The Blue, the Gray, and the Green: Toward an Environmental History of the Civil War

INTRODUCTION

New Fields of Battle

Nature, Environmental History, and the Civil War

BRIAN ALLEN DRAKE

Jack Temple Kirby was a staunch supporter of the union—the union, that is, between Civil War studies and environmental history. In 2001 Kirby, a historian at Miami University (and later the Bancroft Prize-winning author of Mockingbird Song, an environmental history of the American South) penned an online essay for the National Humanities Center in which he wondered why the two academic fields had never gotten together. Environmental history had, at that point, at least two decades of impressive growth behind it. Civil War historians, meanwhile, had spent those same twenty-plus years marching away from a narrow focus on battlefield events and sectional crises to explore the lives of individual soldiers, freed slaves, women, the home front, motivation, memory, and a host of other topics. Both fields were doing interesting and even provocative work but doing it separately. Why?¹

It was not because there was nothing new to say about the Civil War. My graduate school mentor [had] joked that the Civil War era was overcrowded, Kirby recalled, and that there was nothing left to write about but ‘The Sex Life of Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog.’ It was not actually true, of course, as his mentor well knew. The African-American experience of the war was only then getting sympathetic attention, Kirby observed, along with political issues both large and local. Women and the war awaited eager scholars and readers, later. Yet in 2001 the environment had somehow failed to make it onto the list. Kirby blamed geography. While the Civil War was an eastern topic, he said, environmental history was a child of western history, born and raised across the wide Mississippi, and simple physical separation went a long way in explaining why neither discipline was doing much reading in the other’s books and articles. The rest of the essay offered suggestions for how a marriage between environmental history and Civil War studies might proceed and what it might look like.

The cornerstone of any good marriage is familiarity, and one can imagine both sides looking a bit warily at the partner that Kirby the matchmaker intended for them. Civil War history has always had something of a reputation for confirmed historiographical bachelorhood, and although its interests are far more diverse than they were twenty years ago, that diversification was long in coming. Social historians, meanwhile, have until relatively recently tended to avoid mere military history, devoting themselves to labor, class, race, gender, and the broader civilian subaltern; historian Maris Vinovskis famously called them out in 1989 for losing the Civil War in particular. Now, here was Kirby issuing another call for setting up house. Who, exactly, his readers might have asked, was this spouse-to-be?²

It’s a good question, especially from the Civil War side, because environmental history is nothing if not an eclectic and sometimes even enigmatic field, and historians of the war would not have been the first to be confounded by it. The short answer would be that environmental history is the study of the interactions between humans and nature across time. Like the social history turn that influenced it greatly, environmental history seeks to give voice to actors whom our historical narratives have traditionally ignored. Unlike with social history, however, those long-ignored voices do not belong to humans alone. Geography, climate and weather, natural resources, flora, fauna, microbiology, and the like have also shaped human history, environmental historians argue, and people have in turn shaped them. History, in other words, unfolds within a larger web of dynamic ecological connections, and to ignore that is to miss a good chunk of the human experience.

It is also true that few, if any, human experiences in American history were as profound as the Civil War and its aftermath. The statistics delineating the war’s human carnage are a kind of historical mantra, as are the moral and political debates about race, economics, and freedom that brought the two sides to blows in 1861 and dominated their reunion after 1865. The work of a phalanx of historians, some of them among the profession’s best, has left few stones unturned in those particular historiographical patches. Indeed, there is perhaps no period in American history that has received more and better attention than the Civil War era. Why, then, should its scholars care about nature, when their labors have already been so fruitful? What could an environmental approach tell them about the Civil War experience? Why should they—or anyone else, for that matter—even consider Jack Temple Kirby’s marriage proposal?

To begin, given the attention to detail in other areas, it is simply odd that so little thought has been given to nature’s place in the Civil War story. This is unfortunate from a coverage perspective, but the drawbacks go beyond that. While it might not have the potential to transform Civil War studies in the way that social histories have, an environmental-history approach can tell us many things we didn’t know before and can also allow us to reassess some things we thought we knew. As its contributions to other fields suggest, environmental history can locate and turn over new stones in the Civil War field as well as reposition some older ones. With that in mind, a short survey of environmental perspectives in non-Civil War military history will give shape to the environmental gaps in Civil War studies and help elucidate some of its potential contributions.

