Post-Modern Landscapes of the American South
by Jack Temple Kirby
"You can't change history if you are [weighed down by history]."
Clint Mathis, May 2002
The suburban Georgian, Clint Mathis, only twenty-five, addressed the United
States' experience of invisibility (or humiliation) in quadrennial World Cup competition on
the eve of 2002 match play. A fleet and improvisational striker whose boyhood hero was
the unglued Argentinian Diego Maradona, Mathis was instrumentally blunt about U.S.
soccer's unglorious past: Deal with it and move on, he advised. Reminding me of
Professor Fred Hobson's post-modern southern fiction writers, beginning with Walker
Percy, who were and are "autochthonous." Unlike modernists such as William Faulkner,
who were possessed by and obsessed with history, post-modernists interrogate memory in
relative independence and discover the funny as often as the morbid.(1) If with Faulkner,
Pickett's Charge is still happening, with Percy it's over yet still signifying everywhere, often
in absurd manifestations. (In The Thanatos Syndrome, moldy, crumbling former slave
quarters are converted to hip $300,000 condos.) Post-modernism as fiction or
historiography might dismiss the past as casually as the mature writer Richard Ford or the
maturing athlete Clint Mathis. More often post-modernism engages and questions history
with a wit and improvisation resembling Mathis' flamboyant play. Which brings me to the
brilliant work of a pair of Minnesotans, and to a poetically imagined historical southern
landscape.
The brothers Coen, Ethan and Joel, have been making what I would call comic
regional films for years-e.g., about the sentimental working classes of the Southwest, in
Rising Arizona; contemporary southern California slacker culture, in The Big Lobowsky;
and most famously, the maddeningly bland yet redemptively persistent Nordic
midwesterners ("you betcha!"), in Fargo. Then early in 2001, the Coens brought forth a
"southern," O Brother, Where Art Thou?, which is more historical than their previous
regionals-and one might add, allegorical, since the script is "Inspired by The Odyssey, by
Homer." The scene is the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta during the 1930s, high age of the
"American Congo,"(2) when tiny white minorities coerced enormous black majorities in
cotton fields and on chain gangs, when Dixie demagogues roused the rednecks with
oratorical vacuity and fiddle tunes, when the legendary Robert Johnson, having exchanged
his soul for virtuoso guitar licks at a delta crossroads, riffed and yowled in smokey juke
joints, and when publicity-hungry rural outlaws roared over the countryside in V-8 Fords,
sticking up banks, exchanging heavy fusillades with the cops, and providing witty
summaries to the press. O Brother offers bits of all this and more-a Klan ceremony, for
instance, that resembles the overture to "Springtime for Hitler" in Mel Brooks' The
Producers. There is even a public works project, typical of the '30s-a new dam will flood
a hidden "treasure" sought by the film's three hapless protagonists. And the Delta's low,
flat profile itself figures large throughout, conferring a sultry, dangerous verisimilitude.
But O Brother's landscape is really a mondo bizarro in which most everything is
wrong. The film opens with a chain-gang scene of black men making large rocks into small
ones beside a dusty road. Then three white guys, just escaping, pop up, and we follow their
wacky odyssey thereafter. A blind, elderly black man (The Oracle, probably representing
Homer, himself) appears memorably but briefly. Robert Johnson-here rendered "Tommy
Johnson"-accompanies the escapees' vocal group, "The Soggy Bottom Boys," as the only
persistent Afro-American character in a very Afro place and time. None of Johnson's or
his contemporaries' blues are heard, either. Instead we get T Bone Burnett's remarkable
assemblage of "ole timey" white music, which is the film's plot motor and pleasure; and
this, too, is wrong in another way.
"Ole timey"-the descriptor spoken by the movie's blind white radio station manager
and recording engineer-hardly seems appropriate to Jimmie Rodgers' "He's in the Jailhouse
Now" or Louisiana Governor Jimmie Davis's "You Are My Sunshine," both new in the
'30s. "Ole timey" really means traditional mountain music, the deathly lamentations of
Appalachians such as the Carter Family and Stanley Brothers. (Ralph Stanley, himself, won
a Grammy for his rendition of "Oh, Death" on the film's soundtrack, which became a hit
CD.) I am persuaded that differing elevations and geologic morphologies yield differing
sensibilities and musical styles. Not that flatlanders and highlanders were unaware and/or
unappreciative of each others' musical traditions in the age of automobility and radio.
