TO THE Spanish sailors who, in the years before 1500, followed the north-flowing currents of the Florida Strait toward home, the land which they glimpsed (and considered part of Asia) must have seemed a mere line, a darkening of the horizon mists. Then as now, the sky over the green Gulf took a Himalayan form when squalls threatened. The rookeries of the Keys—gulls, herons, and terns—were in fuller voice then, and the seamen may have seen some animals, such as the West Indian seal, which have since become extinct or nearly so. Some seamen paused on the Keys...

THE HISTORY of the Western Hemisphere is one of separation from the Old World broken by intermittent rediscovery. Because there are penalties for prolonged isolation, the two great discoveries of which we have knowledge entailed ecological revolution.

The origin of the American Indian was long a mystery and in many respects remains one. He is a cousin of the Mongoloid peoples, the descendant of a common ancestor. His original home was in northeastern Siberia. He sprang, it would appear, from homogeneous stock, perhaps a few closely-related tribes of big-game hunters who preyed on the great fauna of the Pleistocene. (The...

EVEN AS the English settlers seeded the New World with their diseases, they began to transform the land and forests by their labor. They faced their new existence in a state of overwhelming weakness—physical, psychological, and economic. The voyage deprived them of strength, the strangeness of everything beset them like an enemy, and the land was recalcitrant about yielding the necessities of life and trade. They suffered terribly, and their experiences did not make them gentle or inclined to hesitate about the misuse of other peoples or the land. Like its virtues, the failings of the society they created...

ONE OF the Biblical metaphors in which our ancestors delighted was especially apt: a new earth had been given into their hands, with its creatures, trees, and waters. They were not all-powerful over it, and they were, as time went on, increasingly restrained by revived notions of stewardship. Nevertheless, they could not have failed to be struck by the upending of values which resulted from the crossing of the sea. In England labor had been abundant and land dear, men common and forests dwindling, privilege strong and animals of the chase protected. Englishmen ventured into their New World with all...

THE EXPANSION of the south across the Appalachians and the Mississippi River to the fringes of the high plains was one of the great American folk wanderings. Motivated by the longing for fresh and cheap land, and by obscurer urges, such as simple restlessness and the large human capacity for dissatisfaction, southerners completed their occupation of a region as large as western Europe. Despite the variety of the land—which contained regions of pine barrens and prairies, of hardwood forests and limey plateaus, of some of the world’s oldest mountains and a considerable part of its third longest river—and...

THE CONQUEST of the Southwest by white settlers and their black chattels impacted on every aspect of the environment. Diseases carried into the new regions took their familiar course with Indians and settlers alike. Hunters fell upon wild species with their customary vigor. Herds of cattle grazed the prairies and the open pine woods. Forests were cut, often merely to get them out of the way; the beginnings, though only the beginnings, of a commercial lumbering industry also appeared. Every part of the primeval landscape—woods, soil, and waterways, and the animals that used them—was altered by the demands...

FOR MANY southerners the Gilded Age was a hardscrabble time, and their environment suffered accordingly. Poverty is no friend to natural resources, which typically are devoured piecemeal to sustain existence. Poverty plus a worsening disease environment severely impaired the region’s human resources, as well, for the South’s endemic ills probably became more widespread as well as more peculiar in the generation when medicine was transformed by Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch. Its epidemic yellow fever, though visitations became rarer, remained a regional trademark.

What happened to the South’s natural wealth depended very largely upon the action of outsiders, who cut...

AS A theater of environmental disasters, the south of 1900 –1930 offered instructive dramas. The boll weevil infestation that spread continuously during the period and the great flood that occurred toward its end were cooperative ventures, jointly produced by man and nature. But growing human intervention in nature on a grand scale had the most varied practical consequences. During the same decades a bold though as yet unsuccessful attack was mounted on the region’s endemic ills, and a successful one against the last appearance of the epidemic killer yellow fever. A lively conservation movement began to offer promise, if as...

IF THE Depression decade had been merely a time of increased privation, it would rate little attention in any history of the South, including this one. Instead, for the section perhaps even more than for the nation, the decade proved to be the wellhead of remarkable changes in government and society. Of these changes, many were reinforced and some perverted by the war that followed.

Despite the fact that the Roosevelt administration lavished far more rhetoric than money upon the South’s problems, its varied and paradoxical programs helped to launch a many-sided revolution. Some New Deal policies represented a holding...

FOR SOUTHERNERS even more than for other americans, the post–World War II era was crowded by events. The New South system passed away as decisively if not as explosively as the Old South had a century before. Men and women who were middle-aged in the 1980s and 1990s were, like their great-grandparents, separated from their youth by more than years. The changes in the metaphorical landscape of culture were mirrored in the physical landscape, whose forms, more than ever before, were shaped by superabounding human power. Cottonfields changed to pastures or to woods; marshes to soybean fields or rolling...

FROM THE first advertisers of the wonders of Virginia, southerners have displayed the normal human urge to brag about their region. Sometimes their fellow Americans, entranced by the image of a warm place they have really known very little about, have joined them in undiscriminating praise—whenever they were not doing the opposite. A decade ago historian Charles P. Roland delivered a witty address on “The South, America’s Will-o’-the Wisp Eden,” pointing to the persistent promise and lagging performance of the region, which he interpreted in terms of its enduring educational backwardness and economic colonialism. The urge to overcelebrate the...