Reviews
"This warm and fine personal look at the legendary forest management practices of Herbert Stoddard and Leon Neel will appeal to a variety of readers. Foresters and landowners will profit from its detailed descriptions of the Stoddard-Neel approach to managing forests, one based on old-fashioned woodsmanship, a deep familiarity with longleaf pine forests and a primary concern with the sustainability of the forest ecosystem. Neel’s stories and recollections of growing up in the Piney Woods are pleasurable in and of themselves, and they will reward anyone interested in the South and in Southern folkways."
—Lawrence S. Earley, author of Looking for Longleaf: The Fall and Rise of an American Forest
Description
The namesakes of this method are Herbert Stoddard (who developed it) and his colleague and successor, Leon Neel (who has refined it). In addition to presenting a detailed, illustrated outline of the Stoddard-Neal Approach, the book—based upon an extensive oral history project undertaken by Paul S. Sutter and Albert G. Way, with Neel as its major subject—discusses Neel’s deep familial and cultural roots in the Red Hills; his years of work with Stoddard; and the formation and early years of the Tall Timbers Research Station, which Stoddard and Neel helped found in the pinelands near Tallahassee, Florida, in 1958. In their introduction, environmental historians Sutter and Way provide an overview of the longleaf ecosystem’s natural and human history, and in his afterword, forest ecologist Jerry F. Franklin affirms the value of the Stoddard-Neel Approach.
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Cloth |
Leon Neel is a forestry consultant and land manager who lives in Thomasville, Georgia. Paul S. Sutter is an associate professor of history at the University of Georgia and editor of the Press’s Environmental History and the American South series. His books include Environmental History and the American South: A Reader. Albert G. Way is a postdoctoral fellow in southern studies at the Institute for Southern Studies, University of South Carolina.