Rather, I suggest, the Coen brothers and musical director Burnett were engaged here in a
playful homogenization of upland and lowland white Souths. A historical Appalachian
band, the Foggy Mountain Boys, becomes the ad hoc Soggy Bottom Boys, rather like one
of Walker Percy's characters' hilarious misappropriations of legend. The "South," then,
always a singular idea despite its irreconcilable varieties, is effectively leveled. And O
Brother becomes, to me, a wistful poem to us about southern landscapes in our own
lifetimes.
Consider first southern Appalachia. Never a great agricultural commodities empire
like the South's piedmonts and deltas, the mountains nonetheless were home to many
farmers for a long time, many of them participating in remote markets. Appalachian
farmland was typically "cove land," narrow, fertile stream-side settlements. Hardly anyone
lived on heavily forested ridges and peaks. This land held rains, filtered water, and
provided fuel, building materials, and selectively cut timber for downriver markets. Then
came railroads, timber and coal corporations. Forests were clearcut, and mines, whether
"slope" or "deep," brought forth not only coal but slag wastes including toxic minerals that
tumbled down ridges onto farms and into streams. Farmers went to work in the mines or
left for the Midwest; and by 1960, agricultural census-takers dismissed most of the
subregion as either "industrial" or some rural-undeveloped descriptor.(3)
Then appeared a quantum leap in mining technology-giant machines that would
strip away vegetation, dirt, and rock to reach seams of coal approximately parallel to
horizon or slope. Federal and state legislation during the 1970s required operators to
"restore" landscapes once coal seams were depleted, but legislators did not intend
replication of original morphology and ground cover. Instead they insisted that mined
landscapes be returned to some economically useful form, and this usually meant near-flat,
grassy (i.e., treeless), would-be beef pastures.(4) The literal leveling of the South was
underway.
Now, after four decades of eastern strip-mining and "restoration," coal operators
have engineered ever-larger machines and a new (during the 1990s) method called
"mountaintop removal." Actually, miners now refer to mountaintops as "overlays," since
peaks and ridges cover coveted seams of low-sulfur coal, so "overlay removal" is the
interchangeable term. The removal procedure begins with blowing up mountaintops; then
teams of towering mining machines, each twenty-stories high, manipulate monster drag-lines to dump millions of tons of rubble into valleys, most with streams. People living
below such overlays are typically bought out, their villages to become "valley fill." The
Army Corps of Engineers, which issues permits for filling watersheds in coal country,
concedes that about one thousand miles of Appalachian streams have disappeared as a
result of landscape leveling. The concession may be too modest, and destructive flooding
in southern West Virginia during Spring 2002 suggested to many a causative relationship
with wholesale obliteration of forests. In 1999 and again during the floods of '02, the chief
judge of the federal district court of southern West Virginia condemned government
permits for valley filling as an "obvious perversity" of the Clean Water Act. The judge's
first ruling was overturned on appeal, and King Coal marched on, imperiously confident in
a cozy consensus with the rest of the federal judiciary and the current administration.(5)
Now consider the coastal South. Here a much older-and pervasive-perversity of
several clean water acts(6) is evident everywhere, from Chesapeake Bay and the Delmarva
Peninsula to Key West to Padre Island. Mile after mile, as any beach-goer or pelican has
observed, any patch of land, dry or soggy, not already built upon is for sale and
"development." Since World War II, but explosively since the 1960s, the eastern riviera
has risen, quite literally (even as parts of the mountains have fallen). Most of this low
landscape consisted of wetlands of some sort or another-flood-plain pine barrens, pocosins,
tidal marshes, estuarial swamps. Ocean and Gulf beaches are themselves deserts, of course,
delicate, shifting, windblown. Yet ironically, even as wetlands' ecological functions and
beaches' impermanence became generally understood-in the '60s-Americans herded to the
coasts to live, permanently or on regular or extended holidays. Private landowners obliged
private developers and eager local and state governments; but it was the Army Corps of
Engineers (again) who dredged and straightened creeks, dug canals, and drained thousands
of acres of wetlands, using spill from massive excavations to build (relatively) high and dry
landscapes for safe homesites and convenient business districts. When environmentalists
recoiled in horror at losses of wildlife habitat, natural fish hatcheries, and estuarial
function-as early as the mid-1960s-the Corps resisted or ignored checks by Congress, the
Fish and Wildlife Service, and private conservationist groups.(7)
Florida, the lowest southern state with the longest coastline, was (and remains) the
epicenter of re-engineered hydrology and runaway development. During the late-'60s and
early '70s, in a move astounding in its secrecy and state-corporate collusion, the Walt
Disney company bought miles of orange groves and wetlands near Orlando, established a
private government for its domain, and built Disney World, transforming a low, pastoral
landscape into a soaring tourist attraction, the biggest in the East, that supports a year-around population in sprawling suburbs. Northeast of Orlando, along the Intestate-95
corridor from Jacksonville past St. Augustine toward Daytona Beach, good drained
farmland is now under wholesale conversion to golf course-gated community
developments. This despite the shocking news, in 2001, that Florida's water supply is
compromised by pollution and limited in relation to population growth, which passed
fifteen millions in the 2000 Census, heading for at least twenty millions by '10.(8)
It is South Florida, however, that has become the most elevated of all southern
coastal places. Limestone foundations support impressive skylines of office towers and
multi-story condominiums from Palm Beach to Miami, Tampa-St. Petersburg to Naples.
