ing ‘‘land ethic’’ of the Iowa-born game manager Aldo Leopold. If humans,
ever a part of natural systems, behave knowledgeably as stewards, then
earth might remain a harmonious home.
tThe creation of an ecological science of dynamic systems working
toward equilibrium was an international accomplishment with principal
American contributions originating in the Midwest. From the s, how-
ever, ecosystem ecology would mature and flourish, and—one may well ar-
gue—as asouthernconcept, earnestly refined and promoted by southern-
ers and practiced most ingeniously in the South. Doubtlessly serendipity
explains some part of such an odd turn of geography and genius. But the
southernization of ecology was propelled by historical situation and hu-
man self-consciousness of mission, too.
As already observed, for at least a long half-century, from about
through World War II, the South was the great, nagging, seemingly impos-
sible problem of the United States. Dixie was woefully out of equilibrium
—the ‘‘nation’s number-one economic problem,’’ as President Franklin
Roosevelt memorably declared in . He might have added ‘‘social,’’ ‘‘pub-
lic health,’’ and ‘‘ecological’’ to ‘‘economic.’’ By that late date the fragmented
plantation system was dissolving, the region’s post–Civil War farm tenure
system and gross maldistribution of wealth were an international scan-
dal, and legions of the poor and near-poor (white and black, but dispro-
portionately black) had already deserted the region. Among the legions
remaining, pellagra surged again, a parallel to (and perhaps a result of )
emerging mechanized agriculture. Poverty and illness were already old and
widespread in the South by the s. But in contemporary national pub-
lic awareness as well as in memory, southern ills became much more vivid
because of photography and popularized sociology.and (much
more famously) a temporary New Deal agency’s photographers practically
swarmed over the region, filing their documentary records of distress in re-
gional offices and at Washington. The government published many photos.
Some veterans of the New Deal project—Dorothea Lange being the best re-
membered—compiled coffee-table picture books with accompanying text.
Lange’s and her economist husband’s excellent work about displacement
and migration was titledAmerican Exodus. Commercial photographers and
writers took up the genre, most notoriously Margaret Bourke-White and her
husband, the best-selling novelist Erskine Caldwell. Whatever the quality
of such a torrent of documentary still photography, most of it is notable not
only for the human subjects but for their vernacular landscapes: shabby