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Using the lens of environmental history, William D. Bryan provides a sweeping reinterpretation of the post-Civil War South by framing the New South as a struggle over environmental stewardship. For more than six decades, scholars have caricatured southerners as so desperate for economic growth that they rapaciously consumed the region’s abundant natural resources. Yet business leaders and public officials did not see profit and environmental quality as mutually exclusive goals, and they promoted methods of conserving resources that they thought would ensure long-term economic growth. Southerners called this idea “permanence.” But permanence was a contested concept, and these businesspeople clashed with other stakeholders as they struggled to find new ways of using valuable resources. The Price of Permanence shows how these struggles indelibly shaped the modern South.
Bryan writes the region into the national conservation movement for the first time and shows that business leaders played a key role shaping the ideals of American conservationists. This book also dismantles one of the most persistent caricatures of southerners: that they had little interest in environmental quality. Conservation provided white elites with a tool for social control, and this is the first work to show how struggles over resource policy fueled Jim Crow. The ideology of “permanence” protected some resources but did not prevent degradation of the environment overall, and The Price of Permanence ultimately uses lessons from the New South to reflect on sustainability today.
Bryan writes the region into the national conservation movement for the first time and shows that business leaders played a key role shaping the ideals of American conservationists. This book also dismantles one of the most persistent caricatures of southerners: that they had little interest in environmental quality. Conservation provided white elites with a tool for social control, and this is the first work to show how struggles over resource policy fueled Jim Crow. The ideology of “permanence” protected some resources but did not prevent degradation of the environment overall, and The Price of Permanence ultimately uses lessons from the New South to reflect on sustainability today.
“A brilliantly disorienting reassessment of the South’s economic development in the period between the Civil War and the Great Depression...Bryan has not only given us a more convincing, nuanced, and unified account of the New South, he also offers a cautionary tale of the dangers of a politics of sustainability too narrowly shaped around profits and growth.”
-Brian Hamilton, University of Wisconsin–Madison "Exploring the different approaches that southerners took to conserve resources for their long-term use, this well-researched work moves beyond stereotypical images of rapacious, short-sighted developers willing to pay any ecological cost in pursuit of economic growth to a more nuanced account. In the process, Bryan makes a significant contribution to both environmental and southern history." -Andrew T. Patrick, Centre College “'The best environmental history takes a traditional historical narrative and turns it slightly so that readers might see the past from a slightly new point of view' ... And that is precisely what William Bryan’s book provides: an innovative twist on the traditional narrative of the environmental history of the New South. From the get-go, Bryan's book diverges from the well-beaten path of presenting postbellum recovery as focused on rebuilding the exploitive plantation macrosystem of the previous era, and instead offers a new version of the New South that utilizes environmental concerns to focus forward instead of backward." -Liz Skilton, University of Louisiana at Lafayette "a lucid, tightly written corrective to past historians' depictions of industrialization in the so-called New South...Bryan's study thus conjoins environmental and southern histories in a nuanced depiction of how a southern, business-minded version of conservationist ideals was deployed, for better and for worse." -Caroline Grego, Queens University of Charlotte "This environmental and business history argues that permanence is both part of and distinct from the concurrent development of conservation...Ultimately, Bryan’s book is a significant addition to and revision of both conservation and New South historiographies by intertwining those two seemingly disparate threads of historical knowledge and challenging narratives that southern economic growth in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was unconcerned with environmental impact...The Price of Permanence convincingly demonstrates that environmental concern was an important and misunderstood part of the New South Creed." -Trevor Egerton, University of Colorado, Boulder |