Blue Ridge Commons: Environmental Activism and Forest History in Western North Carolina by Kathryn Newfont (review)

“You put it in ‘wilderness’ & we’ll put it in ashes,” reads a handwritten sign in protest of legislation in the late 1970s proposing to restrict public access to federal lands (164). Such an ultimatum may seem an unlikely form of environmental activism, yet Kathryn Newfont uses oral history, regional archives, written histories, and federal records to trace the origins of such sentiments among rural residents of southern Appalachia, and she describes the mobilization of grassroots groups to defend Blue Ridge forests against clearcutting, petroleum extraction, and elite recreation—forces that threatened to destroy, overtake, or otherwise limit residents’ access to the lands they relied on for hunting, fishing, gathering, and logging. In the face of such threats and from their long history of using forests as a shared resource (or commons) arose “commons environmentalism,” a distinct form of environmentalism that, Newfont argues, deserves recognition within the larger context of the environmental movement in the United States (3).

Blue Ridge Commons: Environmental Activism and Forest History in Western North Carolina is an excellent resource for the environmental history of southern Appalachia that emphasizes the role of the commons, and is an engaging and deeply researched social history of the grassroots organizing that has protected this shared resource. To outline the impact of changes in forest ownership early in the twentieth century from small-scale private lots to large-scale federal tracts, Newfont draws primarily on United States Forest Service (USFS) records and correspondence; she later incorporates voices of her interview cohort to revisit an era of activism, primarily in the 1970s and 1980s, when residents fought to protect their access to public forestlands. Using short quotes from interviewees in conjunction with excerpts from newsletters, newspapers, scrapbooks, correspondence, and various archival collections, she recreates the full historical context of this era of commons environmentalism in Western North Carolina.

Newfont traces the roots of this activism to Blue Ridge developers who, throughout the Great Depression, forcibly displaced many rural residents during the construction of federal parks and projects. Citing her interviews, Newfont explains that “the trauma of these removals persisted for decades in local memory” (104). Residents viewed these projects, which offered little direct benefit to local people, largely as “federally funded pleasure grounds” for “wealthy outsiders,” which led in turn to a widespread distrust of federal agencies throughout the region (128). A generation later, against this backdrop of vivid memories of injustice, commons users eagerly exercised their right to provide input on decisions concerning the management of USFS lands. This right, awarded by the 1976 National Forest Management Act, ushered in a formal period of forest activism that began with opposition to a 1978 program that proposed applying wilderness designation to forests in Western North Carolina, thereby setting aside more lands to be used primarily by outsiders for recreation. Newfont recounts the debate, which played out publicly in the local press, and explains that “the idea of wilderness, emphasizing as it did an absence of people and of human work in the woods, failed to resonate with many longtime mountain residents” for whom the woods were a necessary part of daily life (252). Uniting around their belief—and practice—that forests were for use, rural residents successfully organized against the proposed wilderness designation program.

A decade later in 1989, a formal campaign emerged to inform and mobilize residents against misuse of forestlands by the USFS. Cut the Clearcutting!— spearheaded by the Western North Carolina Alliance—was fueled by citizens whose experience and firsthand knowledge of these forests differed from those of USFS foresters, who relied more on theoretical models than familiarity with the forest itself and who proposed clearcutting as a major component of forest management. Forester Walton Smith was “jolted into action” after reading the USFS proposal and led forestry training sessions that enabled citizen volunteers to gather data that disproved the USFS theories (253). Emphasizing the primacy of...