Corps of Engineers-sanctioned canalization yields more and more (and expensive) "water-front" property, which is essentially fill from canal-digging. Truck and auto traffic-and air
pollution-render life hectic and dangerous to all but the sequestered wealthy. Gail
Fishman, a Miami native, writer, and conservationist, has moved permanently to
Tallahassee, declaring recently that she could no longer bear Dade County, where over-development had broken her heart. Carl Hiaasen, another Dade native, famously remains,
where his arch send-ups of South Floridian life appear in the Miami Herald. Hiaasen is also
author of a series of over-the-top "ecological" novels featuring a disaffected ex-governor,
now gone feral in the Everglades, and a mad young man obsessed with highway litterers.
Both characters are avenging nemeses not only to the publicly messy but to developers and
their shady politician-accomplices.(9)
What is called development in South Florida includes also a well-drained
agricultural empire. Below Miami, around Homestead and Florida City, down the eastern
border of Everglades National Park, endless fields of vegetables and citrus stretch out
between arrow-straight canals. Workers speak en español and live in colonias. Were the
air not so humid, and were the canals not carrying water away, rather than to, the
croplands, a visitor might mistake this surreal scene for the Imperial Valley at the bottom
of California. More disorienting-is this another aspect of the "post-modern"?-on my road
atlas this landscape is part of the Everglades, indicated not only by a printed label but the
cartographer's symbol for wetlands. So, too, is the rural countryside northwest of Miami,
up to Lake Okeechobee. A drive up US Route 27, from Miami's suburban fringe, reveals
not grass, standing water, or alligators, however, but forty miles of continuous sugar
plantations. Then, from the western shore of the Lake, down Florida Route 80 beside the
dredged and locked Caloosahatchee River toward Fort Myers, spread more miles and miles
of orange groves-also in territory designated Everglades. All this inland agricultural
gigantism, like the sprawling coastal built landscape, results from the twentieth century's
modern engineering, the disastrous drainage of most of the Everglades. Arguably the
recent multi-billion dollar plan to un-do large parts of the last century's engineering triumph
and restore natural hydrology, could be termed a profoundly post-modern dialogue with
the modern past-in this case, employment of techno-genius to condemn techno-genius. But
we must wait and see.(10) There is no such thing as perfect restoration of historical
landscapes, and the pressures of migration and greed are not to be underestimated.
Now move a short distance inland, to the Atlantic and Gulf coastal plains, to the
piney woods of legend and fact, an enormous southern subregion always rivaling
Appalachia in rustic poverty. With a few notable exceptions, little of this tidewater
landscape was under cultivation before the Civil War. Instead, entrepreneurs established
naval stores industries, especially turpentining, among towering stands of longleaf pines.
North Carolinians over-boxed their tree plantations and exposed their stands to insect
invasions. The longleafs were destroyed by about 1850; then the Carolinians moved on to
fresh trees in Georgia. When those were also exhausted, during the 1880s, the turpentiners
migrated to longleafs in northern Florida, Alabama, and westward. Farmers often replaced
the forest industrialists, but with poor prospects-tobacco being the great exception, peanuts
another-on sandy, acidic soils. State-sponsored industrial plants came and went during the
second half of the twentieth century. Nothing succeeded in stabilizing this poor country.
The young and ambitious left; others hung on in despair. The coastal plain was, simply, in
Linda Flowers' memorable eastern Carolina expression, "throwed away."(11)
In the meantime, however, and hardly visible at first, another sort of industrial
transformation was underway. During World War I an ambitious Swedish-born chemist
arrived in West Point, Virginia (east of Richmond) and established a mill to make woodpulp
from local loblolly pines. The pulp first went to an Ohio papermaker for finishing; but by
the mid-'20s the Swede's Chesapeake Corporation had become the pioneer papermaker of
the South. In 1936 the New York-based Union Bag and Paper Company built an
enormous paper mill in Savannah, signaling the real beginning of the national industry's
shift to the region. By 1950 the South produced 55 percent of U.S. wood pulp, by 1990,
71 percent. The great shift was by no means a natural consequence of regional advantage,
once the so-called "sap problem" of young southern pines was resolved, back in the '30s.
