A Natural History of the Central Appalachians by Steven L. Stephenson (review)

As the effect of humanity on the natural world has moved from local to regional to global, from self-repairing to barely reparable, it has become ever more important that historians understand the natural world and that scientists understand the human world. As the geologists say, we are now in the Anthropocene. Strictly speaking, that means that our human presence is now detectable in the record of the rocks. This is the conclusion of half a millennium of the expansion of human ability to change the natural world. Human action and nature are intimately linked.

This connection is seen in the growth of environmental history in recent decades, not only in the scholarly societies and journals dedicated to it, but also in its increasing presence in other histories. For those colleagues whose specialty is Appalachian history, Stephenson’s A Natural History of the Central Appalachians provides a ready reference, written with the detail needed for accuracy, but also with the clarity and energy that holds attention.

It may not be obvious to some historians, but biologists have a keen sense of the history of a place. Native American groups that lived and traveled in the Appalachians did not rely passively on the fruit of the land; they actively impacted and even managed that land in ways that affected plants, animals, and the environment. With the coming of European settlers, Native Americans fleeing westward, and African American slaves escaping to the mountains, whole suites of nonnative plants and animals arrived as baggage, along with different cultural norms and practices. Yet these new residents also interacted intensively with wildlife and plants in ways only dimly remembered now. Both historians and biologists know that the particular details of human-natural interactions in different times and places matter—to both the land and the people. Stephenson’s book provides biological perspective on changes in the land, the flora, and the fauna. He provides a knowledge base for historians who want to be clear about exact human-nature interactions.

Stephenson divides the book into sections that do not demand a detailed scientific background: six chapters on flora and four on animals other than us. While these chapters present mainly a snapshot of current plants and animals, they also include vignettes of human/natural perspective. “What all of this means,” he writes, “is that the geology of the Central Appalachian region has been a lot more dynamic since the arrival of the first Native Americans more than twelve thousand years ago than might be suggested by the seeming imperturbability of the landscape (apart from changes brought on by certain human activities). The geological record reveals abundant evidence that what we see today is very different from what would have been seen in the distant past (and sometimes the not-so-distant past)” (7–8).

Stephenson presents a capsule discussion of the extinction of large mammals during the time when humans first migrated into North America. He points out that overhunting of the mammoth and mastodon is likely only one cause of their extinction. The climate was changing especially quickly during this period. Habitats became fragmented, vegetation changed, and larger herbivorous mammals and the predators which fed on them declined (30–32). Only six large mammals persisted in the Central Appalachians at the time of European contact: eastern wood buffalo, eastern elk, white-tailed deer, black bear, gray wolf, and mountain lion. The last eastern buffalo was killed in West Virginia in 1825, the last elk about 1890, and the wolf and mountain lion declined thereafter. Any reported sightings today are likely abandoned pets. Deer and bear, of course, still exist. Their stories in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (not told here) offer classic opportunities for environmental history. Human-induced extinctions continue with the story of the passenger pigeon, but Stephenson takes the opportunity again to stress that habitat destruction (through deforestation for agriculture and timber) was also a major factor in its demise.

Forests (NB, forests of...