David Silkenat, "Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Summary

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Podcast Summary

Podcast: New Books Network – New Books in the American South
Episode: David Silkenat, "Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South" (Oxford UP, 2022)
Host: Brandon Jetta
Guest: Dr. David Silkenat, Senior Lecturer in American History, University of Edinburgh
Date: December 8, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode explores Dr. David Silkenat’s groundbreaking book Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South. The conversation delves into how the environment and the institution of slavery were deeply intertwined, shaping not only the Southern landscape but the lived experiences of enslaved people over two centuries. Silkenat discusses his research process, key themes of the book—including soil depletion, deforestation, and the violence of environmental exploitation—and the ongoing legacies of these dynamics today.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Motivation and Origins of the Study

• Background of the Author

  • Dr. Silkenat is a historian with a diverse focus on Southern history, previously addressing topics like social life, surrender during the Civil War, and more.

• Why Environmental History? ([04:54]–[07:39])

  • Sought to challenge himself by engaging with new methodologies.
  • Influences included the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the intersection of environmental devastation and racial injustice.
  • The Black Lives Matter movement and the climate crisis heightened his interest in the connections between environment, race, and history.

  “It caused me to really think about these questions of environmental justice, the ways in which the populations, especially in the south, that suffer the most from environmental destruction... are very often people of color.” —Dr. Silkenat, [06:47]

Research Approach and Sources

• Centering Enslaved Voices ([08:21]–[09:44])

  • Primary reliance on fugitive slave narratives, WPA interviews, and first-person accounts by enslaved people.
  • Supplemented with writings of enslavers (e.g., Edmund Ruffin, Thomas Jefferson) and observations from scientists/naturalists visiting the South.

  “I wanted to... privilege the voices of the enslaved and formerly enslaved... try to look at them through an environmental lens.” —Dr. Silkenat, [08:21]

• Charles Ball as a Central Figure ([10:41]–[14:03])

  • Ball’s narrative provided unique insight due to his movement through different regions and acute environmental observations.

  “What makes his narrative interesting is... he was enslaved in a variety of different locations... He has a naturalist's eye.” —Dr. Silkenat, [12:19]

  “He draws both implicit and explicit connections between the brutality of slavery on people... and the brutality of this institution upon the land.” —Dr. Silkenat, [12:53]

Environmental Transformation & Slavery’s Violence

Soil Degradation and Expansionism ([16:56]–[22:45])

• Beyond Tobacco: Cotton’s Impact

  • While soil depletion due to tobacco is widely taught, cotton cultivation was even more destructive.
  • Enslavers treated land as disposable, continuously moving west to exploit new frontiers rather than maintain or rejuvenate exhausted soils.

  “Enslavers... started to really see this land not only as a source of great profit, but as land that could be used up and then replaced.” —Dr. Silkenat, [18:49]

  “Wars that the United States wages to acquire new land... is driven in part by this insatiable demand by enslavers for further land further west.” —Dr. Silkenat, [21:51]

• Personal Consequences for the Enslaved

  • Environmental exploitation led to forced migration, separation of families, and grueling work clearing land for new plantations.

  “Gangs of enslaved people... clear cut land to create new plantations... Mourning for not only the forest that's lost, but also the brutality that's embedded within that.” —Dr. Silkenat, [23:27]

Forests, Swamps, and Maroon Communities ([25:25]–[33:31])

• Dual Understandings of Wilderness

  • Forests and swamps served enslavers as obstacles to “progress” but were sites of refuge, resistance, and subsistence for the enslaved.
  • Maroon communities thrived in inaccessible swamps; forests were essential for religious and social gatherings, hunting, and escape.

  “There's ways in which these wild spaces, if you will, were tremendous venues... if you want to become a maroon... swamps are great places to do that.” —Dr. Silkenat, [27:12]

• Deforestation and Exploitation

  • Turpentine extraction: intensive, brutal work for enslaved labor, ultimately destroying entire forests for short-term profit.

