The fate of the original longleaf pine forests that once graced southern Moore County and much of the coastal Southeast is the stuff of tragedy and shame.

An eloquent naturalist named Lawrence S. Earley has written an entire book about that long-vanished ecosystem, which I only recently got around to reading. It's called "Looking for Longleaf: The Fall and Rise of an American Forest," and parts of it are enough to break your heart.

The first European explorers, Earley tells us, encountered stately forests of longleaf pines (Pinus palustris) that seemed to march to infinity across 92 million acres of land stretching from southeastern Virginia to southeastern Texas.

Today, as a result of relentless depredations by the species Homo sapiens, mere shreds of the original old-growth stands remain in a few scattered, sheltered, overlooked spots here and there.

We treated longleaf pines the way we treated Native Americans. First we ruthlessly decimated them, and then we consecrated them as a proud symbol of our heritage.

North Carolina's brutal early exploitation of the longleaf even accounts for our peculiar state nickname, "Tar Heel," at least according to the most likely of several theories. The term was first used disparagingly, they say, to describe the sticky-footed condition of the scroungy, shoeless inhabitants who worked in the coastal woods to extract tar and other "naval stores" from the trees.

The longleaf pine also had an honored place in our state toast, which most native North Carolinians (even those who live in the dry counties where there's nothing with which to toast) can quote at the drop of a Carolina-blue cap:

Here's to the land of the longleaf pine,

The summer land where the sun doth shine,

Where the weak grow strong and the strong grow great,

Here's to "down home," the Old North State!

"Past seas shaped this land's terrain, rivers its very pitch and roll," Earley writes. "It's a green land, but it's also a land of flame and ash. It was in this region of sand and sea, wind and fire that longleaf flourished as no other pine could do, perfectly adapted to the conditions, swaggering over the Coastal Plain. ...

"By any measure, longleaf's decline of nearly 98 percent is among the most severe of any ecosystem on earth. It dwarfs the Amazon rain forest's losses of somewhere between 13 and 25 percent. It is comparable to or exceeds the decline in the North American tallgrass prairie, the coastal forests of southeastern Brazil and the dry forests of the Pacific Coast of Central America."

The trees that were merely chopped or sawed down, dismembered and sent north in endless long, groaning trains to provide the lumber to build massive Victorian houses for a burgeoning American population were, in a sense, the lucky ones.

At least they met a quick, if brutal, end. Millions of others were consigned to a death of slow torture, their bark stripped off in great gashes so that their lemon-fragrant sap could bleed away.

First that rich, golden life's blood was used for pitch and tar required to keep wooden imperialist fleets afloat. Then later, on a much more vast and destructive scale, swarms of busy human ants would boil the sap down into turpentine and rosin, which found many uses in the Industrial Revolution then transforming human civilization.

So the pines that weren't hauled away by "cut-and-run" loggers were bled dry and left to die by the lumbermen's mortal enemies, the turpentiners. These fatally damaged "slash pines" became vulnerable to disease, insect infestation and fire. The dried pitch that covered the great wounds in their skin would crystallize to white, making stands of these doomed giants look like an unearthly, spectral horde at night.

In the mid-1920s, poet Anne McQueen mourned the hideous death torment of the longleaf pines thus:

Listen! The great trees call to each other:

"Is it come your time to die, my brother?"

And through the forests, wailing and moaning,

The hearts of the pines, in their branches groaning:

"We die, we die!

Flaying the bark, and our bodies baring,

Like dim, white ghosts in the moonlight staring,

Naked we stand, with the life-sap welling -

Tears of resin to gather for selling -

We die, we die!" ...

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