8 - The Myth of the Southern Soil Miner: Macrohistory, Agricultural Innovation, and Environmental Change

Summary

The differentiation of life is in part a matter of environmental adaptation, in part a question of cultural growth and diffusion. The origin and spread of ideas and skills is of course not to be thought of as taking place by any evolutionary sequence. There are no stages of culture; there are only inventions that make their way out into a wider world.

Carl O. Sauer, “Regional Reality in Economy,” Association of Pacific Coast Geographers' Yearbook 46 (1984): 45

When Conservationists of the 1930s wanted examples of destructive occupance on the American landscape, the American South provided them with their most dramatic horror stories. Photographs of worn-out soils, gullied fields, and streams choked with sediment offered graphic evidence of the region's environmental abuse. Regional histories, inspired by the unkind critiques of European visitors and native agrarian reformers, lent additional weight to an indictment of the South as an archetype of destructive occupance. These histories, and others since, told of over three centuries of chronic environmental exploitation; of an agrarian cycle of soil exhaustion and erosion, land abandonment, and frontier migration; and of an ecological myopia embedded within southern culture. This critique was unsparing and relentless, if not always consistent. It represented part of a larger critique of American society initiated earlier in the century by Progressives and reinvigorated by the Great Depression. Few regions were better suited to the Progressive critique. The South was filled with ambiguities and immense ironies; so too was Progressive thought.