given their cultures and technologies, to provide elemental necessities—
food, water, and shelter—and, whenever possible, delights. The getting of
all these, the last, especially, may involve methods we must call destruc-
tive and wasteful, although I must concede that human life without de-
light seems grim, indeed. So the ethical question about human behavior
upon landscapes, from the origins of civilization through tomorrow, may
well turn upon what really constitutes necessity, and especially the conse-
quences of accumulating delights. The query is suggested in the prologue,
lurks (at least) in all the chapters, and becomes the principal subject half-
way through the epilogue.
Parts of the text following may seem to some readers not ‘‘environmen-
tal’’ history at all. I hope that they will be patient. There are, for instance,
a few linear diversions—for example, attention to the arc and details of
Hernando de Soto’s barely credible expedition around ‘‘La Florida,’’ which
for a long time defined the South’s boundaries and variety, at least to the
Spanish. The objective in employing such a trope, yet again, is to frame the
Mississippian natives the Spanish encountered, not only culturally and po-
litically, but ecologically. There is much more nonlinear composition here,
however, that offers odd (perhaps) but substantial as well as poetic juxta-
positions. The famous friendship of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and Zora
Neale Hurston, for instance, was a remarkable social-ecological phenome-
non, given its chronology and location. But I hope readers will perceive that
Hurston’s and Rawlings’s personal harmony (however imperfect) parallels
and complements both women’s declared commitment to the notion of
equilibrium in nature, which must include human behavior appropriate to
nature’s harmony. Likewise my twining narratives of hunting and soldier-
ing, with intertwined biographies of Alvin York and Audie Murphy, suggest
much—so I must think—about the romantic ideal of subsistence gather-
ing and the industrial-scale horrors of killing during two world wars, the
latter making precedence for the industrial horrors of post–World War II
meat production.
Some readers, the academic in particular, will be interested in an au-
thor’s provenance, as it were—his intellectual inspirations and obligations.
These are (mostly) represented in the endnotes and occasionally named in
the text, but I am glad to acknowledge here powerful shoulders upon which
I gladly squat. First are historians of the South and of agriculture and rural
life who dominated my student and early professional days. Among these
C. Vann Woodward was and remains paramount, for his forthright present-
ism and principled commitment to the region, his profound grasp of irony,
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