Scars on the Land
Reflections on Slavery in the American South and the Role of the Natural Environment
This month’s environmental history reading group’s book selection is Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South by David Silkenat. If you’re in Chattanooga and would like to attend in person we’d love to see you, details are available at the link. If you are reading this but live elsewhere and would like to participate—Dr. Silkenat will be giving a presentation via Zoom followed by group discussion—feel free to join in via this Zoom link, we start at 6:30 pm Eastern US time. Regardless, the following essay acts as a sort of review of the book and a reflection on themes opened up by it, I hope it’s helpful.
The literature on slavery in the American South is vast, and rightly so: few elements of our history have been as consequential, not just to the history of the South itself but to all of North America, and indeed the world. You cannot tell the story of the United States without serious attention to slavery, nor can you tell the story of modernity, industrialization, capitalism, and all the rest without attention to slavery. And, as this book demonstrates, you cannot tell the story of the Southern American environment, in all of its geographical and ecological complexity, without understanding the deep role the slavery (and its long aftermath) played. The reverse is also true, Silkenat argues: when we take the environmental settings and interactions within which slavery played out seriously, we will better understand the dynamics of that system and how people, enslaved and free, navigated and shaped it.
As we know from last month’s material, the environment of the American South had already been shaped by millennia of human interactions, aspects of which continued across the divide of European conquest and colonization. Enslaved Africans, as well as poor whites, continued to make use of the bounty of the forest, especially for their meat requirements, adding new creatures to the ecological mix, in particular the hog (the numbers of which would quickly exceed thirty to fifty…). Native peoples themselves, at least before large-scale removal in the 1830s, adapted to varying degrees many aspects of European agriculture and environmental interaction, including slavery, livestock ranging, and cash crops. But on the whole the story of European colonization was one of large-scale ecological change, with a depth and severity native peoples simply could not have managed had they wanted to. Much of this was driven, not so much by new technologies that were somehow exponentially more powerful than older native ones (axes and hoes might have been made of metal now but they were still hand-powered!), but by the new demands and possibilities of a globalized market economy, and by the availability of an ever growing army of enslaved labor. And so we see in Silkenat’s study dramatic discontinuities from the environmental history about which we learned last month; in discussion we can draw these contrasts out further hopefully.
In what follows, in lieu of a comprehensive reading guide, which I don’t think is really necessary given the clarity and thematic arrangement of this book, I will just point out a couple of things that especially caught my attention, and close with a more personal reflection and question for readers.
One of the things I had not fully appreciated prior to reading this book was the degree to which slavery reached deep into the Southern highland interior, whether in the form of enslaved miners digging for gold or acting as colliers and coal miners to feed the emerging iron industry. Nor had I really thought about the extent of ecological destruction those industries caused prior to the Civil War; the destruction of industrial logging and later strip mining, among other later nineteenth into twentieth century occurrences, are almost common knowledge, but this book opened my eyes to earlier but still significant examples.
Along similar lines, in part because my experience of the once great longleaf pine forest has mostly come in South Mississippi—which was not particularly touched by pre-Civil War industry—I had not appreciated how much of an impact industrial-scale tree tapping had upon the longleaf pines of the Atlantic Coastal Plain, or how vital slavery was to that work. That so much of the longleaf pine forest was devastated by extraction was something of a shock to me. What features of this story especially stood out to you? The role of water? Of climate and weather events? Relationships with animals? And how did all of these relationships work in terms of human agency, collective decisions, cultural norms, and so forth?
Two centuries of brutal enslaved labor had transformed the American South. The expanding slave frontier had caused a cascade of ecological change that left soils eroded, waterways polluted, and habitats denuded. Driven by the lash, enslaved African Americans had cut down forests, rerouted rivers, and mined toxic elements from the earth. Enslavers saw the environment as disposable, a resource that could be exploited and replaced as needed. Although some of them professed devotion to the land, their individual and collective choices exposed their environmental stewardship as a fraud, a willful self-deception that mirrored the paternalistic ethos they used to justify dominating and torturing the people they held in bondage. Committed to an economic and social order built on enslaved labor and racial superiority, most white Southerners cast their lots with the Confederacy, believing that only a war for independence could preserve their peculiar institution.
Upon reading a work like this we should reach the end and ask ourselves, “How does this history continue to matter? What should we do in light of this history in the present?” The answers we give will surely vary. At the very least, it is important to be aware of the continuing traces and effects of slavery in and upon the environment, both in a very literal sense—ecologies restructured, species introduced, landforms changed—and in harder to define sense, this presence of slavery and its cultural and social effects in our environmental imaginations, in the ways in which we relate to the land, to ideas about agriculture, and of course to one another. Something we will want to discuss in fact might be this question of long-term effects to our ecological, agricultural, and other forms of thinking and imagination, to what extent did slavery shape those attitudes, beliefs, and so forth, even into the present? How have the effects of the interplay of environment and slavery played out among white Southerners? Black Southerners? Or among people who are recent-comers to this region, whose personal memories, connections, and so forth do not go back in any way to this history yet have become part of the story in other ways?
