The Slain Wood: Papermaking and Its Environmental Consequences in the American South by William Boyd (review)

The title of William Boyd’s ambitious book, The Slain Wood: Papermaking and Its Environmental Consequences in the American South, offers a hint to readers about the analytical framework Boyd employs in telling the story of the pulp and paper industry. William Faulkner’s turn of phrase “the slain wood” likens the southern forest to an organic life-form, not human, but certainly alive and bearing witness to the region’s changing priorities, dreams, and disasters. This book is about the industrialization of nature and the myriad ways that technologies, natural systems, and social groups grow up together, emerging as something peculiar to a region and a historical moment. The “slaying” of the woods, and the environment, was but one of the consequences of this industrial growth.

Boyd traces the development of the southern pulp and paper industry during the twentieth century, exploring how the historical legacies of slavery, extractive agricultural methods, poverty, and minimal long-term investment in the land and people created a very troubled rural economy. Employing a wealth of primary materials, Boyd describes how the South became home to the majority of pulp and paper mills in America starting in the mid-1930s. By focusing the story on a set of challenges faced by the growing industry, Boyd is able to deeply explore some of the defining issues that explain both the industry’s successes and its painful failures.

The first issue was the challenge of “industrializing the southern forest,” seen as necessary to ensure the stability, efficiency, and productivity of the enterprise (p. 16). This transformation involved improving the management of the forest, regenerating the trees through systematic reforestation, and using science to improve the trees themselves. The goal here was to change forestry culture by treating the forest “as a crop rather than a mine” (p. 18). It was a process increasingly familiar to northern farmers, who were being pulled into an industrial logic themselves in the 1920s and 1930s.

The second issue concerned logging and tree procurement, a fascinating story of nearly invisible laborers and contractors who brought the trees to the mill. It is hard to overstate the danger, uncertainty, and marginality of this kind of labor, as well as the difficulty of organizing the work processes in any sort of rational way. The dominant form of organizing—contracting—managed to put the great bulk of financial and physical risk on the loggers and contractors themselves, leaving the mills with little formal responsibility for the workers and communities in which they were located. Again, the contract system was and is perniciously common in developing economies worldwide, so while the paper industry may not have been unique, it shared an approach with the most brutal labor practices anywhere.

The third issue centered on papermaking itself. Technological innovations in the paper industry required massive investments, which in turn drove the industry to overproduce paper on a regular basis. Bad management and fierce competition created what one termed “industrial insanity” by 1937 (p. 110). Surprisingly, unions found the mills welcoming, yet union-based racism precluded the full inclusion and promotion of most African American workers.

The final issue was the extremely intense growth of industrial pollution throughout the South, caused by the pulp and paper mills. Regional leaders had long believed that bad-smelling air and bad-tasting water were a small price to pay for prosperity, but by the 1960s these ills were impossible to ignore and, indeed, attracted national attention from legal and civil rights groups. In response, the industry became skilled in creating an appearance of cooperating with emerging regulatory practices while investing heavily in promoting challenges to the law. Although this situation did lead to several important scientific and medical developments, the damage to humans and the environment was devastating and long lasting. Boyd’s description of the cat and mouse game...