| Book Review | Environmental History, 12.1

Book Review

Southern United States: An Environmental History. By Donald E. Davis, with Craig E. Colten, Megan Kate Nelson, Barbara L. Allen, and Mikko Saikku. Santa Barbara, CA.: ABC-CLIO, 2006. Nature and Human Societies Series, edited by Mark R. Stoll. xxii + 409 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth $85.00.
Southern United States: An Environmental History is the latest volume in the "Nature and Human Societies" series edited by Mark Stoll. Donald E. Davis is the lead author, although Craig Colten wrote the core narrative's final chapter and, as with other volumes in the series, there are case studies by three additional authors. Beyond that, the volume also has several ancillary sections, including a glossary of "Important People, Events, and Concepts," a "Chronology," and more than fifty pages of primary source "Documents." It is a busy and, frankly, confusing assemblage of material, presumably aimed at the undergraduate textbook market, but pedagogically inscrutable and with a cover price that will dissuade most from assigning it.	1
The chief virtue of the book is Davis's admirable attention to the early environmental history of what is now the U.S. South. Indeed, fully half of the historical narrative is devoted to events and trends that pre-date the arrival of British planters and African slaves. Davis includes chapters on the Pleistocene era and the earliest appearance of humans in the region, the Holocene era and the development of the Archaic and Woodland native cultures, and the spread of maize and Mississippian culture. These early chapters borrow heavily from historical ecology, anthropology, and archaeology for their insights, and they offer a thorough and useful introduction to what environmental historians often have quickly by-passed as "pre-history." Davis might have been more successful at integrating the insights of these disciplines into a more recognizable environmental history framework; sometimes these chapters read as if the findings of these other disciplines are self-evidently environmental history, when in fact they are driven by questions often quite different from the ones environmental historians tend to ask. Nonetheless, it is refreshing to see an author give over such a large proportion of a synthetic narrative to the pre-colonial era—and, in this case, to the Spanish colonial era as well, which Davis convincingly argues was a critical environmental watershed for the region.	2
The careful attention to the early environmental history of the South means, unfortunately, that the postcolonial treatment is rushed and scatter-shot. While Davis—and in the last chapter, Colten—hit most of the expected topics, there is little that is fresh here. That's too bad, because the subfield of southern environmental history is at a critical maturation point, and this volume might have done much more to isolate distinctive themes, chart new territory, and raise new questions for future research. Despite its many strong analyses, the second half of the historical narrative seems only roughed-in, framed but not finished.	3
After the narrative section, three fine case studies are appended: Megan Kate Nelson offers a historical journey through the Okefenokee Swamp; Barbara Allen charts the development of Cancer Alley and the rise of an environmental justice movement in Louisiana's corridor of chemical plants; and Mikko Saikku provides a history of the region's extinct and imperiled birds. Each of these case studies is quite brief, and while they provide intriguing glances at how individual scholars have approached southern environmental history topics, it is not at all clear why these particular case studies appear (as opposed to others) and how they fit the larger purpose of the volume. The same might be said of the documents section.	4
In sum, Southern United States: An Environmental History disappoints, less because of what the authors have contributed than because the unwieldy organizational structure of the volume stifles the full development of each of its components. While I admire Davis's treatment of the South's early environmental history, and even Colten's heroic effort to deal with the twentieth century in a single chapter, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries deserved twice as much space ; while each of the case studies was provocative in its own way, they left me wanting more, perhaps an entire volume of such case studies that would present a fuller picture of the region's environmental history and historiography; and the same might be said of the documents, which deserved more company as well. In trying to do many things, the volume does none of them particularly well.	5
Paul S. Sutter is associate professor of history at the University of Georgia and editor of the Environmental History and the American South book series, which is published by the University of Georgia Press.

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