New book gives personal account of holistic forestry, land management

he Art of Managing Longleaf, by Leon Neel, a forestry consultant and land manager who lives in Thomasville, documents the sometimes controversial management system that has protected Greenwood’s “Big Woods” and has been practiced in the Red Hills and other parts of the Coastal Plain.

The book presents a detailed, illustrated outline of the Stoddard-Neel Approach—based upon an extensive oral history project undertaken by Paul S. Sutter, an associate professor of history at UGA, and Albert G. Way, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of South Carolina.

Often described as an art informed by science, the Stoddard-Neel
Approach combines frequent prescribed burning, highly selective logging, a commitment to a particular woodland aesthetic, intimate knowledge of the ecosystem and its processes and other strategies to manage the longleaf pine ecosystem in a sustainable way.

Greenwood Plantation in the Red Hills region of southwest Georgia includes a rare 1,000-acre stand of old-growth longleaf pine woodlands, a remnant of an ecosystem that once covered close to 90 million acres.