An American Original - southeastern Georgia's Okefenokee Swamp

National Wildlife, August-Sept, 1999 by Les Line

Loftin found that in dry periods, the sill floods only 4,000 acres, or less than 1 percent of the swamp. Moreover, she noted, as many fires occurred after construction of the levee as before.

After all, the Okefenokee is located in one of the country's highest lightning-strike zones. In high-water times, however, the sill impoundment covers as much as 60,000 acres and has altered plant successional patterns on about half that area, Loftin reports. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service now plans to remove water-control structures and breach the levee in order to restore the affected area's original hydrology and vegetation.

But as Loftin emphasizes, wildfire is an essential part of the landscape dynamic. Peat corings show that intense fires occur every few hundred years during extended droughts, playing a major role in reshaping the character of the swamp. For example, many present-day prairie/marsh and open-water areas were created when fire raged through swamp forest and burned deep into the peat. Surface fires like those of the mid-1950s set back plant succession to a lesser degree. Refuge policy calls for extinguishing fires of less than one acre, containing larger ones in the interior and vigorously suppressing all wildfires on the swamp perimeter that threaten private timberlands.

The interruption of the Okefenokee's natural fire regime, Loftin says, will have significant short-term impact on the swamp by allowing more areas to fill in and become forest. But she predicts that a fire intense enough to significantly change the landscape will occur within 50 years.

'Weather patterns will change, and when the peat dries out a lightning hit will cause the whole place to burn,' she says. 'But that doesn't mean all the wet forest, which accounts for almost 60 percent of the swamp, will revert to prairie.' Meantime, conservationists can relax a bit about the DuPont company's controversial plan to expand its titanium mining operations on Trail Ridge. DuPont is the world's largest maker of titanium dioxide, a white pigment used in the paper, plastics and paint industries, and the chemical giant owns or leases 38,000 acres along the ridge. The firm's proposal to open a 30-mile-long, 3-mile-wide surface mine along- side the Okefenokee wilderness area was denounced by Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt, the National Wildlife Federation, the Georgia Wildlife Federation and other conservation groups feared that the 50-year project would adversely affect the swamp's hydrology.

Earlier this year, faced with an onslaught of criticism, DuPont's embattled shareholders signed off on a different scenario: In place of a huge strip mine, a consortium of conservationists would build a world-class research and education facility focusing on the rare and complex Okefenokee ecosystem and on the Native Americans who lived near the swamp or on its islands for at least 5,000 years. The success of the pact depends on finding funds to acquire land and mineral rights from DuPont, local governments and another landowner with a financial stake in the titanium mine.