Environmental History, American Studies, and the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta
In the following few pages, I wish to briefly describe the general characteristics of two
interdisciplinary academic fields – environmental history and American Studies –
and examine some connections between them.(1) I furthermore attempt to
demonstrate that the long-term environmental history of the Yazoo-Mississippi floodplain can
provide an ideal subject for a study applying the methodologies of these two fields.
Environmental history may be described as an attempt to study the interaction between
humans and nature in the past. Its aim is to deepen our understanding of how humans have been
influenced by their natural environment through time and, conversely, how they have affected
their surroundings and with what results. This relatively new field of historical study
rejects the traditional assumption that human experience has been exempt from natural
constraints or that the ecological consequences of past human activity can be ignored. In
comparison with traditional historiography, environmental history emphasizes the role of
humans as an integral part of their natural surroundings. Modern environmental history
strives for a fuller understanding of today's environmental issues and, ideally, provides
information for contemporary problem solving. What ecological models does history offer us?
What have been the adaptive and maladaptive human societies throughout history and how did
they function in relation to the natural environment? These questions require empirical
answers which environmental history can provide. Even as current environmental problems may
differ from former ones, understanding of the past events may prove
helpful.(2)
The most important questions within the field seem to be the different productive strategies
of the human societies, their ideological backgrounds, and their consequences and comparisons
across culture and place. What kind of human society and natural environment emerge as a result
of the interaction between these forces? Environmental history can be of great importance to
the general study of human-nature interaction by phenomenologically identifying various social,
economic, and ecological processes in the past and analytically separating relevant patterns
from each other. Successful pattern descriptions can identify recurring features of
socioecological dynamics and enable enlightened guesses on how they functioned. Detailed
description of past events furthermore forces environmental historians to draw analytical
distinctions and define criteria for the identification of environmental
change.(3)
In environmental historiography, the study of human-nature interaction often has to focus on
long-term change. Thus environmental history approaches what the French historian Fernand
Braudel called the history of long duration, or, histoire de la longue durée.
Environmental history is also spatially more flexible than traditional historical research;
natural entities, such as drainage basins or other geological formations, are often more
important than the boundaries created by humans, such as the borders of nation states or other
administrative units.(4)
It has recently been claimed that "bioregion" should be recognized as a precise and useful
term for environmental historians. Natural geographic systems, such as biotic and physiographic
provinces, biomes, and ecosystems, can constitute the appropriate setting for insightful
environmental histories of place.(5) Environmental historians should strive
for a precise spatial application of Braudel's histoire de la longue durée:
instead of making wide geographic generalizations in shallow time, deep time should be analyzed
in a single locality. Bioregional histories should therefore commence with geology, landform,
and climate history. The second basis for bioregional history, beyond ecological parameters, is
constituted by the diversity of human cultures across both space and time. Bioregional history
is therefore the story of different but successive cultures occupying the same space. As space
plus culture equals place, these cultures create their own succession of
places.(6)
During the last five hundred years, the increasing integration of local economies into the
world economy has greatly affected the relationship between human societies and their natural
surroundings. The fact that the exploitation of natural resources and the consumption of goods
manufactured from these resources often take place in a different part of the world, combined
with absentee ownership of production facilities, has caused ecological indifference that small
and locally controlled economic systems could hardly have accepted. Due to their widespread
temporal and spatial linkages, human-induced environmental changes of the past continue to
affect contemporary life on earth. Soil impoverishment, erosion, deforestation, and pollution
of air and water are among current environmental problems that have influenced human societies
for a long time.(7)
Current research in environmental history displays enormous diversity in its selection of
approaches and research subjects. It is, however, possible to identify some general orientations
within the discipline. Donald Worster has observed that there are three general levels on which
environmental history operates. There is nature itself and the human socioeconomic and
intellectual realms as they interact with the natural environment. Environmental historians can
intertwine these three levels in a myriad of ways.(8)
Environmental history therefore calls for an interdisciplinary approach, as conventional
methods of historical research are hardly sufficient, and traditional sources cannot provide
enough source material on environmental change. This interdisciplinarity largely results from
the extreme diversity of sources for environmental history. Much of the source materials
utilized by current environmental history has been available for generations, and current
research attempts to reorganize the data based on recent theoretical advancements:
interdisciplinary synthesis can often be achieved by combining existing information from
diverse disciplines in a new way.
Not surprisingly, the research topic tends to dictate the approach, source materials, and
research methods used. Therefore the source materials utilized in environmental history vary
from traditional written documents to data provided by modern science, such as pollen and
sediment studies, dendrochronological findings, and carbon datings. Methodologies employed by
the natural sciences can provide information on past environmental change, whether natural or
human-induced. For these reasons, environmental historians have to employ the findings and
methodologies of ecology, zoology, botany, geology, meteorology, and many other natural
sciences. Environmental historians should furthermore interpret the history of technology in a
new way: the development of technical equipment has had an enormous impact on the way humans
utilize natural resources. It can be argued that the skills of an environmental historian are
weighed by the researcher's degree of sophistication in interweaving the different approaches
and source materials. There is no one accepted paradigm for this task, but research on as many
levels as possible can, nevertheless, be regarded as the ideal for environmental history.