But rather, vast southern loblolly plantations and papermaking dominance signify a hard-won victory for fire suppression, the rationalization of supplies form hundreds of thousands
of small, private woodlot owners, of the "reform" of state and local tax policies, of tree
genetic engineering, and finally of the chemical management (not at all unlike conventional
agricultural industry) of loblolly monoculture.(12)
By the 1970s, then-a bit earlier in some places-a geographically enormous and
economically powerful paper "complex" had appeared. Denizens of (say) West Point and
Franklin, Virginia; Plymouth, North Carolina; Savannah and St. Marys, Georgia;
Jacksonville, Florida; or Bogalusa, Louisiana, needed no reminders of the complex's
existence. They see and smell mills' smoke; they live in the physical monotony of loblolly
culture, where sometimes for miles, all plants are one species, all the same size-unless they
drive past the ugly remains of a recent harvest. Nearly everyone else, I suspect, especially
drivers on I-95 (all the way from Fredericksburg, Virginia, to Jacksonsville) or I-75 below
Atlanta to Lake City, Florida, or I-10 from Jacksonville to Beaumont, assumes s/he travels
through "forests." Not so. Forests-even predominantly coniferous ones-are complex
ecosystems including many plant and animal species. Plantations are single-plant
constructions; they are effective deserts-except that my allusion gives deserts an
undeserved bad name. Increasingly since the 1940s-'50s chemical revolutions in
agriculture-and notwithstanding the Environmental Protection Administrations' banning
of the notorious pesticide, DDT, and the once-popular herbicide, 2-4-D--paper companies
and private "tree farmers" have employed countless tons of pesticides to kill insects judged
dangerous to loblollies, and stupendous quantities of herbicides (nowadays, Roundup) to
kill hardwood tree seedlings and other competitors with loblollies. A pine plantation, then
is nature grotesquely simplified, a monochromatic grid bearing little similarity to original
landscapes-unless the original were cotton fields. White oaks, for instance, are not
permitted, nor the stately longleaf, which is almost gone. Animal life is also impoverished.
Woodpeckers that normally feed upon insects that damage trees have been virtually
extinguished by pesticides, along with dozens of species of ground animals, worms, fish.(13)
I suggest to Midwestern vacationers headed south on the interstates that they try
to find a high prospect-maybe a bridge span-slow down, and admire the remarkable
geometry of pine plantations in the South. Think of Disney World (a probable destination,
anyway). Think, too, that the Orlando creations may last longer than the paper complex.
This because today there is a global oversupply of paper, and the American industry is in
flux once more. Chesapeake was taken over by Saint Laurent, a Canadian company, about
three years ago, and this year became part of yet another multinational. Most distressing
to northern hemisphere with the advantage of plantation "rotations" even shorter than the
fifteen years southern U.S. geneticists have achieved. The complex, conceivably, could
collapse-they will suffer at least a dramatic downsizing-in the near future.(14)
This must be the prognosis, too for another, newer, much smaller wood-products
industry, one that resembles agriculture not at all, and that produces no monochromatic
geometry: wood chips for export. The Pacific Northwest's timber businesses have blown
sawdust and chips into the holds of Japanese vessels at Coos Bay, Oregon, for years.
Southeasterners chipped pulp bolts at domestic paper mills. Then in 1985 the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway opened to navigation. At two billion dollars the most expensive
public work to date, the project was to enrich the impoverished counties along the
Alabama-Mississippi state line, from remote Tennessee hill country down to Mobile Bay.
After a decade, though, it became obvious that the Waterway would not replace or even
rival the Mississippi (not to mention railroads) in delivering midwestern commodities to the
Gulf. More than half of barge cargoes consisted of wood chips or wood-for-chipping that
had been harvested in adjacent counties-where the poverty rate, incidentally, had actually
risen by 1996.(15)
American corporations with familiar names-Weyerhaeuser, Scott Paper (now
merged with Kimberly-Clark)-sell the chips to the Japanese in Mobile for processing into
paper and composition board. But here the corporations do not practice monoculture on
plantations. Chip suppliers are small, simple-technology operators who buy the woody
cover on small private properties. Pine, oak, sweetgum, poplar, hickory-any species of any
size will do. All these are bush-hogged or bulldozed, dumped into large barrel-like
contraptions with spikes inside, that tear off bark and reduce sticks and logs to chips.
