Blue Ridge commons
Subtitle: environmental activism and forest history in western North Carolina
By: Kathryn Newfont
Series: Environmental history and the American South
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2012
Place of publication: Athens
Language: eng
Number of pages: 400
ISBN-13: 9780820341248; 9780820341255
Subjects: Politics and government; Forest conservation; Environmental conditions; Communal Natural resources; Environmentalism
Description: "In the late twentieth century, residents of the Blue Ridge mountains in western North Carolina fiercely resisted certain environmental efforts, even while launching aggressive initiatives of their own. Kathryn Newfont provides context for those events by examining the environmental history of this region over the course of three hundred years, identifying what she calls commons environmentalism--a cultural strain of conservation in American history that has gone largely unexplored. Efforts in the 1970s to expand federal wilderness areas in the Pisgah and Nantahala national forests generated strong opposition. For many mountain residents the idea of unspoiled wilderness seemed economically unsound, historically dishonest, and elitist. Newfont shows that local people's sense of commons environmentalism required access to the forests that they viewed as semipublic places for hunting, fishing, and working. Policies that removed large tracts from use were perceived as 'enclosure' and resisted. Incorporating deep archival work and years of interviews and conversations with Appalachian residents, Blue Ridge Commons reveals a tradition of people building robust forest protection movements on their own terms."--p. [4] of cover.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.