Environmental history’s roots run deep and wide. Many schools of thought have shaped it: social history, the Annales school, the work of western historians like Walter Prescott Webb and James Malin, agricultural history, the history of science and technology, political economy, the geographical sciences, biology, and ecology, to name only the major contributors. As a distinct field, it emerged in the United States in the ecologically minded 1970s and grew slowly in the 1980s and early 1990s. Its most significant accomplishment at that time was to fundamentally change the historical narrative of early North American history by uncovering the vital role of virgin soil diseases in the decline of Native populations and their dispossession by Euro-Americans. From there the discipline matured and expanded, informing everything from the history of American agriculture, forestry, wilderness preservation, and other forms of land use to urban sanitation, race and gender relations, religion, and postwar politics. It also moved beyond the borders of the United States to take regional, transnational, and global perspectives. While its influence has never equaled that of social history, environmental history has nevertheless become an indispensable category of analysis alongside the social history trinity of race, class, and gender.³

It wasn’t quite true, as Jack Temple Kirby claimed, that there had been no environmental perspectives on the Civil War before 2001. His betrothed couple had dated casually before then, as it were, even if early practitioners were not environmental historians per se and did not conceive of their work in environmental terms. Weather, for instance, has long been an obvious factor in Civil War histories, as anyone familiar with the Seven Days campaign, Burnside’s Mud March, or Sam Watkins’s travails in his memoir Co. Aytch could attest. Photographs of shattered trees, dead animals, and battlefield detritus have been similarly ubiquitous ("Military historians preoccupied with combat on specific landscapes almost do environmental history, Kirby noted in his essay, and environmentally-minded readers may deduce from conventional texts ecological aspects of warfare"). More to the point, Ella Lonn’s 1933 book Salt as a Factor in the Confederacy argued that a major obstacle to Southern victory was its lack of salt, which was necessary for everything from curing meat and butter to tanning hides. Here was an argument, grounded in ecological realities, that a modern environmental historian would have recognized immediately; the surrender at Appomattox was a consequence of Leibig’s Law of the Minimum, so to speak. In the 1960s, historian Paul W. Gates plowed both Union and Confederate fields with Agriculture and the Civil War, touching on the effects of drought, frost, and flood on crop production. But overall, Kirby was spot-on; while other fields moved to incorporate an environmental viewpoint, military history in general, and Civil War history in particular, seemed to hold itself back in reserve. This probably had a lot to do with the sheer potential of social history; since so little scholarship had been produced concerning the experiences of women, African Americans, common soldiers, and so on, it stood to reason that scholars would focus their attentions there. Perhaps bringing nature into the mix seemed like too hazardous a mission for a field still working out the implications of the social history turn.⁴

After Kirby’s essay, however, some slow progress came. In 2002 environmental historian Ted Steinberg dedicated nine pages to the Civil War in Down to Earth. Two years later, Natural Enemy, Natural Ally: Toward an Environmental History of Warfare featured one chapter on the Civil War amid studies of India, Japan, Finland, South Africa, and the Pacific islands. Mark Fiege’s Gettysburg and the Organic Nature of the American Civil War argued that Lee’s famous 1863 raid into Pennsylvania was more a foraging expedition than a strategic move, as overgrazing and scarce rations in Virginia drove him northward in search of food and fodder, and there he utilized the local geography to brilliant tactical effect. In 2005 Lisa Brady joined Steinberg and Fiege with her essay The Wilderness of War, in which she interpreted the 1863 Vicksburg campaign, the 1864 Shenandoah Valley campaign, and Sherman’s march through Georgia as Union attempts to sever the South from its agroecological foundations, that is, its pastures and fields. For several years, however, these three pieces remained the only significant works of Civil War environmental history.⁵