  “They do this knowing that that kind of intensive extraction is going to generate them a lot of profit, but it's also going to kill the tree... this entire industry basically self destructs.” —Dr. Silkenat, [32:09]

Rivers and Water Management ([35:55]–[42:49])

• Rivers as Opportunity and Threat

  • Rivers were vital for transportation and plantation productivity but threatened enslavers with unpredictable flooding.
  • Levee construction—built and constantly maintained by enslaved labor—created new environmental dangers by raising the riverbed above the surrounding land.

  “Enslavers describe the vigilance you need in watching your levies with the same kind of language they use for the vigilance... for a slave revolt.” —Dr. Silkenat, [39:09]

• Disproportionate Suffering

  • When disaster struck (levee breaches, floods), enslaved communities bore the heaviest losses—losing homes, possessions, and families—while plantation owners often recovered or relocated.

  “The people who he enslaved have to have these, you know, series of catastrophes... they lose their property and they lose their families and their homes.” —Dr. Silkenat, [42:49]

Severe Weather & the Unequal Burden ([44:09]–[47:29])

• Hurricanes: then as now, the South was hurricane-prone, but in the past, enslaved people suffered the most due to vulnerability of their housing and lack of warning.

• Climate impacts were not “climate change” per se, but the institution of slavery exacerbated the ecological and human devastation of storms.

• First-person accounts—for example, an enslaved person's view of the Last Island Hurricane—bring immediacy to these tragedies.

  “The accounts we have are very often that the houses of enslavers usually survive those storms intact, but the slave quarters don't... the fragility of those structures and the people living in them are very vulnerable.” —Dr. Silkenat, [44:43]

Secession, Expansion, and Unsustainability ([48:38]–[51:53])

• Environmental Ruin as a Driver of Expansion and War

  • Planters’ willingness to abandon ruined lands drove relentless westward expansion—fueling the politics of secession and Civil War.

• Little Concern for Long-term Sustainability

  • While a few advocated for crop rotation or fertilization, most planters ignored sustainable methods for faster profits.

  “People read those journals and then don't do any of it... Like they sort of strike me as sort of like fitness magazines: People get them and they say, oh, I know what I'm supposed to do, but I'm going to go have a cheeseburger anyway.” —Dr. Silkenat, [50:18]

  “They are thinking in the 1850s about expansion beyond... Cuba, Mexico, other parts of Latin America... what's the next frontier for them.” —Dr. Silkenat, [51:07]

Emancipation & Environmental Knowledge ([52:05]–[54:45])

• Enslaved People’s Expertise

  • Their intimate knowledge of the environment aided escape, resistance, and support for the Union army.

  “The knowledge that enslaved people had about the environment helped them both to escape from bondage, but also how that helped them to be... aid the Union war effort.” —Dr. Silkenat, [53:13]

• The End of Mobility and Rise of Sharecropping

  • After emancipation, land use shifted: mobility decreased, fertilizer use increased, and both black and white Southerners redefined their relationship to the land.

  “Fertilizer was widespread... in the antebellum south it was very rarely used simply because there was always ways in which you could acquire new land... As the south becomes the region that uses the most fertilizer... that reliance signifies a very different kind of relationship to the land.” —Dr. Silkenat, [56:22]

• Land Ownership and Black Southerners

  • Post-emancipation, African Americans asserted claims to land they had worked—but systematic land redistribution mostly failed to occur.

  “They tell him, look, what we want more than anything else is the claim to the lands that we have worked for generations, that we feel that our labor entitles us to that.” —Dr. Silkenat, [57:22]

Contemporary Relevance & Lessons ([59:19]–[64:38])

• On “Presentism” and the Role of the Historian

  • Silkenat defends making connections between past and present. The scars of slavery’s environmental legacy still shape Southern landscapes and inequities.

