agriculture in the Delta went unchanged, and the cozy brotherhood of the
and corporate chemistry was unbroken.
tStill, there is now a middle-aged environmental movement, and it
dreams on with mad persistence. Beauty, health, and permanence must be
had. These brazenly utopian goals, according to one of the most insight-
ful American historians, Samuel P. Hays, drove post–World War II envi-
ronmentalism and environmental politics.^29 This ever-evolving movement
was much preoccupied both with conservation—wise use of natural re-
sources—and with preservation of wilderness, or a notion of natural wild-
ness where humans might visit but not live. Even preservation was instru-
mental to human need and happiness, though. High, remote, protected
mountains accumulate snow that melts and waters deserts below, permit-
ting agriculture and sprawling cities, for example, and wetland preserves,
salt- and freshwater, nurse fisheries while scrubbing and flushing wastes.
Meanwhile, beauty, health, and permanence inbuiltlandscapes—a mat-
ter not much formally considered by American environmentalists—surely
would be best represented in clean, secure building materials tastefully
rendered into form. Professor Hays, by coincidence, is himself a native
of a rich landscape with lovely indigenous architectural materials: Cory-
don, the first capital of Indiana, in the limestone hills of the state’s deep
south, a short commute nowadays (via I-) from Louisville. Not far north
of Corydon is Bedford, heart of the region’s great limestone quarries, which
for generations supplied the building blocks of capitols, courthouses, and
mansions but also modest housing for the middle classes. Southern Indi-
ana’s limestone is to be found in many places but most densely, elegantly,
near its own source and across the Ohio River in northern Kentucky. A
stone house is safe from wind and fire, a thing of beauty and a statement
of strength suggesting health, too. There are other sturdy building materi-
als in the South. Northern Georgia has granite. Florida floats upon a giant
mat of porous limestone but is famous for its soft coquina, also porous
and requiring plaster or stucco for waterproof construction. This seems a
shame—the covering of fossil shells that tell of old seas—but solid shelter
necessitates certain compromises.
Surely it is the sturdy brick, though, that for most southerners has sig-
nified security, freedom from most maintenance, stability in weather, and
something approaching permanence. Southerners made brick from native
clays and, later, clay and shale, too, as soon as their hold on the land seemed
permanent. There were a few brick houses by the late seventeenth century