Meanwhile, scholars of other wars were doing a much-more-thorough job of incorporating environmental history into their work, and in the process they uncovered some fascinating connections between nature and military experience. World War II was the prime example. Back in 1995 the journal Environmental History got things started with a short piece titled The Impact of World War II on the Land. In 2001 Edmund Russell produced War and Nature, a groundbreaking study of the reciprocal links between chemical warfare research and postwar pesticides like DDT. Natural Enemy, Natural Ally featured several chapters on the war, and between 2003 and 2011 Environmental History published articles on topics ranging from urban agriculture in wartime Finland to the global ecological footprint of aluminum production to the environmental context of Japanese American internment. Books by Judith Bennett and Chris Pearson explored the ecological legacies of American troops in the South Pacific and the meaning and uses of forests in Vichy France. The Cold War also received its share of analyses, as Jacob Darwin Hamblin analyzed the environment and geopolitics, Andrew Jenks wrote on the enduring environmental contamination from weapons research, and Mark Fiege explored the environmental sensibilities of atomic scientists at Los Alamos. John McNeill and Corinna Unger’s Environmental Histories of the Cold War included chapters from fifteen scholars on everything from dam building to weather control. Charles Closmann’s War and the Environment included an essay by Lisa Brady on Sherman’s march but otherwise had a strong World War II/Cold War orientation. David Briggs’s award-winning Quagmire, on imperialism, hydrological engineering, and warfare in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, appeared in 2012. Civil War scholarship on the environment, it was clear, had a lot of catching up to do.⁶

It was in this context that Stephen Berry and I hatched the idea for The Blue, the Gray, and the Green. In 2007 I came to the University of Georgia’s history department, fresh from graduate school at the University of Kansas, where I specialized in the history of the post-1945 American environmental movement. Berry—then an assistant professor, now the Greg and Amanda Gregory Chair in the Civil War Era—arrived that same year. He had recently become interested in environmental history, having long been impressed by its analytical creativity, and as we got to know each other our conversations about our respective fields piqued my own interest in the Civil War. I was also influenced by our colleague (and a contributor to this volume) John Inscoe, by the work of several graduate students, and simply by living in the South, where traces of the war are still in the air as well as on the land. After a number of freewheeling discussions about the state of our respective fields—often centering on why they never seemed to get together—it seemed obvious to Steve and me that Jack Temple Kirby had been right: environmental history and Civil War history were a great match. We also decided that we should capitalize on that fact. When Steve suggested that we co-organize a meeting on Civil War environmental history as a part of the UnCivil Wars conference series sponsored by our department, the T. R. R. Cobb House, and the Watson-Brown Foundation, I leapt at the idea. The result was the October 2011 conference The Blue, the Gray, and the Green, the first academic history conference dedicated wholly to the topic. It was our good fortune to attract a slew of impressive scholars, no easy task given the dearth of Civil War environmentalists. The essays in this volume—the fourth in the University of Georgia Press’s UnCivil Wars series—emerged from conference presentations.⁷

What, then, do these essays tell us about the Civil War? Since environment history deals with two very broad subjects—humans and nature—it can be an unwieldy methodological lens, and in answering that question it is useful to first have a sense of the field’s thematic topography. Many scholars have offered their favorite interpretive frameworks and metaphors. Arthur McEvoy, for example, has argued that environmental history focuses on the interlocking, coevolving links between ecology, production, and cognition—that is, the relationship between people, their work, and the world they live in. Similarly, for Donald Worster the practice of environmental history involves three levels of analysis. The first emphasizes nature’s impact on human history, stressing the nonhuman world’s agency in human affairs. The second analyzes the ways humans think about, define, and regard nature in science, religion, art, and culture, both popular and high. The third focuses on the places where people, drawing on their respective cultural values, physically engage the natural world in order to obtain what they need and want from it—the realm of agriculture, resource extraction, commodification and the market, and their related technology and material culture. John McNeill’s interpretive trinity is similar to Worster’s but simpler, broken down into the material, the political, and the cultural aspects of the human-nature interface. Paul Sutter, however, has recently offered a framework that eschews the three-tier approach for something even simpler. All environments are hybrid, he writes, intricate and ever-changing fusions of human and nonhuman actors and activities. Thus, the best environmental histories weave McEvoy, Worster, and McNeill’s various categories together into a complex causal taxonomy.⁸

The following essays offer a Civil War-oriented sampling of that taxonomy. Some emphasize the active role of nonhuman nature while others place more stress on human cognition and cultural values, but all of them deal with hybridity in some way. However, by no means are they, individually or collectively, the final word on either what Civil War environmental history is or ought to be. As one of the first self-consciously environmental forays into Civil War studies, The Blue, the Gray and the Green is not and cannot be definitive. It does not presume to advance a sweeping and conclusive answer to the question of what environmental history can contribute to our understanding of the war as a whole. Instead, it offers a diversity of subjects and approaches in the hopes of showing what sort of distinctive contributions environmental history might make. It is a methodological smorgasbord, so to speak, a platter of interpretive hors d’oeuvres that serves as both an inspiration and a model for more substantial meals to come.