  “If what we write, what we research, doesn't have any resonance with the present, then, you know, why bother?... The scars on the land, to use the title, you know, these are scars that were inflicted during two centuries of slavery, but... take a long time to heal, if they ever heal at all.” —Dr. Silkenat, [61:49] & [62:22]

• Racism and Environmental Crisis are Intertwined

  • Places suffering most from environmental disaster often overlap precisely with the geography of slavery and racial injustice (“Cancer Alley” in Louisiana as a prime example).

  “If we look at the places in the south right now that are struggling the most with environmental challenges... and you sort of map onto that the history of racism and slavery, those things are connected.” —Dr. Silkenat, [62:44]

  “As we're finding out now, we don't really have another place to move to that's viable as of yet. So maybe we should really do more to make the place we're on more sustainable.” —Brandon Jetta, [64:01]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Planter Mentality:
  “Once you tell somebody that they have the authority over another human being... it shouldn't come as a surprise that those same people have a relationship to land and to other kinds of property that is exploitive and violent.” —Dr. Silkenat, [14:19]

• On Sustainability:
  “Sustainability never enters into their mindset. Right. It's just like, let's just go and get as much as we can and move on.” —Brandon Jetta, [33:31]

• On the Legacies of Slavery:
  “We’ve not done a great job taking care of [the planet] and we've not done a great job of dealing with the legacies of centuries of racism. And I think we need to deal with those and many other problems if we want to survive.” —Dr. Silkenat, [64:50]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [03:23] – Introduction by Silkenat: project origins, motivation
• [06:47] – Race, Hurricane Katrina, and environmental justice
• [08:21] – Researching through fugitive slave narratives
• [11:01] – Charles Ball: his life and legacy
• [16:56] – Soil degradation: tobacco and cotton
• [18:49] – Enslavers’ land-use mentality and expansion
• [25:25] – Forests, swamps, maroon communities
• [32:09] – Turpentine forests: brutal extraction and environmental ruin
• [35:55] – Rivers, levees, and environmental catastrophe
• [44:09] – Hurricanes, vulnerability, and disproportionate impact
• [48:38] – Expansion, secession, and sustainability
• [52:05] – Emancipation, environmental knowledge, and the Civil War
• [56:58] – Postwar land relationships and fertilizer
• [59:19] – Environmental lessons for today
• [62:22] – Lasting scars and the challenge to heal

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Conclusion

Scars on the Land fundamentally reframes the history of slavery through an environmental lens, revealing the intertwined devastations of people and place wrought by the slave economy. Silkenat urges us to recognize the long reach of these historic choices—not only in landscapes but in social and racial inequalities that persist. His message is both clear-eyed about the past and fiercely relevant to the current crises of environmental justice.

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Transcript

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[Brandon Jett]

Welcome to New Books in the American South. I'm your host, Brandon Jett. On today's podcast, I'm speaking with Dr. David Silkenett, a senior lecturer in American history at the University of Edinburgh. His research focuses on the social and cultural history of the American south during the 19th century, with particular attention to the Civil War, race, and slavery. He has published four books, including Raising the White How Surrender Defined the American Civil War, which was a finalist for the Gilder Luhrmann Lincoln Prize. Today we're talking about his most recent book, Surprise Scars on the An Environmental History of Slavery in the American south, published by Oxford University Press in 2022. This book is the first comprehensive history of American slavery to examine how the environment fundamentally formed enslaved people's lives and how slavery remade the Southern landscape over two centuries. From the establishment of slavery in the Chesapeake to the Civil War. One simple calculation had profound consequences. Rather than measuring productivity based on outputs per acre, Southern planters sought to maximize how much labor they could extract, extract, extract from their enslaved workforce. They saw the landscape as disposable, relocating to more fertile prospects once they had leached the soils and cut down the forests on the leading edge of the frontier. Slavery laid waste to fragile ecosystems, draining swamps, clearing forests to plant crops and fuel steam ships, and introducing devastating invasive species. On its trailing edge. Slavery left eroded hillsides, rivers clogged with sterile soil, and the extinction of native species. On that really positive note, I'd like to welcome Dr. David Silkenant to New Books in the American South.