Given the interdisciplinary nature of environmental history as an academic discipline, it is
no coincidence that many practitioners of environmental history in the United States have been
American Studies scholars. One of the most established American Studies programs in the United
States, that of the University of Texas at Austin, today describes American Studies as an
interdisciplinary field concerned with the historical study of the cultures of the United
States and with the analysis of their contemporary status. American Studies initially focused
on defining concepts such as national identity and national character, and exploring dominant
archetypes and myths such as the frontier, the American dream, and rugged individualism. Over
the years, the field as expanded beyond this initial focus – and beyond its original
dependence on the traditional disciplines of history and literature – to encompass
everything from philosophy and art to landscape and material artifacts. Consequently, another
well-known graduate program today defines American Studies as "the multiplicity of institutional
and cultural forms and meanings involved in conceptualizing America."(9)
The Yazoo-Mississippi Delta,(10) or the floodplain between the Yazoo
and Mississippi Rivers in the northwestern corner of the present-day state of Mississippi,
offers – in my opinion – a perfect setting for a study utilizing an interdisciplinary
approach within the general framework of environmental history and American Studies. The Delta,
an area roughly the size of New Jersey or the Finnish administrative unit of Hämeen
lääni, experienced enormous environmental change during the period from the
Civil War to the New Deal. Agriculture, lumbering, and remaking of the floodplain hydrological
system transformed the landscape originally dominated by mature bottomland hardwood forest
beyond recognition. The long-term environmental history of the Delta, however, emerges as
immensely more complicated. Significant human impact on the floodplain goes back much further
than the late nineteenth century, and shows remarkable fluctuation even during the last 150
years.
My dissertation attempts to construct a bioregional history of the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta,
identifying the most significant patterns of environmental change on the floodplain since the
arrival of the first humans. The study approaches its subject, the history of human-induced
change in the region's natural environment, on many different levels and scales, and my task
has been to intertwine the three basic levels of environmental history – the natural,
socioeconomic and intellectual – in my examination of that change.
A wide range of primary sources, ranging from early travel literature, naturalists'
writings, governmental records and company archives to private letters and manuscripts, is
consulted for the reconstruction of socioecological change in the Delta. The modes of
production and subsistence economies of successive human societies on the floodplain are
examined, paying attention to the differences exhibited by Native American and Euro-American
cultures. In addition to chronicling changes in human subsistence and economic activities,
the study addresses ecological aspects of the region's changing land use patterns.
I argue that the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta can rightfully be described as an identifiable
bioregion, and therefore an appropriate setting for the study of interaction between humans
and nature in deep time. Braudel's concept of geographical time can be applied in the
environmental history of the Delta on two general levels: it provides time scales for
developments both in the natural and human spheres of history. For example, one clearly
identifiable natural formation, the late Holocene bottomland hardwood forest of the Delta,
has acted as a setting for two major civilizations: the Native American and Euro-American
cultural complexes. These two civilizations can conveniently be used to divide the
environmental history of the Delta into two larger ecohistorical periods that illustrate
socioecological change in a long historical perspective. This loose classification, however,
does not exclude the construction of more detailed analyses within or at the interface of the
two general ecohistorical periods.
The greatest emphasis of my examination of human-induced environmental change in the Delta
is on the developments of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By narrating the
extensive alteration of the natural environment by agricultural clearing, commercial logging
and levee building, and by analyzing its manifold socioecological consequences, I aim to shed
light on the following questions: how and why was this so-called last wilderness east of the
Mississippi River transformed from forest to field and by whom? How did the changes in the
natural environment affect the original and incoming biota of the region, human or non-human,
and how did the people involved in the vast environmental change perceive the process?
Throughout time, what choices concerning the utilization of natural resources were made
deliberately, and to what extent did inhabitants of the Delta act as agents of a more general
societal change?
Probably the most important question in assessing human-induced change in ecological systems
is whether the systems affected retain their resilience. Therefore, I have attempted to find
out whether the human-induced environmental change in the Delta has remained within bounds that
would enable the recovery of the original landscape in the future. And if not, when was the
resilience of the original bottomland hardwood forest complex destroyed?
The Yazoo-Mississippi Delta is an excellent setting for the examination of classic American
Studies topics such as the Frontier, the American Dream, and the ever-present questions of
class and race. In addition, the floodplain has figured prominently in the development of
indigenous American arts, such as the musical tradition known as the blues. Great American
authors and playwrights, among them William Faulkner, Eudora Welty and Tennessee Williams,
have furthermore located many of their works in the region. One can even claim that the
forests of the Delta have given us one of the best-known artifacts of the twentieth century
– the Teddy Bear. The captured black bear cub that Theodore Roosevelt refused to shoot in
1902, subsequently creating a legend – and an industry – belonged to the rapidly
declining Delta population of the species.
Despite its distinctively American features, the environmental history of the Delta is but
one – although extremely illustrative – example of the processes idiosyncratically
duplicated on a global scale. On a more general level of analysis, the factors that contributed
to the successful utilization of natural resources in the Delta are not unique to Mississippi,
Southern, or American history: exploitation of disadvantaged people and the natural environment
in a culture geared at continuous economic growth is an unavoidable theme in modern history.
Mikko Saikku is a Ph.D and the university lecturer of the North American studies
in the Renvall Institute for Area and Cultural Studies at the University of Helsinki,
Finland.