The first several chapters in this book emphasize nonhuman nature, and in the process they remind us that not only did nature matter in the Civil War, it sometimes mattered a great deal. Kenneth Noe’s opening piece reveals that while the elements clearly affected marches and battles in a general way, they also had significant and quantifiable effects in very specific places. Furthermore, Noe shows that climate could be as important as weather, even away from the battlefield; the famous southern bread riots, for example, might have owed as much to bad harvests born of regional drought, flood, and frost as they did to the Confederacy’s inflationary economy or logistical failings. Next, Megan Kate Nelson invokes regional climate to rescue the reputation of a shamed Union officer in New Mexico in 1861. Major Isaac Lynde surrendered to pursuing Confederates after leading his troops into the high desert on an ill-fated march from Fort Fillmore to Fort Stanton. Critics accused him of gross incompetence and his troops of drunkenness, but Nelson argues that extreme dehydration and heat were more practical explanations for their failure; a keen understanding of environmental conditions, she suggests, goes a long way to rehabilitating Lynde’s soiled reputation. It also fosters a broader appreciation of the unique ecological context of the war in the West.

Stephen Berry has written that the Civil War constituted a massive stir of the biotic soup a là Alfred Crosby’s Columbian Exchange, and the next two essays emphasize the active role of nonhuman nature in the form of contagious disease. Like Kenneth Noe, Timothy Silver begins by noting that weather and food scarcity were closely linked; in the mountains of Yancey County, North Carolina, rain, drought, and frost combined with a dearth of male laborers to create severe shortages. Silver moves next, however, to the effects of camp life on Yancey County’s Confederate soldiers. Having grown up in mountainous isolation, their epidemiological innocence rendered them vulnerable to density-dependent illnesses as they merged with recruits from around the South in crowded, unsanitary training camps and battlefields. A comparable situation faced their Yankee opponents in the swampy, muggy 1862 Peninsula Campaign; Silver speculates that epidemic diseases played an underappreciated role in George McClellan’s ignominious retreat to Harrison’s Landing. Even the horses and mules that transported the armies and the livestock that fed them suffered intense bouts of glanders, hog cholera, and cattle fever. It would be years before their numbers in the South would rebound, significantly hindering the region’s postwar recovery.

Disease was so prevalent among troops in the Peninsula Campaign and elsewhere in Virginia in 1862, Kathryn Shively Meier argues in her essay, that it was a major factor—perhaps the major factor—in straggling. Soldiers of both sides routinely left the ranks without permission in order to administer self care, which they much preferred to treatment in hospitals. Eventually, stragglers—unlike deserters—returned to their units; although mainstream treatments of straggling and desertion usually lump them together, Meier argues that an explicitly environmental approach allows us to make useful distinctions between the two. Showing little interest in such nuance, commanders blamed straggling on laziness, cowardice, and lower-class character faults, and dealt with the situation harshly. The irony was that self care likely went a long way toward keeping troops healthy and, in the long run, boosted both the number and the readiness of men available to fight.⁹

The next two chapters take us into to the realm of perception, ideology, and value. Terms like nature and wilderness are among the most complicated in American history, and environmental historians have made a cottage industry out of deconstructing their conflicting cultural meanings and the impacts those meanings had on both people and the environment itself. It is worth asking, then, how the Civil War experience both reflected and influenced those impacts. Aaron Sachs uses language, literature, and landscape paintings to muse upon the ways in which the war complicated and darkened Americans’ imaginings about the meaning of wilderness in particular and nature more generally. Images of stumps, both wooden and fleshly, linked the defilement of human bodies to the defilement of nature, muddying older views of environmental destruction as Progress. Wilderness, too, took on new meanings because of the war. Before 1861 it had been as much a landscape of solace as menace. But the war’s vast destruction shook Americans so badly that they began to lose faith in its capacity to heal spiritual and psychic wounds. That anxiety, ironically, helped to inspire the conservation and wilderness preservation movements of the late nineteenth century—movements that environmental historians have seldom connected to the conflict.¹⁰

