Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Environmental historians have long considered the post-1945 period as a turning point,
whereby technical conservationists who promoted wise use of natural resources gave way
to professional environmentalists who promoted beauty, health, and permanence. Domestic
and urban expatriates who lived part time in the post-1945 countryside have been singled
out as important contributors to the nascent environmental movement. Following this path
of urban-to-rural migration, middle-class suburban homeowners have also been considered
as the progenitors of modern environmentalism. In both interpretations, new arrivals in
the countryside were motivated to protect their bucolic rural or new suburban landscapes
from reckless and environmentally damaging development. As these part-time and suburb-
an pioneers watched the destruction outside their plate-glass windows, they turned to local,
state, and federal authorities to help alleviate the destructive cycles for which they were
partly responsible. Most of these narratives involved liberal, white citizen activists in the
mid-Atlantic and Northeast who leaned on scientific and political networks to resolve en-
vironmental problems, and these localized interest groups generated national environment-
al sensibilities and action. What about in the Southeast?
One limited regional comparison suggested that a general “weakness in environmental
interest” existed in the Southeast. Samuel Hays attributed this sentiment “to the region's
agricultural roots, the persistence of rural attitudes and institutions, and the slower growth
of urban populations with newer interests and values.” Only by the 1980s did the citizen
engagement in environmental issues look like the engagement found in New England, the
ors involved in the Trotters Shoals and subsequent water and energy episodes demonstrate
why conservationists and environmentalists in the Savannah River valley Sun Belt coun-
tryside did not wait until the 1970s or 1980s to begin balancing appropriate economic de-
velopment, water quality, and environmental protection.
The New South and Sun Belt eras have a rich conservation and environmental political
history. For example, Georgians led grassroots opposition to Georgia Power's Tallulah
lunteers organized one of dozens of Appalachian Trail clubs (1930) to complete the na-
tional trail, and the idea for the Wilderness Society was hatched outside Knoxville, Ten-
ie Carr campaigned for, respectively, restoration of the Everglades, sustainable longleaf
pine ecosystems, the conservation biology field, and the defeat of the Cross Florida Barge
and others repeatedly linked human behavior with environmental problems and solutions.
Following in their father's footsteps, ecologists Eugene P. and Howard T. Odum studied
old agricultural fields and freshwater springs in the 1950s before helping translate ecosys-
