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The Slain Wood: Papermaking and Its Environmental Consequences in the American South
Bill Buford (Ed.)
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Description for The Slain Wood: Papermaking and Its Environmental Consequences in the American South
Hardback. It shows how the industry's massive pollution loads significantly disrupted local environments and communities, leading to a long struggle to regulate and control that pollution. Series: Studies in Industry and Society. Num Pages: 376 pages, 20, 7 black & white illustrations, 4 maps, 9 graphs. BIC Classification: HBJK; PDX; RN. Category: (P) Professional & Vocational. Dimension: 238 x 162 x 30. Weight in Grams: 642.
When the paper industry moved into the South in the 1930s, it confronted a region in the midst of an economic and environmental crisis. Entrenched poverty, stunted labor markets, vast stretches of cutover lands, and severe soil erosion prevailed across the southern states. By the middle of the twentieth century, however, pine trees had become the region's number one cash crop, and the South dominated national and international production of pulp and paper based on the intensive cultivation of timber. In The Slain Wood, William Boyd chronicles the dramatic growth of the pulp and paper industry in the American South during the twentieth century and the social and environmental changes that accompanied it. Drawing on extensive interviews and historical research, he tells the fascinating story of one of the region's most important but understudied industries. The Slain Wood reveals how a thoroughly industrialized forest was created out of a degraded landscape, uncovers the ways in which firms tapped into informal labor markets and existing inequalities of race and class to fashion a system for delivering wood to the mills, investigates the challenges of managing large paper making complexes, and details the ways in which mill managers and unions discriminated against black workers. It also shows how the industry's massive pollution loads significantly disrupted local environments and communities, leading to a long struggle to regulate and control that pollution.
Product Details
Format
Hardback
Publication date
2015
Publisher
Johns Hopkins University Press
Condition
New
Series
Studies in Industry and Society
Number of Pages
376
Place of Publication
Baltimore, MD, United States
ISBN
9781421418780
SKU
V9781421418780
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 15 to 20 working days
Ref
99-50
About Bill Buford (Ed.)
William Boyd is an associate professor of law at the University of Colorado-Boulder.
Reviews for The Slain Wood: Papermaking and Its Environmental Consequences in the American South
This excellent book contributes most robustly to economic and environmental history, but it will be read profitably by scholars interested in political change, regulatory regimes, and race and labor...[an] insightful analysis of the paper industry's important role in the twentieth-century South. The trees slain for this book sacrificed their well-engineered lives for a good cause. American Historical Review Boyd provides a comprehensive and scholarly analysis of a vital industry in an era of substantive regional change. Choice ... Tremendous value as a legal history situated within broader political, historical, economic, and social context. North Carolina Historical Review Slain Wood is an important contribution to promoting understanding of the transformations borne by the Southern regional landscape in the twentieth century. The work is carefully researched and critically related, with a distinctive emphasis on the legal framework guiding transformation of Southern papermaking. AAG Review of Books William Boyd bring such analysis to the American South in a significant contribution to both southern and environmental history... this book is a welcome cross-disciplinary bridge between economic, legal, and environmental history that successfully explains the fundamental historical importance of this understudied industry H-Net Reviews This is a magisterial study of a relatively poorly understood world. To tell it well, Boyd takes seriously the many historiographical layers of the story, using business, technological, labor, legal, and environmental history approaches. The synthesis of these overlapping tales is a huge achievement and his beautiful writing make the book a powerful read. It could well stand as a model for future industrial-environmental historians. Journal of Southern History Overall, Boyd illustrates the double-edged sword that is economic development; its jobs and prosperity often inflict a devastating impact on the non-human and human environments. Boyd makes plain that "the smell of prosperity" is an odor whose costs should be weighed more carefully than Governor Wallace's glib analysis suggests. Environmental History