When we think about environmental justice in the present, how should the history of slavery shape our responses? At a very practical level, for those of us engaged in agriculture, agroecological or otherwise, in the present, what responsibilities do we have in relation to the descendants of enslaved people, to the historical memories and traces of slavery upon the land, and so forth? Can we, white Southerners, black Southerners, Americans in general, heal the scars that linger?
For myself this is a particularly difficult yet unavoidable subject: I am the descendant of slaveowners, of people who helped to wear out the land east of the Appalachians and so pushed west once Alabama and Mississippi were “opened up” in the euphemism for the ethnic cleansing of the Muscogee Creek, Choctaw, and Chickasaw. I’ve visited the graves of my ancestors and of my ancestors’ slaves, lying in the same plot but the first marked by marble headstones, the latter by crumbling blood red friable Mississippi sandstone. The scars on the land and the scars upon the bodies of slaves tangle into my own bloodline, made my very existence possible. How I should grapple with that reality, what sort of responsibility or ownership or restitution I should undertake—these are things I’ve wrestled with most of my life, and I’d be lying if I said I’d found the final conclusive answer.
Well. There is much more for us to discuss, to reflect upon, to mourn, and much to do once we are equipped with this historical knowledge. I will close by saying that I am driven by the belief that a different South is possible, that the landscapes and ecologies that for centuries were used for injustice and exploitation can become themselves agents of justice and healing and reconciliation, and that in the process we can reverse many of the harms inflicted on the land itself. Historical knowledge is a powerful starting point, and there is much work yet to be done just on memorializing and remembering, even as we work together to write a different, better story, creating not new scars on the land but new verdant places of healing and life.
Hello and good evening, Jonathan,
I deeply appreciate your willingness to broach this subject. Many of us descended from Europeans owe our generational wealth and relative insulation from systemic hardship to a long and terrible history of oppression, economic exploitation, and outright terror—just as you allude to. My ancestors likely enslaved other human beings, and I, too, feel a responsibility to help make things right.
There were countless moments in history when greater justice could have been achieved for the Black diaspora scattered across Turtle Island in the wake of European colonization. The same forces that drove the transatlantic slave trade continue to animate our modern for-profit carceral systems. The same powers that demanded indentured servitude now clamor for AI and automation—not to liberate us from labor, but to access skill without granting skilled people access to wealth.
We must remember that 40 acres and a mule were promised to every formerly enslaved person—a promise that was never fulfilled. The South remained hostile to Reconstruction, and even now, white supremacy lingers like a ghost, with its flag still waved in defiance from a defeated state. We’ve yet to internalize the truth that white supremacy is not only morally bankrupt, but also a failed ideology. We still struggle to see non-Europeans as equals—our kin, our comrades.
There are many paths one could take when examining slavery’s enduring impact on the sociopolitical climate of the Southeastern United States. I, too, share the hope that the South can rise anew, as a dear friend once phrased it to me. But this resurrection must include us, not just me.
Moreover, the planter class didn’t simply steal the labor of enslaved Africans—they stole generations of knowledge: irrigation techniques, milling practices, seed-saving wisdom, and so much more. Europeans did not just kidnap “peasants.” They kidnapped skilled artisans, agronomists, metallurgists, and healers—dignified people who were then forced into dehumanizing conditions. Frankly, I question whether Europeans would have survived, much less thrived, without exploiting and appropriating Indigenous and African labor and cultural knowledge—an unacknowledged source of immense wealth.
It was a Black man, Edmond Albius, who discovered how to hand-pollinate vanilla orchids with a blade of grass—a critical innovation, since the orchid was being cultivated in Southeast Asia, far from the native bees of Mesoamerica. Or consider the story of Antoine, from Louisiana, who single-handedly cultivated the pecan varieties we know today. Pecan seeds produce variable fruit, but Antoine perfected grafting techniques that ensured consistency—every modern pecan tree in the South traces back to his work.
There are countless stories like these—stories that deserve the honor and visibility so long denied to them.
In short, this is a powerful and timely topic—not just from a standpoint of social and economic responsibility, but also because of the deep well of wisdom and resilience it reveals. I support this conversation wholeheartedly, and I’d be honored to collaborate in any capacity.
In solidarity,
– JM