Where There Are Mountains: An Environmental History of the Southern Appalachians (review)

This book covers the transformation of southern Appalachia from 1500 to the early twentieth century by dividing the process into periods of environmental and cultural change: the protohistoric native era, Spanish incursion, English-French-Cherokee commercial and political contact, white frontier settlement, antebellum industrial and manufacturing development, and commercial logging. This study departs from most regional historical treatments in the role that environmental forces take in shaping and directing the transformation of the encounters between the various ethnic representatives over time. The author's point of view is clear: "Human history is natural history" (201).

The book covers the southern Appalachian region as first delineated by John C. Campbell, The Southern Highlander and His Homeland (Lexington, 1969). Material is drawn from the Cumberland Plateau, the Ridge and Valley, and the Blue Ridge Mountains, thus spanning the geography from the New River in southwest Virginia through north Georgia and northeast Alabama.

Much of what was written about southern Appalachia through the mid-twentieth century was crude geographical determinism, in which the isolation and ruggedness of the mountains shaped the personality of its inhabitants. After World War II, political and economic explanations took precedence, but they portrayed individuals as mere pawns in ever-expanding market relations over which they had little or no control. Where There are Mountains is part of a growing trend in southern Appalachian scholarship to move away from static descriptions toward explanatory processes. Ethnohistory is considering the forces that created ethnicity in the early contact period (for example, Robbie Ethridge and Charles Hudson, The Transformation of the Southeastern Indians, 1540-1760 [Jackson, 2002]). Gender studies are focusing on how individual choice and expression create identity (for example, Mary Anglin, Women, Power, and Dissent in the Hills of Carolina [Urbana, 2002]). These works collectively challenge popular cultural stereotypes of Appalachia by revealing the complex and intricate historical and social diversity of the region.

Davis' analytical approach to environmental history rests on the work of Cronon, Crosby, Worster, and Merchant, but his conceptual approach is syncretism.¹ The key attribute of this analytical-conceptual approach to history is that the agency of individuals is blended in a middle ground where it collectively contributes to the overall process of change. Other examples from the region include John Otto, The Southern Frontiers, 1607-1860: The Agricultural Evolution of the Colonial and Antebellum South (New York, 1989) and James Axtell, The Indian's New South: Cultural Change in the Colonial Southeast (Baton Rouge, 1997).

Most history from a syncretic perspective dwells on social relationships. Davis, however, places the natural environment in the position of a "fulcrum upon which cultural identity rests" (210). His objective is to point out the heterogeneity of ethnic subsistence practices since 1500. Davis skillfully outlines for each time period how individual practices and knowledge about subsistence interact and thus transform the environment, which then serves as the template for the next set of interactions.