Next, John Inscoe draws on period and modern literature to explore images of the southern Appalachians as wartime refuge, redoubt, and place of moral high ground. His close reading of the 1864 novel Cudjo’s Cave and several short stories, memoirs, and reminiscences published after the war reveals an emerging northern literary image of the Appalachian wilderness as an island of morally upright antislavery and unionist sentiment amid a sea of decadent lowland slave-drivers. There was some truth to that image, for the real southern Appalachians were full of people with grudges against or ambivalence toward the Confederacy and its planter aristocracy. Escaped Union prisoners, too, experienced the mountains and their residents as friends and allies, and lauded Appalachian geography in their memoirs. The refuge offered by the region dwindled as Confederate and home guard units moved against deserters and resisters in savage internecine conflicts made worse by the difficult terrain. Yet more than a century later, the refuge idea persisted; Inscoe finishes by placing Charles Frazier’s 1997 novel Cold Mountain in the tradition of much of the nineteenth-century writing that established those themes.

The last four chapters focus more overtly on hybridity. First, Lisa Brady offers her thoughts on how the military theorist Clausewitz’s concept of friction—the unanticipated and unpredictable problems that emerge during the execution of even the best-laid tactics—had an under-appreciated ecological facet in Civil War battles. Drawing on Fort Donelson, Iuka, and Perryville as examples, she uses the quirky atmospheric phenomenon known as acoustic shadow to suggest that friction was as much an environmental issue as it was a product of human mistakes and foibles, as Clausewitz mainly defined it. Brady goes further, however, by arguing that nature-as-friction offers a linguistic and conceptual bridge between military and environmental historians who, though they share an interest in nature’s effects on the war, lack a common analytical framework with which to speak to one another about it.

In his narrative about bright leaf tobacco farming in piedmont Virginia and North Carolina, Drew Swanson reveals how the war reinforced the region’s production even as the Union blockade and the Confederacy’s need for men, food, and fodder pushed in the opposite direction. Bright leaf, which was in high demand even in the absence of northern and global markets, generated large profits for, and intense competition among, the region’s producers. Thus, they had little incentive to replace tobacco with food crops, and Confederate directives to that effect generated spirited resistance. Also, bright leaf grew best in soils ill suited for crops, which further undercut arguments for increased food production. In the end, large profits, local understandings of best use agriculture, and the ecological characteristics of bright leaf itself combined to make tobacco production unassailable, even in the face of the Confederacy’s pressing commissary needs. For all the environmental changes the war wrought elsewhere, piedmont tobacco country proved highly resistant to them.

Timothy Johnson brings an environmental approach to cotton production during Reconstruction and afterward. The exploitation of African American sharecroppers is well known, as are the degraded soil conditions where they lived and worked. Less known, however, is the role that fertilizers played in both. After Appomattox, planation elites found themselves still in possession of their lands but bereft of the cheap, controllable labor source they had used to cultivate it. They also found that much of that land was ecologically degraded. Planters like David Dickson proposed the use of imported guano as a way to not only improve soil output but also to avoid the headaches associated with independent-minded sharecroppers. Indeed, guano would help keep them in line; a little-known but key element of debt peonage was the guano note, wherein croppers borrowed money for fertilizers against a percentage of the crop, much as they did with tools, seeds, and the like. Thus, guano served as a distinctly environmental link between the old system of slavery and the new sharecropping one, while also foreshadowing the rise of fertilizer-dependent industrial agriculture in the twentieth century.

Mart Stewart, inspired by burgeoning environmental scholarship on walking, follows with a comprehensive and provocative argument for a literal boots on the ground approach to the Civil War environment. The war, he writes, was a down-to-earth experience, an intense engagement with nature as well as between humans. More precisely, that engagement often came on foot. Civilians, slaves, and combatants on both sides walked, ran, and marched through the landscape as they foraged and hunted, lit out for freedom, or made their way to and maneuvered on the battlefield. Here, Stewart argues, we may find a powerful unifying theme for environmental histories of the war. By giving those histories legs, so to speak, we can see more easily the ubiquitous links between humans and nature during the war itself and in the years after. He begins by analyzing Francis Peyre Porcher’s Resources of Southern Fields and Forests (1863). A guidebook to foraging in the countryside, Porcher’s book united the Thoreauvian tradition of ambulatory naturalism with Confederate patriotism, linking the war experience to American nature-writing traditions. Next, Stewart draws on the saga of Charles Ball to elucidate the role of ecological knowledge and topographical awareness in runaway slaves’ efforts to free themselves. Stewart ends by drawing important links between the practice of marching and the modernist, industrial-era regimentation that would do so much to alter American environments after the war.

