. C. Vann Woodward,American Counterpoint: Slavery and Racism in the North-South
Dialogue(Boston: Little, Brown, ), .
. See (for this and following paragraphs on the subject) Charles Reagan Wilson,
‘‘Mockingbird,’’ inEncyclopedia of Southern Culture, ed. Charles Reagan Wilson and
William Ferris (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), –; Donald
and Lillian Stokes,Stokes Field Guide to Birds (Eastern Region)(Boston: Little, Brown,
), (mockingbird), (white-throated sparrow); <www.mbr-pwrc.usgs.gov/id/
framlist/iid.html>; <www.lsjunction.com/bird.htm>; and <www.birdwatching
.com/stories/mockingbird.html>.
. See William Cronon’s marvelous essay, ‘‘The Trouble with Wilderness, or Getting
Back to the Wrong Nature,’’ inUncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Na-
ture, ed. William Cronon (New York: Norton, ), –.
. See Cronon’s introduction toUncommon Ground, esp. xvii.
. On Rawlings at Cross Creek and vicinity, seeSelected Letters of Marjorie Kinnan
Rawlings, ed. Gordon E. Bigelow and Laura V. Monti (Gainesville: University Press of
Florida, )—e.g., to Alfred S. Dashiell, March (pp. –), on the swamps as
‘‘cracker’’ frontier, but especially the memoirish nature essays in herCross Creek(New
York: Scribner, ).
. Much early writing in the field of environmental history followed a bipolar ‘‘man
vs. nature’’ narrative, but more recent works present humanity as natural within na-
ture and grant the nonhuman natural agency. See, e.g., the essays in William Cronon,
ed.,Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature(New York: Norton, ),
and A. Dwight Baldwin Jr., Judith De Luce, and Carl Pletch, eds.,Beyond Preservation:
Restoring and Inventing Landscapes(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ).
Also see Jack Temple Kirby,Poquosin: A Study of Rural Landscape and Society(Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), esp. –.
. I refer here to the effective overturning of the ‘‘stable ecosystem’’ ecological sci-
ence of especially Eugene P. Odum, which prevailed from the late s into the s,
by a new science of dynamic local ‘‘patches’’ and unpredictability. See S. T. A. Pickett
and P. S. White,The Ecology of Natural Disturbance and Patch Dynamics(Orlando: Aca-
demic Press, ), and historian Donald Worster’s summary essay, ‘‘Ecology of Order
and Chaos,’’Environmental History Review (Spring/Summer ): esp. –.
. This and the following paragraph on storms are based largely on Ted Steinberg,
Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America(New York: Oxford Uni-