred to in
American vernacular as “rednecks.” As incendiarists and
hunters, the oft-disparaged rednecks play vital but seldom
recognized roles as environmental stewards, roles that are currently
being only partially filled by officialdom.
Before jumping to the defense of traditional land uses
and wildlife management techniques, invocation of the term
“redneck” requires some justification, especially given that it
can be used pejoratively. More or less equivalent names for
this diverse socioeconomic and cultural designation include:
English—country bumpkin, briar, hick, yokel, cracker, and
hillbilly; French—bouseaux; Spanish—cholo; Russian—zhlobs.
Many North Americans referred to as rednecks, particularly in
the Southern states, are descendants of the Celtic tribes that
terrorized but then were overwhelmed and ridiculed by
ancient Romans, economically and geographically marginalized
to the hinterlands of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales by the
Anglo Saxons, and shipped to the New World and Australia
as prisoners and indentured servants by the English in the
eighteenth century (McWhiney 1988).
According to the
Oxford English Dictionary, the term “redneck” was first used
in the seventeenth century in the north of England in reference
to dissenters against the Anglican Church. Before the
mid-twentieth century in the United States, rednecks were
often referred to as “poor whites.” Recently, several redneck
defenders have quite forcefully pointed out that while stereotyping
people on the basis of their race, gender, religion, ethic
affiliation, or sexual orientation is frowned upon in polite society,
slurring people on the basis of their socio-economic status
is generally accepted (Goad 1997). On the other hand, self-effacing
humor is characteristic of many people who self-identify
with rednecks (e.g., Wilde 1984, Foxworthy 1989).
Among the multitude of environmental problems confronting
suburbanites and ecosystem managers throughout
the developed world, fire (too few and therefore too intensive)
and overpopulations of deer and a number of other “weedy”
wildlife species figure prominently. Fire is a particularly serious
problem where houses have encroached into ecosystems
that historically were maintained by frequent, low-intensity
fires. To protect the houses, fires are suppressed, which results
in loss of fire-dependent native species (e.g., most pines, fox
squirrels, badgers, bobolinks, tortoises, quail, and red-cockaded
woodpeckers), massive fuel accumulation, and wildfires
that are difficult to control when they do occur. Similarly,
elimination of large predators and reduced human hunting
pressure have allowed populations of raccoons, foxes, opossums,
and other “meso-predators” to expand, to the detriment
of the many songbird species on which they prey.
Finally, suburbanization
and the decreased hunting with which it is associated
often result in deer populations that expand to the
point that regeneration of many native plant species is impeded,
gardening is futile, Lyme disease goes rampant, giardia is
chronic, and driving is hazardous. To address these problems,
governmental employees and their contractors thin dense
stands, conduct prescribed burns and, where public sentiments
and budgets allow, cull populations of deer and what
were formerly “game” animals but are now considered
“varmints” (e.g., opossums and raccoons). Unfortunately, for a
variety of reasons including lack of funds, legal restrictions,
and bureaucratic impediments, official managers of game and
ecosystems are not always successful at maintaining any semblance
of natural balance.
Defending the “traditional” landscape and wildlife management
practices of rednecks as a partial answer to these woes
is challenging for several reasons. First of all, the same traditions
for which I will provide selective defenses resulted in the
near or complete local extirpation of a number of noteworthy
species (e.g., beavers, wolves, moose, turkeys, and bears) from
much of North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries as well as continuing losses of tortoises, rattlesnakes,
and other target species. Secondly, many redneck traditions,
such as frequent burning, sometimes at night, and without
elaborate precautions, are no longer tenable given suburbanization,
exurbanization, and other forms of landscape fragmentation.
Finally, the fondness of many rednecks for off-road
vehicles is unquestionably problematic.
Rednecks as fire ecologists
In the glare of the conflagrations that consume forests and kill
fire-fighters in western and far northern North America every
fire season, special care is required when trying to present fire
in a positive light. Even for ecosystems that depend on frequent,
low-intensity fires for their maintenance, such as
prairies and savannas, it is often politically challenging to
make the case that lack of fire is a problem. Urbanization of
human populations compounds the problems because opportunities
for first-hand experience with open fires of any sort
are diminishing. Few people in the United States, for example,
still use wood fuels for cooking or kerosene lamps for
lighting. It is even more challenging to defend the pyrophily
of “veteran woods burners,” a group profiled in a U.S. Forest
Service study (Doolittle and Lightsey 1979) as a “disadvantaged
culture group with antisocial tendencies.”
Before presenting a qualified defense of fire use by rednecks,
I should clarify that as a scientist and landowner, I use
fire in a highly sophisticated manner as an ecosystem management
tool. But to be honest, I must admit to having on occasion
burned more than I “planned,” sometimes substantially
more, and more than occasionally without official permits.