[Dr. David Silkenat]

Really happy to be here.

[Brandon Jett]

Brendan, first and foremost, congratulations on the book. I don't read too many environmental histories, but for some reason, this one really drew me in. And I was really excited that you agreed to come on the podcast to explore this really intriguing but surprisingly understudied topic.

[Dr. David Silkenat]

Well, thank you. I mean, I wrote it in part, not necessarily with just environmental historians in mind, but with historians of the American south, people who are interested in the history of slavery, but also just people who have broad interests in how the south ended up the way that it has. That's sort of who I envisioned as the audience, so I'm glad it caught your interest.

[Brandon Jett]

Well, you've certainly succeeded there. And I will throw my wife under the bus. I think I've done this once or twice on this show. So far, she hasn't read my book, which is fine. She's heard me talk about it enough. My wife has read it, but there's a couple of books I get. And she saw this and was like, that's a book I want to read based on the title. So I think you are doing a really great job of reaching those audiences. But there's something about this book that I also found really interesting in terms of who you are and what you've done in the past. You've researched and written about Southern history quite extensively. You've written about things like suicide, divorce, and debt in the Civil War era, Civil War, refugees, and, as I mentioned in the introduction, how surrender defined the Civil War. This seems like a bit of a departure. So I just was hoping you could explain to us a little bit about how you became interested in the environmental history of slavery in the American South.

[Dr. David Silkenat]

So that's a good question. So I am, by training, I guess, a sort of generic Southern historian. I've done, you know, my work before. This project has dabbled in a number of different methodologies. I've done some social history, cultural history, a little bit of legal and economic history, some military history, and obviously now going into environmental history. And that's sort of part of the challenge I sort of set myself when I started new projects. I want to do something that pushes me to think in new ways.

And, you know, coming to this project, I knew that the scholarship on.

The slavery pretty well. You know, I taught that slavery had always been at the core of the previous things I've done. But, you know, writing environmental history required me first to come up to speed with an entirely new field and a new approach to doing history. But it also caused me to then Sort of read sources that I had read many times before, but read them in new ways to look for new things.

And, you know, reading fugitive slave narratives, for instance, through an environmental lens caused all kinds of things to pop out that I hadn't seen before. You know, in terms of an inspiration for why I came to this book, I've been thinking about this a lot, because often I don't know what motivates me to do things until after I've done them. You know, I think Hurricane Katrina, I think, was a big influence. Thinking looking at this devastation of Louisiana and the ways in which the environment and race there intersected was quite powerful to me.

And it caused me to really think about these questions of environmental justice, the ways in which the populations, especially in the south, that suffer the most from.

Environmental destruction and environmental challenges and environmental catastrophes are very often people of color. And to then sort of think through that historically, you know, and in the years that I was researching and writing Scars on the Land, it was very much at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, the protests around the country, but also with sort of growing recognition that the global environmental crisis is the great challenge that humanitari humanity has to face right now. And seeing those two items in the headlines for the past five years has really caused me to ask questions about how those are related and how we can make sense of the history of race and slavery in the one hand, and the environment on the other.

[Brandon Jett]

Absolutely. Well, I think you've done a really, really nice job of bringing those two elements together in a really, really engaging way. And you touched on this a little bit, but I'm hoping maybe you can elaborate. You know, this is a pretty broad study. You're not focusing on one state, but instead the south more broadly. How did you go about researching the book? Was it just simply going back through sources that you had already considered, but looking at them through a different lens, or did you have to dig into new archives? What. What really was most useful for you?

[Dr. David Silkenat]

So one of the things I wanted to do very much with this project was to privilege the voices of the enslaved and formerly enslaved. So that was sort of the first set of sources I looked to, you know, and I.

