Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South by David Silkenat

Abstract

Reviewed by: Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South by David Silkenat Kevin Grove Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South David Silkenat. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. I and 260 pp., figs, notes, bibliog, index. $35.00 hardcover (ISBN 9780197564226) The field of environmental history has often played an influential role in the development of geographic research on human–environment relations. William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis and Changes in the Land, for example, helped contour geographic debates on socio-ecological hybridity and the ontological politics of nature during the tumultuous “science wars” of the 1990s and early 2000s. David Silkenat’s Scars on the Land holds similar promise today. Silkenat’s text excavates the environmental impacts of slavery on landscapes and ecologies of the US South, and offers an unwavering emphasis on the need to link environmental destruction to the dehumanizing horrors of chattel slavery, white supremacist ideologies, and opaque practices and landscapes of Black and Indigenous resistance. Much like Cronon’s work three decades earlier, Scars on the Land comes along at a crucial conjuncture in geography — a moment where the broader impact, utility and value of social science and humanities research is being contested and reconfigured. As is well known, calls for a new social contract between science and society have proliferated since the early 2000s, with the demand that science contribute solutions to emergent and pressing social needs. Geography is not immune to these debates. As recent efforts to reorganize the National Science Foundation’s Human-Environment and Geographical Directorate illustrate, some disciplinary colleagues are all too ready to dismiss qualitative and critical geographic research as “unfit” for NSF support on grounds that it does not contribute to solutions-oriented interdisciplinary collaborations (see Grove and Rickards 2022). Given how these directorate changes come on the heels of long overdue interest in Black and Indigenous geographies, the current moment presents geography with a unique problem. Rather than demonstrating the interconnections between nature and society, the challenge is now to excavate how the social production of nature works through the production of racialized difference; and to do so in a way that can speak to novel demands for the social utility of science. Scars on the Land illustrates how interdisciplinary collaborations across environmental history and geography can address both problems. [End Page 215] To be clear, Scars on the Land is primarily written for an audience of historians. As Silkenat explains in the introductory chapter, the text aims to bridge disconnected debates on the social and environmental histories of the American South within the field of southern US history. While the text admirably succeeds in this regard, it perhaps bypasses some opportunities to build bridges with work in other disciplines, particularly research in Black geographies and the geography of the US South (both of which feature prominently in this journal). Its core arguments on the environmental impacts of slavery will resonate strongly with scholars working in fields such as Black ecology and Black geographies, which situate socio-ecological problems in the long history of anti-Black racism and the life-destroying landscapes it produces (Pulido 2002, Wright 2018, Moulton and Salo 2022). Nonetheless, there is much to be gained from a close engagement with Silkenat’s arguments. One major contribution Scars on the Land offers is the robust array of archival materials and secondary sources Silkenat draws on to develop an environmental history of slavery in the US South. Each chapter focuses on a specific environmental attribute, and deftly draws on troves of historical documents to bring to life fragile southern environments, the violent logic of plantation ecology — specifically, its treatment of land and enslaved labor as dispensable and given to free, instrumental use — and its contradictions that created opaque niches of Black resistance and alternative forms of life. Chapter 1 starts from the ground up, focusing on soil. Here, Silkenat introduces the key dynamic between racialized extraction and resistance. On one hand, soil clearly illustrates the plantation system’s compulsive drive to total objectification and consumption of non-white and non-human life. Plantation agriculture cleared forests and overworked fragile soils, creating denuded...