Finally, in a probing epilogue, Paul Sutter considers the promises and the perils of Civil War environmental history and, echoing Lisa Brady, how environmental historians might make their work more accessible and useful to traditional historians of the conflict. With a sympathetic but critical eye, he discusses the limitations as well as the strengths of the book, but more important, he suggests some routes for future exploration. Waving the muddy shirt—his sly metaphor for environmental historians’ insistence that nature matters—will not be enough to win the interpretive battle, he argues. The best environmental histories will instead have to have a keen sense of hybridity, dialecticism, and long-term impact; in particular, they will have to be acutely aware that the human side of the nature-culture hybrid remains vitally important. Why does environmental history matter for understanding the Civil War? Sutter replies that, if done well, environmental approaches will do more than stick a few green sprigs into traditional narratives. They will let us "[rethink] the very matter of the war, its lived material realities, and their formative relation to that roiling ideological formation that we call nature."

Common to all chapters is how they hew to the agenda set out in the UnCivil Wars series’ first book. The essays in Weirding the War: Stories From the Civil War’s Ragged Edges took as their inspiration the idea that we can see the war with more clarity if, ironically, we embrace its fractal nature and explore a single story, incident, or phenomena that leaves us with questions about the war we thought we knew. This involves, among other things, focusing on events and actors seldom appreciated by even the best of recent Civil War historiography. Nature was one of those fractals; essays by Amy Murrell Taylor and Joan Cashin brought an environmental perspective to the history of emancipation in Kentucky and wartime food shortages in the South, respectively. The Blue, the Gray, and the Green continues in that vein. On one level, it seems painfully obvious that nature mattered in the Civil War—recall those photographs of battlefield destruction and the stories of illness, starvation, and marching in the mud. But the following chapters reveal that nature mattered in ways we have not always appreciated or even considered. By both their breadth and their specificity, they show us that the environment weirds the war, as well. They also take up Jack Temple Kirby’s suggestions concerning avenues of exploration. His essay urged historians to look at forests, farmland and agriculture, livestock, the urban landscape, disease, and environmental protection, including the ways in which the war affected them after 1865, both in and beyond the South. The Blue, the Gray, and the Green touches on nearly all of these topics, and then some.¹¹

In the end, The Blue, the Gray, and the Green is not and will not be the final word on Civil War environmental history. It is only an opening statement in a historical conversation rich with possibility. Much work remains, and some of it has already begun; contributors Lisa Brady, Megan Kate Nelson, and Kathryn Shively Meier have recently published some of the first books in the field, joined by Jim Downs’s Sick from Freedom and Andrew Bell’s Mosquito Soldiers. But the road ahead is long—Jack Kirby followed up Maris Vinovski’s call for a social history of the Civil War with a powerful one of his own, and in answering him there are miles to go before we can stand down. It is our hope that this book encourages a steady forward march.¹²

Notes

1. Jack Temple Kirby, The American Civil War: An Environmental View, online essay for the National Humanities Center, July 2001, http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/nattrans/ntuseland/essays/amcwar.htm; Jack Temple Kirby, Mockingbird Song: Ecological Landscapes of the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).

2. Maris A. Vinovskis, Have Social Historians Lost the Civil War? Some Preliminary Demographic Speculations, Journal of American History 76 (June 1989): 34–58.

3. The literature of American environmental history is vast. For broad discussions of the field’s major topics, ideas, written works, and primary sources, see Paul Sutter, The World with Us: The State of American Environmental History, Journal of American History 100 (June 2013): 94–119; Mark Fiege, The Republic of Nature: An Environmental History of the United States (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012); Ted Steinberg, Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Carolyn Merchant, ed., Major Problems in Environmental History, 3rd ed. (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 2011); and John Opie, Nature’s Nation: An Environmental History of the United States (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1998). For broad non-U.S. works see Edmund Burke III and Kenneth Pomeranz, The Environment and World History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); J. Donald Hughes, An Environmental History of the World: Humankind’s Changing Role in the History of Life 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2009); I. G. Simmons, Global Environmental History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); and John F. Richards, The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). The leading proponent of virgin soil studies is Alfred W.