FOREVER GREEN; The History and Hope of the American Forest, by Chuck Leavell with Mary Welch. . - Reviews - book review

American Forests, Spring, 2003 by Carl Reidel

FOREVER GREEN; The History and Hope of the American Forest, by Chuck Leavell with Mary Welch.

$24.95, Longstreet Press, Atlanta GA. 2001.

Here's a book with a pedigree. Written by renowned rock and roll keyboardist Chuck Leavell, with dust-cover accolades by Jimmy Carter and Mick Jagger, it's both a primer of American forestry and the story of a family's love of the forestlands it inherits from a Georgia grandmother.

"My friends say I am a tree farmer in my heart and a musician in my soul." These lines introduce the book with a brief autobiographical sketch of Leavell's early love of music, especially the piano, and his experiences in establishing a tree farm on Charlane Plantation, which he and wife Rose Lane inherited from her grandmother. He tells how he came "to have a great admiration and wonder" for forests and their spirit and for tree farmers as he struggled with inheritance taxes and learned to manage his lands.

Most of the hook is a survey of American forestry, with chapters on the vast array of products made from wood, tree physiology and growth, forest types, logging, forest management, and the history of the American forest from Colonial times to the present. Given the book's modest length, Leavell had to condense a lot of complex information into few pages. For some there probably won't be a lot that's new, but the book provides a solid introduction for those beginning a similar journey into the world of tree farming.

Two brief final chapters explore national forest policy and the challenges facing public forestlands and private industry. Leavell offers a list of "things we all can do to help" and concludes with a heartfelt plea: "(T)he thing that fascinates me... is that the canvas we use for the art of forestry is the landscape of our counties and rural areas, our cities, our states, our nation.... So let's be careful of the brushstrokes we use on that canvas."