A decision by the Grenada City Council to sell off some of its public land for a timber cut is being watched closely by a local group that hopes instead to turn the forest into a nature preserve.
Friends of Chakchiuma Swamp Natural Area, a grassroots group headed by Grenada artist and Greenwood ArtPlace instructor, Robin Whitfield, hope that instead of selling the forest in question to a timber company, the city will sell it to them in exchange for a conservation easement.
The idea came to Whitfield last summer when she first heard of the city’s planned timber sale.
A painter who’s lived in Grenada for 20 years, Whitfield spends hours in the swamp each week giving tours to students, observing the changes in seasons, and plying her craft. She lives in a building just off the old downtown square, less than a mile from trail entrances off Main Street into the swamp and the surrounding forest.
“It’s about saving the heart of the community,” Whitfield said.
Once she heard about the city’s intention of selling off the forest, she took their survey map and consulted with foresters to determine the monetary value of the trees.
On the Friends’ Gofundme site, a pulpwood tree is valued at $20, a yellow poplar or sweet gum is valued at $30, a sycamore is $40 and so on up to $100 for sponsorship of a hickory or cherry tree.
The Friends have raised around $13,000 online “selling” trees at this point.
Most recently, an anonymous philanthropist from Jackson stepped forward promising to match 50 cents on every dollar pledged toward the Friends’ ultimate goal.
The intention is to raise $200,000, enough to meet Grenada’s immediate financial wants and to ensure the future of the natural area at the same time.
But for the Friends to reach their financial goal, they say, they need a binding decision from the city that the forest will remain undisturbed, at least for whatever time they agree upon in a purchase/easement contract.
The city, meanwhile, is keeping its options open.
If the Friends’ plan goes through, trees surrounding the river channel and swamp will remain in place under the care of wildlife managers and conservation professionals.
The forest would continue to serve its purpose in the river channel ecosystem, and could possibly even become part of a four-mile trail and natural area, a center for preservation of biodiversity, a research site and an ecotourism draw to this unique water feature just off I-55.
At issue is the force that drives most decisions of government: money.
The city of Grenada is experiencing financial woes and recently hired a city manager to help them address economic shortfalls.
Trey Baker, a lawyer and Grenada native, came back to his hometown from Denver to help turn things around and was faced immediately with the timber sale.
Grenada had already put parcels of land surrounding the existing Chakchiuma Swamp Natural Area up for bids, but the bids that came in didn’t meet the council’s minimal expectation of $270,000.
Now, the forest has been put up for bids a second time, and those bids were opened at a city council meeting this week.
Whether the city will accept the new bids is uncertain.
Baker said in a recent telephone interview that “at the end of the day, the city is going to do what’s in its best financial interest.”
Whether that’s collecting one-time revenue from cutting down a forest in the middle of the city is questionable, says Friends member and owner of the Vaiden Timber Company, Brian Dismukes.
“You sell it to a timber company for $270,000 and that’s gone three months later,” Dismukes said. “But for the next 50 years, the forest is gone.”
Dismukes speculates there are reasons bids have not come in as high as the city wanted, most likely because this is a wetlands area.
“Obviously, I’m not against cutting trees. That’s what I do for a living,” Dismukes said. “But you have to be careful in a wetland- type area like this. There are streamside management zones, and on the river there’s a pretty wide area where you’re supposed to leave a certain amount of tree canopy.
“That’s probably why the bid was low. The company that put in the bid -- great people, I know them -- were probably calculating in all the timber they’d have to leave.”
Dismukes said restricting water flow and changing elevation are among other concerns timber companies would have to face should they choose to cut in this area.
“It just doesn’t seem like the best long-term idea for the city to me,” he said. “A touch of short-term gain and a long-term loss.”
James Cummins of Wildlife Mississippi, the nonprofit responsible for preserving the Sky Lake area near Belzoni, said consideration needs to be taken about how the cut would impact both the swamp and the city.
“Hardwood forests and swamps absorb flood water,” Cummins said. A 14-inch diameter cypress tree, for example, takes in through its root system and transpires about 55 gallons of water a day.
“Hardwood forests and swamps take the flood waters into themselves,” he said. “I’m not trying to stir up hype or anything like that, but certainly you’d see increased flooding with a cut like this.”
Other concerns, said Cummins, are swifter water flow, rising water temperatures resulting from loss of tree cover and stream bank erosion.
Whitfield says the forest surrounding the river channels and Chakchiuma Swamp should remain because this is one of the few remaining wetlands in the Yazoo watershed, extending from Grenada to Sky Lake, that has been left relatively undisturbed.
Most of the swamp areas that remain in the Delta after 150 years of levees, drainage ditches, flood control lakes and agricultural clearing are “duck holes” cut off from natural flooding events and from their ancestral biological systems, Whitfield says. Animals and plants can no longer move freely from one wet area to another, and the result is loss of biodiversity.
That is what has made the Delta habitable by humans. Otherwise, she says, we’d live Louisiana-style, on stilts.
But Whitfield and Friends of the Chakchiuma Swamp Natural Area want the swamp in the heart of Grenada to remain as it is, connected to its source and rich in biodiversity.
Cutting down the trees surrounding it, they fear, would be the first step in changing it forever.
• Contact Kathryn Eastburn at 581-7235 or keastburn@gwcommonwealth.com.