Read through as many of the fugitive slave narratives as I could. The WPA interviews from the 1930s, other kinds of accounts by enslaved people, you know, try to look at them through an environmental lens. And so there's. There's that sort of the main sources I use for this. I also read through the writings of enslavers Some of whom are very environmentally astute. Most of them are not, but some of them were. You know, Edmund Ruffin, for all of his many problems, was a very keen observer of the environment. Thomas Jefferson similarly thought and wrote a lot about the environment around Monticello, but also more broadly. And, you know, I found those to be particularly useful. And the third set of sources that turned out to be just very important for me.

Were accounts by scientists and naturalists who are visiting the American South. And some of them have thoughts about slavery, and some of them, or at least before they arrive there, some of them don't. But they are often very keen observers, both of the environment, obviously, because that's their training, but also.

Of the ways in which that environment is shaping the lives of the people who are enslaved. And sometimes they're very sympathetic, and sometimes they're not. But I found that they had that particular eye for describing landscape, for describing, you know, even if they're geologists, they're primarily interested in going looking at rocks, but they are also describing the other things they're seeing around them. And I found those kinds of sources. People are visiting the south from the north, but from Europe, to be really very, very valuable. Wow.

[Brandon Jett]

Yeah. You know, one name kind of building on this source conversation that popped up again and again. So anybody who reads the book is going to notice this name, Charles Ball. He reference repeatedly.

[Dr. David Silkenat]

He's kind of the main character, if there is one.

[Brandon Jett]

Yeah, in a lot of ways. And so I was hoping maybe we could just learn a little bit more about who Charles Ball was and why he played such an important role in the book.

[Dr. David Silkenat]

Yeah. So Charles Ball is the author of a really important fugitive slave narrative. It's published in the Rich first in the 1830s. So it's a little bit before Frederick Douglass. And they're the ones people maybe familiar with. Yeah, it's often neglected. I don't know. It doesn't get taught very often. I think partially because it's very long. People tend to gravitate towards teaching Frederick Douglass, or. Right, it's narrow, or Solomon Northup or Harriet Jacobs, because they're short and teachable and Charles Ball is not. But.

I have taught it. Actually. One of the things. One of the things that happened, as I was sort of in the lead up to writing this book, is I assign that to a class I teach here on the history of antebellum slavery. And I had my students, since it was so long, read a couple of chapters every week, in addition to other things we were doing.

And what Makes his narrative interesting is first that he was enslaved in a variety of different locations. So he's born in the Chesapeake, but then he's sold to the Lower South. So he spends time in South Carolina on a rice plantation. He's in Georgia. He spends some time.

Working in a fishery on a river. And so he has a number of different experiences in slavery. And he's a very keen observer of that landscape. So he has a very. You know, he has a naturalist's eye. You know, there's one point.

Early in his narrative where he's describing traveling through Virginia. He's being sold. He's just been sold for the first time from. From.

The Chesapeake down. Down into South Carolina, I think. And he's passing through what had been a century earlier, the heartland of the tobacco industry. And what he describes is sort of the devastation that intensive tobacco cultivation had had upon the land. And he draws both implicit and explicit connections between the brutality of slavery on people who are enslaved and the brutality of this institution upon the land. And the land reflected that.

Violence. And he describes this. Nothing grows there, and nobody can live in this region because it has been brutalized by violence. He's got a dog. The dog is very important to him. And there's a whole section of the book about enslaved people's relationships with dogs. And so I just. He was a very. He was probably the. You know, in terms of the sources that I was using, he was. That was just a real gold mine for different kinds of experiences and somebody who could, you know, draw these connections that I wanted to make between the lives of the enslaved and what was going on with the landscape.

[Brandon Jett]

Yeah, absolutely. I thought one of the more compelling parts of the book was when you emphasize those connections. Right. The people who treat other human beings so violently. Violence undergirded all of the slave south, and they're doing the exact same thing to the environment that they are kind of reaping.

