
          This Land, This South
          Reviewed by Ayers, Edward L.Edward L. Ayers
          Vol. 6, No. 4, 1984, pp. 22-23
          
          This Land, This South: An Environmental History
by Albert E. Cowdrey. University of Kentucky Press, 1983. 236
pp. $23.00
          The land has always set the stage. Our literature, history, memory,
and experience have always been permeated by the delta, the mountains,
the pinebarrens, the coast. Some students of the South, in fact, have
seen the land and the weather as the basic facts of Southern history,
the reason for slavery and for staple crops, Southern violence and
Southern lassitude. What we've never really understood is that the
land itself has a history. As Albert Cowdrey makes clear in his
evocative, detailed, and impressively researched account, the Southern
landscape has played more than a passive role in shaping Southern
lives.
          Cowdrey's story immediately confronts us with surprises. The corn
which fed so much of the native population of America before the
Europeans and Africans arrived, for example, was the product of
ingenious selective breeding; the plant cannot survive unless humans
separate the kernels from the cob and plant them. "Indians," too,
probably created the South's vast pine forests by burning off older
forests. The apparently natural bounty whites found was not nearly as
natural as they assumed, though the deaths of seventy percent of the
natives who had contact with Europeans and European disease may have
made the continent seem much more empty than it otherwise would.
          Disease played havoc with the new arrivals as well, for the South
has long proved a haven for microbes and insects. Whites and blacks
infected one another with strange maladies, and decade after decade
passed before mortality rates stabilized. But eventually they did, and
the North American slave population--alone of all those in the New
World--survived in numbers sufficient to replace themselves.
          Once the slave population began to grow and cotton emerged as the
foundation of the region's economy a new era began, one in which the
South's resources came under new strains. The region's soils,
generally older and more fragile than those of the North and West,
began to show signs of wearing out even before the slave regime
ended. Yet it remained for the Gilded Age to damage the South the most
brutally. As railroads penetrated the forests, lumber companies began
to strip huge areas throughout the region, taking the best trees and
leaving the worst to strangle the forest. Cowdrey describes the waste
and rapacity with understated passion. The beginnings of conservation
also appeared in the South during the Gilded Age, but not before much
was ruined.
          The history of the Southern environment in the early twentieth
century repeated the same cycle, though those years did witness great
strides against some of the persistent illnesses of the region,
malaria in particular. It was not until the Depression and the New
Deal that attempts to manage the South's resources made much
headway. The Mississippi River, which had long bedeviled planners, was
at least partially tamed. The Tennessee River Valley became the focus
of national attention and an admirable--though uncopied--model. The
Civilian Conservation Corps began to repair some of the damage
inflicted by greed in decades past. Yet even the New_Deal had its
costs: the Agricultural Adjustment Administration proved a boon to
large planters and a curse to thousands of tenants, who were driven
from the land and often from the South. The 1930s and the war years
that followed, Cowdrey argues, were probably the most revolutionary
years in the region's environmental history.
          The balanced account of the postwar years will surprise few who
have lived in the South. All can see the effects, good and bad, of
development, commercial reforestation, strip 

mining, oil fields,
suburbanization, landscaping. But to those who read this fine book the
South can never look quite the same again. The signs of centuries of
struggle with and against the land will be easier to see and more
understandable--if no less poignant and tragic.
          
            Edward L. Ayers is associate professor of history at the
University of Virginia. He is author of Vengeance and Justice:
Crime and Punishment in the 19th-Century American South
(Oxford University Press, 1984).
          
        