These are poured onto "Tenn-Tom" barges bound for Mobile. The government of
Alabama "advises" landowners to replant stripped plots; but so far as we know, few oblige,
and those who do replant pine, which grows to harvestable size years before deciduous
trees. Thus pine cover in the South expands yet further, beyond fall lines well into
upcountries. And meanwhile, family-sized sawmillers, backbone of many rural upcountry
communities, find themselves without mature hardwood to cut and sell.(16)
Elsewhere the coastal plain witnessed a horror more Spielbergian than Mobile's
mountains of yellow chips. During the '60s, a Duplin County, North Carolina, high school
vocational-agriculture teacher named Wendell Murphy decided to go into the pork
business. Expanding the model set by "integrators" in the poultry broiler business back in
the '40s, Murphy confined every-larger populations of pigs in an industrial system of
production that by the 1980s rendered small-scale hog-raising economically unfeasible.
Giant new slaughterhouses appeared along the lower reaches of the Cape Fear and Neuse
rivers to process the enormous bounty of Murphy Farms and other confinement operations.
By 1997 North Carolina (principally its eastern counties) rivaled Iowa as premier U.S. pork
producer. Murphy became "Boss Hog." And at the beginning of the new century North
Carolina surpassed Iowa.(17)
Industrial marvels in meat production are no less problematic than in plants.
Animals confined in crowded quarters from birth to near-death live in their own feces and
atmosphere and must be fed antibiotics. (They are also fed growth hormones to hasten
fattening and shorten life.) Swine are extraordinary in their production of wastes-on
average, relative to poundage, no less than twice the volume of humans. Millions of hogs'
feces and urine soon became disastrous in coastal Carolina, where the soil is porous and the
water table high. So-called "Lagoons" of wastes, whether lined or not-"Boss Hog" and
his legislative allies assured weak or no regulation-are prone to leach into groundwater,
creeks, rivers. Then during the 1990s, usually during storms, enormous lagoons burst and
flooded high-oxygen refuse into the Cape Fear, Neuse, and the New River (near
Jacksonville). Red tides appeared-not an unknown phenomenon. But these new tides
killed unprecedented numbers of fish, and watermen and -women and doctors reported
extraordinary human symptoms: lesions on hands and arms, and mental disorientation,
anxiety, hostility.(18)
The medical mystery presented itself, quite by accident, in a veterinarian's
laboratory fish tanks at North Carolina State University. Puzzled by persistent deaths of
his fishes, the vet called in a young aquatic biologist, recently arrived from her native
Midwest, JoAnn Burkholder. Ultimately (and painfully), Burkholder identified the "new"
red tide, a dynoflagellate she named Pfiesteria piscacida. (She and others also called it
"the cell from hell.") Pfiesteria apparently lie dormant on river and sound bottoms; then,
aroused by huge, sudden oxygenization-swine and/or chicken wastes, fertilizer runoff,
probably human sewerage, too-the cell changes shapes, becoming a dynoflagellate, and
attacks fish in a terrifying frenzy. Aquatic victims, dead or dying, emit fumes that sicken
humans. Burkholder soon found herself both a heroine and a villain-blessed deliverer to
fishery and recreational businesses, and evil despoiler of an important industry and of
economic development generally. This particular story has not ended in North Carolina.(19)
Nor elsewhere, for that matter. In 1997, scientists confirmed Pfiesteria in a
Pocomoke River, Maryland , red tide. Careless (or criminal) distribution of chicken wastes
from industrial scale broiler producers were the primary suspect. The appearance of
Pfiesteria in the already-crippled upper-Chesapeake fishery was, sad to say, only the latest
horror in this agribusiness's half-century history. Midwestern (principally) integrators had
first appeared in marginal, worn-out cotton country, during the '40s, as saviors of small
farmers searching for means of survival. Representing big grain millers, the integrators
offered contracts to rural landowners who would build feeder houses and accept delivery
of corporate-supplied biddies, feed, and medicines. In eight weeks biddies became broilers,
to be fetched and paid for by the integrators. Farmers hastily cleaned out the chicken
houses-presumably spreading wastes on their own cropfields-and accepted a new batch
of biddies. Chicken farmers' hard work over time actually grew harder and riskier, even
as technology and operational scale grew apace. Farmers discovered they had become in
effect sharecroppers of a new sort, utterly dependent upon and subject to the supervision
of their singular supplier-customers, who commanded that farmers indebt themselves for
ever-larger feeder houses, new medicines and hormones, automatic waterers, etc.
