Years of Environmental Degradation and Reclamation in the Copper Basin, Tennessee

Bibliographic Data

ID9386451
AuthorsLouise E Mathews (corresponding author), Louise Mathews, Carol P Harden, Carol Harden
Year1999
Volume39
Issue1
Pages1-21
Publication date1999-05-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueSoutheastern geographer (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0038-366X • E-ISSN: 1549-6929
PublisherUniversity of North Carolina Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/sgo.1999.0008
OpenAlexW2017273940
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited1

The Copper Basin, Tennessee, is unique in the southeastern United States for the extent and persistence of its treeless landscape. Reclamation has been slow and costly, but the basin has finally lost the appearance of a desert and is now green again. Reviewing the environmental history of the Copper Basin since 1847, we find a treeless landscape to have resulted and persisted due to a set of interrelated human activities that included grazing, burning, building, and charcoal-production as well as mining and sulfuric-acid recovery. Reclamation efforts, chronicled in this paper, became increasingly successful after the 1970s as a result of new techniques and sheer effort. Reclamation focused primarily on reducing erosion and downstream sedimentation until recently, when other water quality issues have received increased attention. Changing land ownership in the basin threatens to reverse some of the changes achieved by reclamation projects

Archaeology · Charcoal · Environmental protection · Geography · Geomorphology · Hydrology (agriculture · Land reclamation · Sediment · Sedimentation · Structural basin · Water resource management · Archaeology and Natural History · Botany, Ecology, and Taxonomy Studies · Environmental Science · Geology · Soil erosion and sediment transport

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