beginning in West Point, Virginia, early in the twentieth century, was pulp
and paper mills. They persist. (See more of them below.) Then came the in-
dustrialization of chicken and pork production, a disaster for workers and
for watercourses, land, and air. The tidewaters are cursed, their people—
recalling Linda Flowers’s eastern Carolina-ism—‘‘throwed away.’’^10
Meanwhile, in these same sandy, piney landscapes—and indeed, into
the piedmonts here and there—piney-ness itself was transformed after
about , as an enormous and economically powerful paper complex
took shape. Denizens of (say) West Point and Franklin, Virginia; Plymouth,
North Carolina; Georgetown, South Carolina; Savannah and St. Marys,
Georgia; Jacksonville and Palatka, Florida; or Bogalusa, Louisiana, needed
no reminders of the complex’s existence. They see and smell the smoke
from the mills, and they live in the physical monotony of loblolly culture,
where sometimes for miles all plants are one species and all the same size
—unless they drive past the ugly remains of a recent harvest. Nearly every-
one else, I suspect, especially drivers on I- (all the way from Fredericks-
burg, Virginia, to Jacksonville) or I- below Atlanta to Lake City, Florida,
or I- from Jacksonville to Beaumont, assumes they travel through forests.
Not so. Forests—even predominantly coniferous ones—are complex eco-
systems including many plant and animal species. Plantations are single-
plant constructions; they are effective deserts—except (again) my allusion
gives deserts an undeserved bad name. Even after the banning of the notori-
ous pesticideand the harsh herbicide --during the early s,
the paper complex’s vast loblolly plantations remain absolutely chemically
dependent. Other pesticides assault pine pests, and Roundup—the same
ubiquitous weed-killer of the suburbs—eliminates deciduous competition
with conifers. A pine plantation, then, is nature grotesquely simplified, a
monochromatic grid bearing little similarity to original landscapes—un-
less the original were (somehow) a corn or cotton field. White oaks, for in-
stance, are not permitted, and neither is the stately longleaf, which is nearly
gone. Animal life is also impoverished. Woodpeckers that normally feed on
insects that damage trees have been reduced if not nearly eliminated by
pesticides, along with dozens of species of ground animals, worms, fish.^11
Automobile tourists bound for (say) Disney World who dread the hours
spent among the South’s endless pines might take heart, though. Disney
World is likely to outlast the paper complex and its landed dominion be-
cause today there is a global oversupply of paper, and the American indus-
try is in flux once more. West Point’s pioneer mill has passed out of local
ownership, changing hands twice in the past decade. Other takeovers and