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Blue Ridge Commons: Environmental Activism and Forest History in Western North Carolina (Environmental History and the American South Ser.)

Amazon.com Price:  $27.06 (as of 16/04/2019 04:53 PST- Details)

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Description

In the late twentieth century, residents of the Blue Ridge mountains in western North Carolina fiercely resisted certain environmental efforts, even at the same time as launching aggressive initiatives of their own. Kathryn Newfont examines the environmental history of this region over the course of three hundred years, identifying what she calls commons environmentalism―a cultural strain of conservation in American history that has gone in large part unexplored.

Efforts in the 1970s to expand federal wilderness areas in the Pisgah and Nantahala national forests generated strong opposition. For lots of mountain residents the idea of unspoiled wilderness appeared economically unsound, historically dishonest, and elitist. Newfont shows that local people’s sense of commons environmentalism required get right of entry to to the forests that they viewed as semipublic places for hunting, fishing, and working. Policies that got rid of large tracts from use were perceived as “enclosure” and resisted.

These battles continuously pitted industrialists against environmentalists. Newfont argues that the side that most effectively hitched its cause to local residents’ commons culture frequently won. A couple of perceptive activists realized that the similar cultural ground that yielded wilderness opposition could also produce ambitious protection efforts, such as Blue Ridge residents’ opposition to petroleum exploration and clearcut timber harvesting.

Incorporating deep archival work and years of interviews and conversations with Appalachian residents, Blue Ridge Commons reveals a tradition of people building robust forest protection movements on their own terms.

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