Let Us Now Praise Famous Gullies

Paul S. Sutter set out to write “about the relationship between soil erosion and conservation in the American South” in the spectacularly eroded cotton lands of southwest Georgia. Providence Canyon State Park “could be the nation's most ironic conservation area” (pp. xiii, 1). His book covers a lot of ground. It makes a compelling argument for the role of soil in human history, provides a corrective to simplistic stories Americans tell about southern history, and offers a provocative meditation on the limits to human agency. Following the violent expulsion of native Creek farmers, enslaved African Americans in the 1830s turned this hilly part of the southern piedmont into one of antebellum America's richest cotton counties. Almost immediately the lay of the land and the demands of cash cropping exposed the soil, and rain began to wash it away. Gashes reached more than a hundred feet deep. For 150 years, the strikingly beautiful, massively eroded gullies of Providence Canyon have served as evidence of the devastating wastefulness of plantation agriculture. But this well-known story of environmental folly is only the beginning of Sutter's subtle, sophisticated, and surprising history

Agency (philosophy · Agriculture · Archaeology · Art · Canyon · Cartography · Cash crop · Geography · Praise · Social science · Sociology · American Environmental and Regional History · Archaeology and Natural History · Botany, Ecology, and Taxonomy Studies · History