Defenses of fire abound in the ecological literature, so I
will not expound upon them at length. At least in ecosystems
where fires have historically occurred at frequent intervals,
prescribed fires are recommended to reduce fuel loads and
thus reduce the likelihood of uncontrollable cataclysmic fires.
For plant and animal species that evolved with fire, which
includes most taxa in my home state of Florida, fire is often
required for reproduction and to reduce competition with
more fire sensitive, invasive species. Enlightened managers of
fire-maintained ecosystems therefore generally both advocate
“let burn” policies and use prescribed burns to mimic historical
fire regimes.
Rednecks are among a dwindling group of individuals
outside of officialdom who conduct landscape-scale controlled
(or somewhat controlled) burns, but their motivation for
burning sometimes differs from that of certified and otherwise
officially sanctioned burners. Note that here I am considering
neither recklessly set fires nor the vengeful fires of arsonists,
but instead focus on fires set according to traditions that may
be as old as the species assemblages being burned. Some rednecks
burn out of concern for ecosystem integrity, but more
burn to improve hunting, to kill ticks, because the mower
won’t start, to expose snakes, and for fun. Of all the reasons
why people burn, the recreational nature of fire has received
little attention from serious researchers, perhaps because they
are themselves so serious.
Whatever the motivation, when
cultural differences are surmounted, veteran burners have
much to teach the Nomex-garbed newcomers to the field.
Fires endanger houses, especially wooden ones, but rednecks
have burned fewer of their own houses than might be
expected because they traditionally kept their yards free of
grass and other combustibles. In fact, prior to the advent of
chemlawns, carefully swept yards devoid of plant material,
living or dead, were considered de rigueur throughout the
South. Yard-sweeping is now only occasionally observed in
the U.S., but is still commonplace in many developing countries.
As a method for protecting houses from fires, this
approach is far superior to the “firewise” landscaping techniques
currently being promoted by various governmental
agencies. Furthermore, yard sweeping is effective for keeping
mosquitoes, tsetse flies, snakes, and other varmints at bay as
well as for tracking crepuscular encroachers of the human and
non-human varieties.
Regardless of whether polite society accepts woods burning
as a legitimate form of recreation, it is hard to deny that
fire can be fun. From the montane savannas of New Guinea,
to the pampas of Argentina, and to the savannas of Africa,
local people traditionally burned early and often, whatever
they could get to burn, often for no better or at least more
apparent reason than that it would burn. Paleontologists,
palynologists, and other sorts of experts on pre-history tell us
that evidence of this approach to ecosystem management goes
back as far as their records of pollen, charcoal, and phytoliths
(Pyne 1995). Unfortunately for many fire-dependent species
of now encroached savannas and prairies, this ancient legacy is
fading fast among rednecks all over the world.
I doubt that anyone knows how many thousands of acres
of piney woods and other pyrogenic ecosystems rednecks traditionally
burned every year in the Southeastern Coastal Plain
Province of the U.S. before Smokey Bear burst on the scene, but
I am confident that the area was far larger than that which is
currently being burned by the highly trained forces of all the
burn-permit granting agencies combined. That rednecks typically
have burned during the winter when fires are not “natural”
(according to the experts) may not turn out to be such a
problem as evidence accumulates for the importance of human-ignited
fires in pre-history. I doubt that the Native American
predecessors of rednecks, for example, hesitated to ignite winter
burns if they were cold, tired of tripping over catbrier vines,
looking for fallen hickory nuts, or just for the heck of it.
Furthermore, it seems to me that for hardwood-beleaguered
savannas in the South, any fire is better than no fire.
More significant as constraints on redneck pyrophily than
employment, education, and acculturation are the combined
threats of fence laws, landscape fragmentation, industrialization
of agriculture, television-induced cultural homogenization,
intensification of forestry, and ecologically perverse tax
incentives. As wealthy people move out into the countryside,
land prices go up and so do taxes as residents of the new
communities demand urban-quality services in formerly rural
areas. Furthermore, as the products of mechanized industrial
agriculture increasingly dominate vegetable markets, labor intensive
row crop agriculture is becoming less and less lucrative
and opportunities for even seasonal employment are
diminishing in many rural areas.
Similarly, the fire-friendly
long-rotation forestry operations for which rednecks were natural
managers are being replaced by densely planted short rotation
pulpwood plantations for which fire is a menace and
rednecks are superfluous. Tax laws, particularly stringent definitions
of for-profit agriculture and looming threats of estate
taxes, make owning land particularly onerous for economically
challenged rednecks who typically use low capital and low
intensity approaches to land management. And as homes crop
up in ecosystems formerly maintained by frequent fires, carrying
out either recreational or management burns becomes
increasingly problematic.