[Dr. David Silkenat]

Well, once you tell somebody that they have the authority over another human being, that they own them, that they can beat them, that they can sell their children, that they can sexually assault them, that they have that kind of dominion over people. I mean, in some ways, it shouldn't come as a surprise that those same people have a relationship to land and to other kinds of property that is exploitive and. And violent.

[Brandon Jett]

Yeah. I mean, even today. So I live in southwest Florida, and this is kind of an aside, but I'm just struck by how little people seem to respect nature and the environment. It seems like something that is just there to be conquered, tamed, and we can always overcome it. We just had that hurricane hit not that long ago, and I was just struck by the number of people who didn't.

Heed the warnings that. That, you know, this massive storm surge is coming. And I know there are problems and some people can't get away.

[Dr. David Silkenat]

Sure.

[Brandon Jett]

But so many people just thought, well, this isn't going to be that big of a deal. We. We can handle some wind and kind of that lack of respect for just the. The importance and power and significance of the natural world that I saw kind of embedded throughout the argument you were making in the book. So I thought that was. Was an interesting connection to what I was living through, quite literally at the very same time that I was reading this.

[Dr. David Silkenat]

I hope everything was okay for you and your family.

[Brandon Jett]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, we're a little bit inland, so we had some small roof damage, but nothing compared to what happened to those people on the coast, fortunately. So you've organized this book chronologically, I'm sorry, thematically, as opposed to chronologically. And you take a look at different environmental aspects of.

[Dr. David Silkenat]

Actually, yeah, it's, you know, so it is. The chapters are organized thematically. There's a chapter on soil and trees and animals and what have you.

But I wanted to very much also embed the chronological structure into it as sort of a secondary framework. So, you know, the earlier chapters tend to focus much more on the colonial period, and it culminates with the Civil War and emancipation. So. Sorry I interrupted you, but I was trying to do both in terms of structuring the book.

[Brandon Jett]

Yeah. Well, I think it's really, really effective. And so I thought we could just go through a couple of the. The topics that are covered and maybe you can give us a little bit of insight into what's going on here. The first chapter is really, really interesting. And when I first cracked open the book and started reading, I thought, okay, I've heard this argument before. Soil degradation. Every time I teach the first half of US History, I talk about tobacco and how it was really, really bad for the soil. That. Okay, David, we've heard this.

[Dr. David Silkenat]

Yeah, right.

[Brandon Jett]

Every freshman has read it.

[Dr. David Silkenat]

Yeah.

[Brandon Jett]

But you. You really do a lot more than just emphasize, okay, tobacco was bad for soil. In fact, you. You make an argument that cotton was significantly worse for the soil across the US South. And then you extend it even farther and suggest that that degraded soil damaged ecosystems in myriad ways that perhaps haven't really been emphasized as much as tobacco degrading soil. So would you just explain A little bit what happened to. To the rich, productive soils of the south and what the consequences of tobacco and cotton production were in terms of the.

[Dr. David Silkenat]

So one of the things I'm trying to do in the book that's different than what people have done already on this question is that lots of agricultural historians have talked about.

Soil depletion, the leaching of minerals and nutrients from the soil, but also soil erosion, which is related, but also a sort of different environmental phenomenon. They've talked about that. People have talked about that for generations.

What I wanted to do, though, was to sort of think about then what happens to all of that soil that is run off from the fields. What happens to the rivers that are bordering plantations. What happens then to the fish that are living in those rivers? What happens to the. You know, and sort of. How do we think ecologically about some of these choices? So I was trying to go sort of beyond the sort of bounds of the plantation, because when we think about how complex these ecosystems are, they are fundamentally interconnected.

But the bigger issue that I was trying to wrestle with in that chapter.

Is that enslavers, from the very beginning started to really see this land not only as a source of great profit, but. But as land that could be used up and then replaced. That there was always a frontier to expand into. That slavery from its very beginnings in the colonial period is built on this model that. That the land itself is not what's important. That's not where the wealth and power is. It's in the people that are enslaved. That's where enslavers understood that their real wealth and power rested and that the land was just a vehicle for doing that.

