| Book Review | Environmental History, 13.4

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 13.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Plowed Under: Agriculture and Environment in the Palouse. By Andrew P. Duffin. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2007. xv + 240 pp. Illustrations, maps, tables, notes, bibliography, and index. Cloth $30.00.

Andrew Duffin's history of agriculture in the Palouse, in the loess-hills of Washington State and Idaho, offers environmental historians an engagingly written account of the development of this region. Duffin portrays the Palouse as emblematic of industrial agriculture in the United States, complete with chemical-dependent, profit-oriented farmers and environmental destruction. This story of soil mining is astonishing, and Duffin's writing is brisk and evocative. Descriptions of farms losing between fifteen and one hundred tons of topsoil per acre boggle the mind—primarily because both laymen and farmers themselves have a hard time imagining that sort of volume of soil loss. What is most surprising about this story is that in spite of the evidence of erosion in the loess hills, farmers in the region chose to ignore it, because their crop yields remained high and their farms profitable.

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