New Books In Environmental Studies

Southern capitalists of the postbellum era have been called many things, but never conservationists. Until now. Environmental historian William D. Bryan has written a brilliantly disorienting reassessment of the South’s economic development in the period between the Civil War and the Great Depression. In The Price of Permanence: Nature and Business in the New South (University of Georgia Press, 2018), Bryan finds that in all corners of the region’s 800,000 square miles debates about reconstructing the South’s economy focused on how industries could derive profits from its natural resources in perpetuity. Boosters imagined a New South that would not exhaust its soils, denude its forests, empty its mines, or squander the potential of underappreciated resources. They spoke the language of conservation as enthusiastically as Teddy Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot, but the South’s new, “permanent” economy was to be constructed by private interests alone—a pursuit animated in part by the specter of federal interventio