And they knew that the kinds of agricultural cultivation that they were doing was going to destroy the soil.

And they don't care. I mean, they simply say, look, the economics of this are such that I can farm this land, whether it's tobacco or cotton or other products, take from it what I can get from it, and then as soon as it's no longer profitable for me, I can buy new land further west, cut down the trees and repeat the process. Yeah, you know, and there are some people who say, look, you could fertilize this soil. There's always a handful of guys in Virginia or like, oh, we can. We can, you know, fix things. We can. We can make this work. We can, you know, and they think they have different kinds of schemes for how to crop rotation.

Importing guano from Peru. And other planters look at them and they say, that's Nuts. That doesn't make any sense. Like, yes, you're doing this. It's costing you a phenomenal amount of money. I'm moving to Alabama where I can get a huge amount of land for next to nothing, take my enslaved people there and repeat the process, you know, and when Alabama is worn out, I can go further west and, you know, thinking about, you know, the big story of slavery in the American south, starting the colonial era, going all the way up to the Civil War, it's about the expansion of slavery westward.

And part of the argument I'm making both in that chapter and the rest of the book is that drive, that push that that enslavers have to expand the slavery frontier further west. It was driven by a particular.

Environmental mind frame about how land should be owned and how it should be worked and how it should be disposed of. So I talk in the book about a sort of leading edge of this slavery frontier and then a sort of trailing edge behind the leaves. Charles Ball saw this land that wasn't good for anything.

And there are tremendous consequences of this environmental framework above and beyond sort of what's happening for individual planters. Thinking about.

Wars that the United States wages to acquire new land, whether it's wars against native peoples, war against Mexico that is driven in part by this insatiable demand by enslavers for. For further land further west. If we think about Indian removal, sort of awful use of a genocide that is driven by this demand for westward expansion. If you think about the domestic slave trade in which a million enslaved people are sold from the Upper south to the Lower south, that is also in part driven by this environmental framework. So there are big consequences for seeing the land in this particular way. And it really does shape sluggard as an institution and by consequence shapes the lives of millions of enslaved people.

[Brandon Jett]

Absolutely. How were the lives of enslaved people shaped by this environmental mindset that white plantation owners had?

[Dr. David Silkenat]

Well, in any number of ways, you know. So one of the.

Phenomenon that I think we're all familiar with as historians of the American south.

Is this growth of a domestic slave trade that separates husbands from wives, brothers from sisters, parents from children. That is driven in part by.

This expansionist model for how slavery needs to work.

If we think about sort of the labor that enslaved people are doing, one of the phenomenon you find across this enslaved frontier are gangs of enslaved people who are sent basically to clear cut land to create new plantations.

There's a bit where Solomon Northup.

In 12 Years a Slave, he's describing being sent.

Up. I Think it's the Red river in Louisiana to where enslaver is establishing a new plantation. He describes this beautiful forest and just how sort of Eden like it is. And then he describes, we spent the next six months tearing the whole thing down and, you know, mourning for not only the forest that's lost, but also the brutality that's embedded within that.

So there are real consequences for enslaved people. And when we think about, you know, ultimately the causes of the Civil War, right, When we think about these debates over the expansion of slavery in the west, that is the sort of the dominant political fights over that culminate in the Civil War. Those debates exist in part because enslavers insist that slavery needs to expand in order to survive. And they talk about this not only in the lead up to the war, they talk about this in the ordinances of secession, that they see a need for expansion being driven by the environment as.

Absolute necessity for them. And that secession is the only way they can guarantee that's going to happen. And so there are, you know, there are connections, I think, you know.

Between this environmental worldview that enslavers have and all everything else that's going on.

