Natchez district, much of central and northern Louisiana, and other
stretches, commodity agriculture of any specialty is largely abandoned.
Pine plantations and (more likely) suburbs sprawl over thousands of dis-
appeared Taras. Within the paper complex’s conifers it is often possible to
find, between the straight rows of loblollies, the remains of other straight
rows, where corn and cotton once grew for generations of men and women.
And the suburbs’ shade-making ornamentals flourish where trees were pro-
hibited for eons of extensive agriculture. Out in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta,
where cotton but especially corn, soybeans, and rice cultures survive, rem-
nants of a formerly large but scattered farmworker population are now re-
centralized, like the plantations themselves, in housing proximate to ma-
chinery sheds. Yet even in the Delta most people are no longer employed
in farming but in a variety of industrial and service jobs, and they live in
along-the-highway hamlets (as the geographer Charles Aiken terms such
settlements) close to churches in clean country air.^14
Yet is there such a thing as clean country air in any part of the con-
temporary South? Actually, not much. For many decades the tall stacks of
midwestern electrical power plants have sent sulfates, nitrates, mercury,
and other particulate matter to the Northeast, not only poisoning trees and
water in the Adirondacks but penetrating the lungs of Pennsylvania farmers
and Brooklyn pedestrians. More recently the vast expansion of power ca-
pacity in the South itself (as well as in the lower Midwest) has conferred on a
large subregion called the mid-South the dubious distinction of having the
worst air in the nation. The atmosphere over central and western Kentucky,
middle and eastern Tennessee, most of western North Carolina, and most
of the upper halves of Alabama and Georgia commonly contains more than
six micrograms per cubic meter of particulate matter from power plants
—compared with, say, zero to one microgram on average in the western
half of the United States. (We do not address air pollution from autos and
trucks here.) So now trees and water in southern Appalachia suffer the same
grim fate as those resources in the Adirondacks. There have been massive
tree die-offs in the mountains before, from disease epidemics, and there is
now an epidemic of human denial thatsmokestacks might cause tree
deaths in the Great Smokies and the Black Mountains in North Carolina.
There, and along the Skyline Drive in Virginia, the Park Service conspires to
present evidence. Most effective, I think, are glassed-in displays at pull-offs
that used to present grand vistas. Dated photographs demonstrate clear,
thin air revealing those grand vistas, back in the day, alongside recent pic-