Date: January 25, 2007
Special to The Well at MHC

Dr. Kathy Newfont on the Environmental Commons

The manuscript is a history of postwar environmental battles fought over the nearly one million acres of National Forest land in western North Carolina--the Pisgah and Nantahala National Forests. It explores how environmentalists and their opponents framed issues and built coalitions in the decades after passage of the 1964 Wilderness Act. The American environmental movement was one of the most important developments to shape U.S. history in the post-WWII period. Like other giants of the time—the Civil Rights Movement, for instance, or the Cold War—its long reach extended not only into law and politics, but also into economics, philosophy, and culture. Environmentalist thinkers troubled key American concepts such as “property” and “progress;” they questioned basic categories such as “nature” and “human.” In politics, the movement etched its mark into national, state, and local legislation, into legal briefs and court decisions, and into electoral contests at every level. It also carved into the very landscape of the nation, leaving its signature in the forests, plains, deserts, and wetlands, in the air, soil and water, and even among the animals, plants, and insects. Americans everywhere continue to feel its influence in countless ways. Diplomats negotiating international treaties walk in its shadow, and so do everyday Americans confronting empty soda bottles. Like other giants of the postwar period, the environmental movement and its legacy are still unfolding, still shaping politics and culture in the twenty-first century.

In spite of this enormous influence, however, we still know relatively little about the history of American environmentalism. Compared to the literature on the Cold War or the Civil Rights Movement, for instance, the literature on the environmental movement is remarkably thin.

My current book project, Commons Environmentalism: Forest Politics in Western North Carolina, aims to help fill this gap. The manuscript is a history of postwar environmental battles fought over the nearly one million acres of National Forest land in western North Carolina--the Pisgah and Nantahala National Forests. It explores how environmentalists and their opponents framed issues and built coalitions in the decades after passage of the 1964 Wilderness Act.

Late 1970s efforts to expand the federal wilderness system in the southern mountains, for instance, met with fierce local resistance. Yet just a few years later, before wilderness-battle dust had even settled, North Carolina's rural mountain residents organized to oppose petroleum exploration and clearcut timber harvesting in the national forests. At first glance it seems that mountain people did not know what they wanted for neighboring forests.

A closer look, however, reveals logic beneath this apparent paradox. The idea of wilderness seemed to many mountain residents elitist, economically unsound, and historically dishonest. But their rejection of wilderness environmentalism did not necessarily mean they were hostile to forest conservation. As a few local activists realized, some of the same cultural ground that had yielded opposition to wilderness designation could also produce support for other kinds of forest protection. Longtime mountain residents both rejected wilderness environmentalism and built a regional movement on their own powerful conservationist model. They practiced what I call "commons environmentalism."

The commons model was rooted in a nineteenth-century economy dependent on small-scale forest extraction (Civic Life students, think hogs in the woods!). It lived on, however, in traditions important to twentieth-century rural culture in the mountains--hunting, fishing, herb-gathering, and the like. Local residents often valued mountain forests as working commons harvest grounds, not as unspoiled wilderness. Policies that threatened to remove large tracts from commons use, whether for wilderness designation or for industrial development, met with determined resistance.

The book project grows out of my doctoral dissertation, which I completed at UNC-CH in 2001, just before I joined the faculty at Mars Hill College. A busy slate of responsibilities here at the college kept the project on a back burner in recent years. During the academic year I teach in the history department, the regional studies program, and the women’s studies program, and I am part of the LAA faculty. The past two summers have also been quite full for me, as I worked with a team from across campus to host workshops for community college faculty from across the nation. The sessions, entitled “Working the Woods: Economies and Cultures in the Blue Ridge Mountains, 1650-1950” were hosted by the college’s Liston B. Ramsey Center for Regional Studies. Funding for them came from the National Endowment for the Humanities’ “Landmarks of American History and Culture” program. Exploring three centuries of forest history in our region with colleagues from Mars Hill and around the country rekindled my interest in the book project.

Thanks to a teaching release the college granted me in the fall of 2006, I have now moved Commons Environmentalism to a front burner. I spent the fall revising and updating the manuscript and discussing publication options with academic presses. With college support I have received Appalachian College Association funding to continue research on the project this summer. My hope is that the work will deepen our understanding of American environmentalism, shed light on the history of our own Blue Ridge mountain woods, and help us to see not only trees but also forests with newly appreciative eyes.