“Smarting under the scorching rays of the sun”: Fears of Desertification in the New South

• In Event: Deserts, Droughts, and Development

Abstract

In 1878, Charles Mohr, a botanist from Germany who would later work for the United States Census Bureau and the Department of Agriculture, bemoaned the timber exploitation that had only recently begun to wreak havoc across the southern landscape. Of particular concern was the loss of the longleaf pine across the southern coastal plain that ran from Virginia down to central Florida and eastern Texas. In line with the leading conservationists of the day, Mohr correlated forest cover with increased rainfall and believed that the felling of the longleaf would turn the lush southern forests into a scrape of arid, barren deserts. The pines created an “atmospheric ocean,” he explained, and “robbed of this protection, the hills and plains of the Gulf region, now blooming and clothed with the richest verdure, would be arid and parched, presenting as forbidding and austere an aspect as those of the denuded coasts of Africa along the Mediterranean Sea, devoid of productive power, and unfit for the habitation of civilized man, smarting under the scorching rays of the sun.”* This paper examines the late-nineteenth-century conversation amongst the first generation of American foresters, botanists, and other state officials concerning the degree to which timber exploitation led to desertification. It seeks to highlight the significant implications of the conservation movement on southern woodlands through an examination of nineteenth-century ideas of what is now known as anthropogenic climate change.

*Charles Mohr, “The Forests of Alabama, and Their Products” in Hand Book of Alabama: A Complete Index to the States; With a Geological Map and an Appendix of Useful Tables, ed. Saffold Berney, (Mobile: Mobile Register Print, 1878), 224.

Author

• Fraser Livingston, Mississippi State Universtiy