conceptual limitations and nature’s uncomprehended mysteries. For how
can we know all, really? Meanwhile, we should not kill because we can, but
instead demonstrate respectful restraint.
tNeither a text nor a comprehensive survey nor a specialized monograph
is this book. Principally, my narratives attempt to foster understanding by
presenting the poetics, politics, and portions of the sciences of the human
relationship with the rest of nature in what is called the American South,
from earliest habitation to approximately the present. The South is Ameri-
can, to be sure, but different from other American regions and deserving
of such attention. Most of the South is hot and humid most of every year,
and well watered. Such a place has more flowers and weeds, more insect
life, exuberant avian activity, and more and more varied vipers as well as
nonpoisonous snakes, alligators, and a few crocodiles. There are and have
been more infectious diseases among all animals, including ourselves. As
in other American regions, the South’s humanity has been ever in flux—
Americans are rootless, migrating, commuting folks—so landscapes have
changed drastically from generation to generation, from overgrown dere-
lict settlements to rough new farming frontiers, from mature rural cultures
to abandonment (again) and reforestation, urbanization, suburbanization,
and so on. But because a great war was waged by millions of soldiers over
much of the South, its landscapes arguably suffered more extreme change
and different patterns of redevelopment than less cursed regions. During
the twentieth century, I shall suggest, too, southerners helped invent and
embraced a particular reformist version of scientific ecology whose thesis
and goals centered upon nature’s own system of self-correction, equilib-
rium, and human emulation of nature’s harmony. Finally, the South is dis-
tinct in the extreme brevity of southerners’ experience with densely built
landscapes and the urban life.
Humans (many of them named) are my principal actors, but I am inter-
ested in humans uponlandscapes—from the low and tropical to the mon-
tane and chilly. Landscapes have powers to invite, constrain, and occa-
sionally prohibit human occupance, even while ultimately most have been
susceptible to civilization. Nature’s own violent agency in the history of
the earth is demonstrated not only in the periodic wrecking by hurricane
and earthquake of Charleston, South Carolina, but steadier phenomena,
such as humidity, temperature, altitude, morphology and cover, the func-
tion (or malfunction) of wetlands, and the meanderings of rivers. Humans
nonetheless have ever shaped landscapes as best (or worst) they could,
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