Sympathetic economists calculated farmers' effective labor value (i.e., "wages") as low as
$.75 per hour, during the mid-1970s and early '80s. The so-called chicken farm came to
signify something quite modern and simultaneously old-i.e., that much of the coastal and
upland rural South remained poor.(20)
Monetary poverty usually equates with environmental poverty. Both grow in a
world market for meat in which American producers understand that they compete not only
with subsidized European Union farmers and packers, but increasingly with the southern
hemisphere, where wages are a fraction of the northern hemisphere's, and environmental
regulations are slight or non-existent. Beginning in the 1960s, IBP (then Iowa Beef
Producers) began to grow at the expense of smaller, older companies such as Swift, to de-skill packing house jobs, and to recruit immigrant workers-the model for what was called
"New Breed" meatpacking by the '80s. The Midwest was innovator yet again; but just as
southern businesspeople had ultimately taken over industrial poultry, during the '90s they
became imperial in meats, generally. Don Tyson of Springdale, Arkansas, son of the
founder of Tyson Chicken, created Tyson Foods (with his son and heir, Johnny), by
aggressive growth and acquisition. In 1989 Tyson bought Holly Farms (for $1.5 billion)
and became the largest U.S. poultry producer/processor. Then in 2001, they won a bidding
war for IBP. The Tysons' competitor was Smithfield Foods, the prestigious ham curer of
Virginia, which is led by a native of Smithfield who lives in Manhattan. Smithfield itself had
just bought out "Boss Hog" Murphy's pork operations in North Carolina. A grim triumph
for the South, because both Tyson and Smithfield are notorious polluters of soil and water,
and brazen scofflaws. Tyson is by far the worse, being larger, and perennially in court
answering charges of recruiting and harboring child laborers and illegal immigrants-this
despite the Tysons' famously huge political contributions to Democrats and Republicans
alike.(21) Virginians ought take no pride in a tidewater corporation's new dominion in eastern
North Carolina; nor might southerners generally gloat over Arkansans' tainted reach into
the rural Midwest.
Finally the plantation heartlands-the red-clay piedmonts, black-land prairies, the
deltas. It was here, during the 1960s, that sharecropping ended and that plantations, after
generations of functional subdivision, were re-centralized in a new regime of mechanization
closely resembling big agriculture in the West. The early-1980s revival of cotton following
introduction of a new boll weevil pesticide seemed to signal a weird restoration of the Old
South. During the mid-'90s in Southampton County, Virginia, a black farm laborer named
Turner drove a cotton harvesting machine for a powerful white planter. Anything but
insurrectionists, Turner and other workers of Southampton and a few other counties in the
narrow tidewater landscape below the James and between the towns of Emporia (by I-95)
and Suffolk, picked so much cotton that year that much of the crop was spread upon
runways at the Franklin airport for weeks, waiting its turn at local gins. Below the Carolina
line, on down toward "Boss Hog's" domain, cotton also displaced tobacco and peanuts.
By Christmas-time each year, here and in other spots across the South, especially in Texas,
endless fields and roadsides are generously sprinkled with white-not snow, but cotton lint
escaped from harvesters and transport trucks.(22) Here is a familiar landscape, then, from
which representatives in Congress, allied with western Big Ag, produced the shameless farm
subsidy legislation of 2002.
More typically, however, the former plantation South is no longer recognizable as
such. Commodity agriculture of any specialty is largely abandoned-in the sprawling
Georgia lower piedmont, the old Natchez district, much of central and northern Louisiana,
and so on. Suburbs now sprawl over thousands of disappeared "Taras," and they are
shaded by ornamental trees where trees were before never permitted. Or more likely, old
cropfields' row-hills may be discovered deep within the shade of loblolly plantations. In the
Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, where cotton but especially corn, soybeans, and rice culture
survive, remnants of a formerly large but scattered farm-worker population are now re-centralized, like the plantations, themselves, in housing proximate to machinery sheds. Yet
even in the Delta most people are not employed in farming, but in a variety of industrial and
service jobs; and they live in along-the-highway "hamlets" (as the geographer Charles Aiken
terms such settlements), close to churches in clean country air.(23)
Or is there such a thing as clean "country" air in any part of the contemporary
South? Actually, not much. For many decades the tall stacks of midwestern electrical
power plants have sent sulfates, nitrates, and other particulate matter to the Northeast,
poisoning trees and water not only in the Adirondacks, but penetrating the lungs of
Pennsylvania farmers and Brooklyn pedestrians. More recently the vast expansion of power
capacity in the South, itself (as well as in the lower Midwest), has reduced a large subregion
called the "Mid-South" to the dubious distinction of the worst air in the nation. The