Rednecks as wildlife managers
The “deer problem” confronted by many ecosystem managers
and suburbanites in the wealthy portions of the world is usually
that there are too many deer. It is ironic that up until a
few decades ago, and to this date in most of the poorer countries
of the world, the “deer problem” was and is quite the
opposite—too few deer, too many unsuccessful hunts, and too
many protein-scarce days. Other species that are becoming all
too familiar in backyard vegetable gardens and on BMW
bumpers include wild hogs, turkeys, raccoons, and bears;
some gardens are now only suited for rice or cranberries,
thanks to the industrious engineering of beavers.
Populations of white-tailed deer are particularly problematic
in suburban communities where they often reach
densities of greater than 100 per square kilometer, some 20
times that which biologists consider “natural” (Rooney and
Dress 1997). To put the gravity of the situation in perspective,
several communities have hired sharpshooters to
cull their deer herds at costs of up to $100 per head
(http://www.attra.org/attra-pub/deercontrol.html). It is hard
to imagine any community with a functioning participatory
democracy agreeing to hire professional hunters armed with
high-powered rifles, spotlights, and silencers to shoot deer off
baits in their backyards, but it occurs frequently in some of
the more affluent and politically liberal parts of the United
States. These sorts of culling operations are by no means
“sporting,” but they are apparently very effective. Along similar
lines, you can now hire packs of trained “goose buster”
dogs to keep Canada geese off the greens of your golf course.
The impacts of meso-predators, like foxes and raccoons,
on songbird and amphibian populations are widely lamented,
but the control of these predators by coon-hunting, possum shooting,
and armadillo-smoking rednecks is not held in high
regard. Suburban populations of these predators can reach
astounding densities, as any early morning drive will reveal.
A surprisingly high proportion of bird watchers do not even
recognize that raccoons, opossums, and armadillos are edible
and that these animals eat vast numbers of birds and bird
eggs. Unfortunately, the knowledge of how to hunt or trap
and then prepare the meats and pelts of these animals is fast
disappearing. And like so many traditional redneck activities,
hunting these voracious predators of birds, reptiles, and
amphibians is socially shunned (or at least I am not aware of
any possum hunting clothes and accessories being sold by
high-end mail-order houses in Maine).
Instead of being controlled
by native carnivores or human hunters, populations of
these meso-predators are reduced by frequent rabies epidemics,
a fate that I would not wish on the peskiest possum.
Most rednecks hunt, or at least hunted before their
lifestyles suffered under the combined forces of crowding and
gentrification. Where there are still ample numbers of gun-toting
rednecks, over-populations of deer and other game
species are unlikely to develop. And if rednecks sometimes
stretched the rules of hunting, at least as dictated by the
sporting class, their exploits seem mild when the alternative
of culling by contract hunting or poisoning are considered.
While not condoning rattlesnake roundups or raptor shooting,
it seems only fair to recognize the ecological benefits of
the traditions of hunting of what rapidly become nuisance
species after suburbanization and gentrification of rednecks.
Conclusions
Human population densities, fence laws, house prices, and
zoning regulations may be too high to allow rednecks the
freedom to continue their traditions of burning and hunting,
but this historically important group of ecosystem managers
should not be entirely shunned. While recognizing some of
the more unsavory characteristics of stereotypic rednecks, I
would like to acknowledge them for literally “taking up the
torch” of the indigenous people whom they replaced in many
parts of the world. And even people who do not hunt must
acknowledge that a shot deer in the back of a pickup is one
that they are not going to see between their headlights or
munching in their garden.
Similarly, anyone who has had the pleasure of leaning on
a rake while a grass fire swept gently through a pine savanna
on a cold winter day (or night) is unlikely to condemn the
practice of woods burning and is equally likely to acknowledge
the recreational nature of fire. As the results of fire suppression
become more evident and the costs of labor increase, properly
controlled recreational burning may still have a role to play in
ecosystem management. Perhaps I am being overly nostalgic
or atavistic, but it seems a pity that the only experiences many
people have with open fires are either bad or involve burning
things that come with ignition instructions on the packaging.
Even charcoal lighting fluid no longer flares up!
I am not suggesting that woods-burners or coon-hunters
get conservation awards, but I have noticed that when rednecks
are gainfully employed, educated, law-abiding, and otherwise
gentrified, fuels accumulate and game animal populations
explode to the point that they pose serious environmental
problems. And although I do not condone destructive or
anti-social activities, I hope that rednecks are recognized for
the ecosystem management services that they have traditionally
supplied, even if they were having fun in the process.
Francis Putz is a professor of botany and forestry at the University
of Florida as well as the owner and manager of 100 acres of former
pine savanna and swamp. His research focuses on tropical forest conservation
through sustainable use, but he also studies fire ecology and
ecosystem management in the South.
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