Southern Appalachia in Conservation History

This is adapted from my presentation at the 10th Rooted in The Mountains Symposium, whose theme was “Giduwagi — Appalachian Historical Ecology.” Giduwagi is a Cherokee place name for their ancestral home in the mountains of Western North Carolina.

Whether we speak of environmentalism, conservation, preservation, biodiversity, wilderness, or sustainability, the concepts we use to think about our tangled relationship with the rest of nature are themselves the product of our prior experience with nature. We conceptualize and address our environmental problems with the intellectual resources inherited from our previous attempts to conceptualize and solve our environmental problems. The shifts and turns of our developing attitudes, beliefs and ideas are full of evolutionary drama. Any organism may struggle to construct a niche in a shifting environment — homosapiens differs only in that our nichespace has ineluctably intellectual dimensions. Other speakers here have given you tours through the geological, biological and social histories of Giduwagi. I have taken the intellectual history of preservation as the major terrain for my academic explorations, and I’d like to take you on a little ride through that landscape as it relates to this one.

Our southern Appalachian region has often played a significant role in the development of our environmental attitudes. And I think it is important that we treat the land as an active participant in history, for landscapes work on people as surely as the people work on the…