houses weatherproofed with newspaper, tired mules drawing antique
equipment over fields equally tired.
Arguably the best-known, most widely seen portrait of the South during
the s was a motion picture, a federally sponsored propaganda film on
behalf of themade in by West Virginia–born Pare Lorentz.The
Riverwas screened in Paramount theaters across the nation. The river of the
title was the Mississippi, which had been flooding for eons, but with mount-
ing volume and damage since the late nineteenth century. The flood
along the river below Memphis devastated the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta,
occasioned a gigantic relief effort, and led big planters fearful of losing
their sharecroppers virtually to imprison them atop remaining levees,
which had become islands. Another great flood came in March , just
as Lorentz was finishing filming.The Riveris elementally and passionately
conservationist. It is also ecological. Rivers will flood from time to time,
we are clearly warned, but when thousands of square miles of watershed—
in this case the upper Middle West and middle Appalachian chain—are
clear-cut of their forests, then runoff of rains mounts in volume and dis-
tant drainage systems carry extraordinary new excesses into the Ohio, the
Cumberland, the Tennessee, and then the Mississippi itself. Throughout
the vast valley, erosion had grown and spread, too, because below the clear-
cut places, increased populations of humans had cleared more land and
planted more cotton and corn. Whole farms, houses, and barns tilted into
or were consumed by gullies that had grown into eastern canyons. (Georgia
ultimately made a state park of a gigantic gully known as the Little Grand
Canyon.) The vast territorial connectedness of the system proved dramati-
cally what Lorentz’s sonorous narrator intoned over such scenes, the music
rising to signify tragedy: ‘‘Poor land makes poor people.’’^40
Many southerners, white and black, were publicly engaged in work to
restore equilibrium to the region’s people and landscapes. These included
progressive New Deal elected officials; federal, Soil Conservation Ser-
vice, and other agency employees; government foresters; county agricul-
tural and home demonstration agents; administrators and faculty at col-
leges and universities; many newspaper editors; and more. To me, though,
the exemplary engaged southerner of the time was a rumpled, bespec-
tacled sociology professor in Chapel Hill whose lifetime—–—cor-
responded to his beloved South’s long, grinding travail. This was Howard
Washington Odum, who happened also to be the father of the great ecosys-
tem ecologists Eugene P. and Howard T. Odum.
Howard W. was born to a line of small farmers in northern Georgia, near
avery
(avery)
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