atmosphere over central and western Kentucky, Middle and East Tennessee, most of
western North Carolina, and most of the upper halves of Alabama and Georgia commonly
suffer greater than six micrograms per cubic meter of particulate matter from power
plants-compared with, say, zero-to-one microgram on average in the western half of the
U.S. (We do not address air pollution from autos and trucks here.) So now trees and water
in southern Appalachia follow the grim fate of the Adirondacks. There have been massive
tree die-offs in the mountains before, from disease epidemics, and there is now an epidemic
of human denial that TVA smokestacks might cause tree deaths in the Great Smokeys and
the Black Mountains over in North Carolina. We ought not have to choose between air-conditioning, Sub-Zero friggies, powerful computers and other work tools, and blast-away
stereos, on one hand, and "pristine" forests with neat camping facilities, on the other.(24) Our
latest new South is American, by God, and entitled. Such entitlement, and the national
government's captivity by energy interests, allow no foundation for optimism. Anyone
paying attention to southern landscapes must be the "eco-pessimist," the unhappy witness
to a literal and figurative leveling of the region, leveling meaning in nearly every sense
degradation.(25)
My own cherished trace of optimism, nonetheless, is rooted in the South's food
cultures, arguably the best and most distinctive in the nation. Southerners loved fresh local
produce and inspired cooking long before the founding of Chez Panisse and Southern
Living magazine. "Garden" to most southerners means corn, beans, squash, and tomatoes,
rather than azaleas, peonies, and roses-although the latter are not to be dismissed, for there
is truth in beauty, too. Suburbanized southerners, given sufficient lots, have vegetable
gardens. Virtually all rural southerners do; and from USDA Zone 8 (beginning southeastern
Virginia) southward, they are able to keep productive gardens all year, eating sweet greens
in winter, putting in potatoes in mid-March, other crops soon thereafter, and canning a
cornucopia every fall. Such a culture as this must grasp the elemental ecological concept
that how and what we eat elementally structures the landscapes in which we live.(26) Millions
of food-loving Southerners need simply to enlarge their private and local good works to
encompass a region, perhaps a country and a globe.
NOTES
1. Jere Longman, "Feisty and Fearless, Mathis Swaggers Onto World Stage," New York
Times (NE), Sunday Sports, 12 May 2002, 1 (epigraph), 4; Fred Hobson, The Southern
Writer in the Post-Modern World (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991).
2. I borrow the expression from Nan Elizabeth Woodruff's title for her forthcoming
book (Harvard University Press) on the "deltas" of Arkansas and Mississippi during the
interwar period. The NAACP, according to Woodruff, first employed "American
Congo" as descriptor of the region during the 1920s.
3. See Wilma A. Dunaway, The First American Frontier: Transition to Capitalism in
Southern Appalachia, 1700-1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1996); Mary Beth Pudup, Dwight B. Billings, and Altina L. Waller (eds), Appalachia in
the Making: The Mountain South in the Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1995); and on the near-end of mountain farming, Jack Temple
Kirby, Rural Worlds Lost: The American South, 1920-1960 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 1987), 80-113.
4. See A. Dwight Baldwin, Jr., "Rehabilitation of Land Stripped for Coal in
Ohio-Reclamation, Restoration, or Creation?" in Beyond Preservation: Restoring and
Inventing Landscapes, eds. A. Dwight Baldwin, Jr., Judith De Luce, and Carl Pletch
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 181-91.
5. See Michael Lipton (a West Virginia editor), "The Fight for the Soul of Coal
Country," New York Times (NE), 17 May 2002, A25. For useful overviews of
mountaintop removal and recent legal and administrative struggles, see Francis X.
Clines, "Judge Takes On Bush Administration on Strip Mining," ibid., 19 May 2002,
16; and Elizabeh Kolbert, "Comment: Bad Environments," The New Yorker, 20 May
2002, 35-36.
6. Congress passed "Clean Water" acts in 1960, 1965, 1972, and 1977. Most singular
references seem to refer to the 1972 law. See Samuel P. Hays, Beauty, Health, and
Permanence" Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955-1985 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1987), 53, 58, 78-80, 153, 162, 252, 324, 420, 466, 496,
508, 517.
7. Ibid., 148-51.
8. On the rise of Disney World see: Alan Bryman, Disney and his Worlds (London/New
York: Routledge, 1995). Observations on northeastern Florida, development, and
water are my own, (some based upon local newspaper-reading) during four visits, 2001-02. See also John Sayles' latest film, Sunshine State (2002), which depicts scheming
would-be developers of "Lincolnville" (actually the historically black American Beach),
in northeastern Florida.
9. Gail Fishman, Journeys Through Paradise: Pioneering Naturalists in the Southeast
(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), esp. 246; Carl Hiaasen, Stormy Weather
(New York: Warner Books, 1995), and Sick Puppy (New York: Warner Books, 1999).
