The Cradle of Biodiversity. Witness these facts. Just three hundred years ago the Eastern Forest was mostly intact and still home to what are considered hallmark icons of wilderness: mountain lion, elk, otter, wolf, and rattlesnake.
The only forests boasting higher plant diversity are the planet's tropical rainforests. Our Eastern Forest's rivers rank top in the entire temperate world for fish, mollusk, crayfish, aquatic insect, and salamander diversity. For example, just one high-quality watershed in Tennessee has more fish species that ALL of Europe. The Great Mississippi once drained a forest that was nearly 2000 miles across and
deep. Its many tributaries harbored over 300 species of fresh-water mussels, whereas the Western half of North America has less than ten species.
When English settlers began immigrating to the eastern shores of North America in the 1600's, they discovered an almost completely unbroken forest that supported nearly 50 species of oaks. Back in their homeland of the British Isles, they had known only one. When these same people tried to found their first enduring colonies, they discovered the Atlantic shoreline so densely populated with Native American villages that they had difficulty finding a safe harbor that didn't have the tell-tale sign of campfire smoke.
The East, not so very long ago, was nearly as close to Eden as one could find on earth - a rich cornucopia of diversity in land and in its waters that sustained large numbers of humanity and wildlife alike. We should mention that it is largely in part to the Native American's recent co-existence with a functionally intact forest eco-system (a unique situation in the temperate world) that we still have a chance to save the living wealth of the Eastern Forest today. Is this a natural heritage we would choose to give up on?
The World's Last Chance. Unlike the Old World, the original temperate forests of North America were still intact just a few hundred years ago. North America is therefore our last chance in the world to save a significant land base for the native temperate broadleaf forest.
Yet, our window of opportunity is rapidly closing. As our modern population continues to soar and our lifestyles become ever-weightier on our resources, we have perhaps only a few decades before our North American landscape is indistinguishable from the densely populated, highly managed landscape of Europe. Then what was once the vast and majestic American wilderness will be forever gone in the east. True, the east has taken severe losses; (note: one third of the 300 species of freshwater mussels are either extinct or imperiled) but not so much that we need to lose hope in saving a substantial percentage of the diversity that remains.
Aren't our state, national, and private forests enough? Saving the forest's biodiversity is more than just saving the trees. Much of the diversity in the temperate forest biome lives in the wildlife and on the delicate forest floor -- flowers and ferns who usually 
have only a few weeks in the year to efficiently photosynthesize before tree leaves emerge in the spring and block out the sunlight.
Most of our native understory plants can not survive soil impaction, soil loss, too much sun resulting from a heavy timber removal, or too much shade created by the young, even-aged forest and blackberry tangles that follows a heavy cut. To accomplish preservation of temperate forests, we need to establish significant masses of protected forest land that is left undisturbed. We need our well-managed public forests in the east for their contribution to diversity, their large acreages of forest, and for their relatively judicious conservation methods for lumber removal compared to what often happens on privately owned-forest cuts.
Some species, such as turkey, deer, and hooded warblers actually respond positively to forest canopies opened after a cut. But for the sake of bio-diversity we also need forests that are simply not cut at all. It is in the latter that the east is so sadly lacking.
Salamanders, representing the highest animal biomass in an eastern forest community, are particularly sensitive to disruption caused by timber cutting. In our relatively wet eastern climate, logging roads often
become deeply eroded, losing valuable topsoil and becoming inviting highways for invading alien species. Disrupted forest soils on these logging roads pour thousands of tons of dirt into the streams and creeks every year, soil that was thousands of years in the making. The resulting situation is at cross-purposes to the goal of providing the pure waters required by most of our fresh-water mussels and fish species.
Signature Eastern Forest birds, such as the rapidly declining Cerulean Warbler and Wood Thrush, need large expanses of intact, un-fragmented forests to have high success rates in raising their young. Simply put: small isolated woodlots cannot sustain many woodland bird, reptile, and amphibian species. To preserve biodiversity for all of our native forest species, we need to supplement the relatively common woodlands that still exist all across the east (young, disturbed, rapidly growing forests that are timbered) with a quilting of restored mature forests in large, undisrupted preserves. Today in the east, old growth forests are virtually non-existent. One of the primary functions of the Arc of Appalachia Preserve System is to buy back the forest fragments, reunite them, and bring the mature forests back to the eastern landscape. Literally, we need to re-member wilderness in the east.
Priceless Ancient History. The story of the Eastern Forest rests on human history as well.
The eastern forest that nourished the early Americans was abundant in wildlife, including elk, bobcat, bear, panther, wolves, bison, river otters, Carolina Parakeets, and Passenger Pigeons as well as the mammals we know today. In autumn huge crops of chestnuts, walnuts, beech, and shellbark hickories dropped bushels of mast to the ground, feeding everything from Allegheny Wood Rats to white-tailed deer.
The land and rivers of the Ohio were so productive that the Hopewell societies could conduct ceremony, build earthen mounds, construct sacred-geometric wall enclosures, support cadres of specialized artisans, twist fine vegetable fibers into fabric for clothing, sculpt sophisticated pottery, sponsor heroic journeys of exploration, and establish complex social hierarchies — all while remaining primarily hunter-gatherers. Agriculture of distinctive eastern American crops — prior to the introduction of maize — was employed, but it was not a mainstay. There was apparently no need for the early mound builders to abandon a lifestyle that our modern civilization sometimes wistfully remembers and sacredly mythologizes as the Garden of Eden.
No one has ever been as intimate with the remarkable animals of the Eastern Forest or more prolific in animal-inspired artwork than the Hopewell culture who lived on the land from 200 B.C. to 500 A.D. Excavation of two Hopewell mounds in the eastern United States revealed immense caches of tobacco effigy pipes. Two hundred stone pipes were found in a Chillicothe mound, and 136 at the Tremper mound near Portsmouth — the only mounds in the entire cultural region to produce such collections. Many featured a native animal — such as turkey vulture, bear, wolf, snake, toad, or dozens of other native species. Each pipe was constructed with attentive, intimate and
loving detail. In one instance a raccoon was carved in classic stance,
head gazing upward while the left paw probed deeply into the cone of a crayfish hole. Perhaps these pipes were the people’s deep and ceremonial connection to the diversity of life in the Eastern Woodlands; their way of claiming relationship.
Although the Hopewell people lived throughout most of eastern United States west of the Alleghenies, their ceremonial effigy pipes were found nearly exclusively along the life-giving Scioto: the river that was the axis of power for the Hopewell peoples, and is the axis of the modern-day Arc of Appalachia region. The ground we tread today was the ancient center of their civilization, the inspiration for their artwork, yet even the precious few remaining earthworks are often in danger of being turned under in the name of progress. Feeling that the wilderness landscape we seek to protect is intimately connected with the history of the people who have called it home, the Arc of Appalachia Preserve System is actively involved in the protection of ancient earthworks sites.
Next: The Invisible Biome - The World View