Our history is inseparable from our environmental conditions; this is something important to remember as we move forward in a changing climate.
A quick look at enviromental history
Historians often look at rise
of slavery in the antebellum South as a product of economic realities in
conjunction with the right kind of social and cultural alchemy. But scholars
tend to ignore the critical role played by the land. The ecosystems of the
South dictated the sorts of agricultural endeavors available to Euro-Americans,
and thus set the climatic context for bond labor.
Nature shaped slavery, and the South’s peculiar
institution led to a catastrophic cycle of land mismanagement. As slavery
destroyed countless lives, it also destroyed arable soil throughout the South.
In response to the pressures of the market, planters in the South fixed on
single-crop agriculture, “that drove them on a reckless tear,” leaving
abandoned tracts of denuded landscape.
The
South mortgaged its ecological future to the price of cotton on the open
market. And in the years following the Civil War, the realities of the
environment continued to impact the political development of the South. For instance,
the economy, transformed through Reconstruction, remained tied to the land, and
this mandated a quasi-feudal system known as share-cropping.
Similarly,
environmental conditions led to the mass migration northward of a massive
southern work force, especially through the first fifty years of the 20th
Century. These laborers could no longer make a living from the land, and thus
the wages, though menial, of the northern industries beckoned.
Of
course, this brief sketch of the South is only a small glimpse at the impact of
environmental concerns on what we see as history. In future post, I’ll
illustrate more examples.
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