On Florida (esp. its South) as new American mondo bizarro (replacing California), see:
Michael Paternite, "America in Extremis: How Florida became the new California," New
York Times Sunday Magazine, 21 April 2002: 28-35, 66, 74, 82.
10. Most of this paragraph reflects personal observation (in 2002) and local newspaper-reading, but see also: David McCally, The Everglades, An Environmental History
(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999), esp. 154-81; and Andrew C. Revkin,
"Stockpiling Water For a River of Grass: New Plan Redesigns Plumbing of Everglades,
New York Times (NE), 26 March 2002: "Science Times" D-1, 4.
11. See Robert Outland, "Another New South: Patterns of Continuity in the Southern
Naval Stores Industry" (PhD dissertation, Louisiana State University, 1999); Linda
Flowers, Throwed Away: Failures of Progress in Eastern North Carolina (Knoxville:
University of Tennessee Press, 1991).
12. Jack Temple Kirby, Poquosin: A Study of Rural Landscape and Society (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 197-235; but see esp. William Boyd,
"The Forest Is the Future? Industrial Forestry and the Southern Pulp and Paper
Complex," in The Second Wave: Southern Industrialization from the 1940s to the
1970s, ed. Philip Scranton (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001), 168-218.
13. "Complex" is Boyd's appropriate term. In Poquosin (also above) I suggest further
negatives, relating to human social classes and local political systems; but on loblolly
monoculture see also Janisse Ray, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood (Minneapolis:
Milkweed, 1999), which includes lists of extinct and endangered species in the Lower
South pine plantation belt.
14. On "short rotation" supplies in the southern hemisphere, see Boyd, "Forest Is the
Future?" 202.
15. See Jeffrey Stine, Mixing the Waters: Environment, Politics, and the Building of
the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway (Akron: University of Akron Press, 1993); but esp.
Eric Bates, "Exporting Southern Forests," Doubletake, 3 (Winter 1996): 88-95.
16. Ibid., esp. 90-93. On Pines' antebellum progress over deciduous forests (owing
esp. to farmers' fire culture), see Kirby, Poquosin, 95-125.
17. Michael D. Thompson, "High on the Hog: Swine as Culture and Commodity in
Eastern North Carolina" (PhD diss., Miami University, 2000), 165-95.
18. Ibid.; and esp. Rodney Barker, And the Waters Burned to Blood (New York: Simon
& Schuster, 1997).
19. Ibid. See also the "Science Times" profile of Burkholder: William J. Broad, "In a
Sealed Lab, A Warrior Against Pollution," New York Times (NE), 25 March 1997: B9-10.
20. On Pfiesteria in the Pocomoke, see John R. Wennersten, The Chesapeake: An
Environmental Biography (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 2001), 226-27. On
chicken farming, see Jack Temple Kirby, Rural Worlds Lost: The American South,
1920-1960 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 355-60; and
William Boyd, "The Real Subsumption of Nature? Science, Technology, and the
Industrialization of American Poultry Production," Technology & Culture (2002)
forthcoming.
21. Deborah Fink, Cutting into the Meatpacking Line: Workers and Change in the
Rural Midwest (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), on IBP (for
whom Fink, an anthropologist, worked, undercover); and David Barboza, "Chicken
Well Simmered in a Political Stew: Tyson Fosters Ties to Officials But Is Unable to
Avoid Scrutiny, " New York Times (NE), 01 January 2002: C-1, 8.
22. Personal observations plus those (and occasional press clippings) of one of my
sisters, who teaches school in Southampton County. But see also (on accelerating corn
culture and the 2002 farm subsidies law), Michael Pollan, "When a Crop Becomes
King," New York Times (NE), 19 July 2002, A21.
23. See Charles S. Aiken, The Cotton Plantation South since the Civil War (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), latter chapters.
24. See Katharine Q. Seelye, "Senators Plan Joint Hearings On Clean Air," New York
Times (NE), 09 January 2002: A-18; and on mountain tree deaths, Timothy Silver,
Mount Mitchell and the Blacks: An Environmental History (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, forthcoming).
25. A grimly thorough overview of not only the ecology of the South but the sociology
of writing southern environmental history, is Otis L. Graham, "Again the Backward
Region? Environmental History in and of the American South," Southern Cultures, 6
(Summer 2000): 50-72.
26. Of the huge literature on gardening and cooking in the South, see, e.g.: Diane
Spivey, The Peppers, Cracklings, and Knots of Wool Cookbook: The Global Migration
of African Cuisine (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999); and Edmund N. O'Rourke, Jr., and
Leon C. Standifer, Gardening in the Humid South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 2002).