[Brandon Jett]

So you, you have a couple of chapters where you look at what I'm going to call impediments, right? And slavers who want to come into a new place for them, a new place and establish cotton plantations, they see things like forests and swamps as these major impediments to that kind of economic development. And they need to, to do something about it. And you, you paint this really fantastic picture of a South pre kind of plantation style agriculture that is rich with, with pine forests and important swamp ecosystems. What happens to, to these forests and these swamps? You already mentioned deforestation a bit. But what happens to these really important ecosystems that are across the south as this frontier of slavery expands?

[Dr. David Silkenat]

Well, there is a.

There's a couple things that are going on. You know, one.

Is that enslaved people understand.

The environment in very particular ways, right? They understand ways in which they can use the landscape for their advantage. They understand, for instance, that forests are tremendous places to run away to if you need to. There are tremendous places to hunt if you need to supplement your enslaved diet. And all enslaved people need to do that. If you needed to gather or trap, you could do that. If you wanted to have religious services, you could go to the woods to do that. If you want to apply the slave rebellion, you know, there's ways in which these wild spaces, if you will, were tremendous.

Venues for that. And if you Want to become a maroon. That is to say, if you wanted to escape from slavery, not by fleeing to the north, but by fleeing into.

Wild, impenetrable spaces, swamps are great places to do that. We have maroon communities across the south, most famously in the great dismal swamp on the border of Virginia and north Carolina. But there are swamps in south Carolina. There's obviously swamps. Swamps in Louisiana and other places where African Americans flee from slavery and sometimes live for generations in swamps, which is an extraordinarily difficult life. There's a reason why people don't live in swamps, but they recognized that life in a swamp was preferable to a life in bondage.

And enslavers saw these same spaces as a fundamental threat to their authority. So they saw them as resources first. You could cut down the trees and do all kinds of things with that, Whether that's firewood, building plantations, clearing land for cultivation. Steamboats, Steamboats use up a phenomenal amount of wood.

[Brandon Jett]

Right.

[Dr. David Silkenat]

And we think about sort of the importance of the steamboat for the Mississippi.

You know, they are primarily burning wood for fuel. They are the dominant kind of engine they're using. They have surface two kinds of steamboat engines. The one that becomes the dominant one, because it's slightly faster, is one that is just tremendously fuel hungry.

And, you know, enslaved people are cutting down most of the trees that are being fed onto these steamboats, which then is facilitating both the slave trade and the cotton production.

So, you know, enslavers see advantages to transforming the landscape, advantages in terms of the economics, advantages in terms of their ability to control their enslaved population.

There are efforts to transform swamps by. The best example of this is there is a dismal swamp company that's established slightly before the American revolution, founded by a number of prominent Virginians, including George Washington. And what they want to do is they want to take the swamp they knew was a.

Refuge for maroons and drain the swamp. So Washington drained the swamp. Needs to be very different in the 18th century. Right?

[Brandon Jett]

Right. Man, that has changed.

[Dr. David Silkenat]

Yeah, but they. And what do they do? They sort of dig canals through the swamp. They try to literally transform it into.

Profitable land for them and land that they could similarly exploit.

And thinking about other kinds of forests, One of the.

Areas that particularly interests me are the turpentine forests, which were.

Very prevalent, especially in eastern North Carolina. There's sort of a band of.

Trees, of pine trees that produce turpentine that used to stretch from North Carolina all the way into Texas and sort of a crescent shape and the way these were cultivated, it's a little bit like cultivating maple syrup, but not really. Enslaved people would be sent into these turpentine forests, orchards to extract the turpentine. They do that by cutting gashes into the tree, sort of a V shaped gash into the tree, which would then cause the tree to essentially bleed out the turpentine. And they would carve a bucket, a little cavity in the tree itself. So instead of like attaching a barrel or a bucket like you would for maple syrup, they're actually carving a cavity into the tree.

And they start doing this during the colonial era. And for enslaved people who are sent in to do this work, it's tremendously difficult work. They are working, you know, covered in basically in raw turpentine, which is not good for your skin, it's not good for your breathing, right?

And there's sort of two gangs of people. There's one gang who are called dippers, who are going and collecting this raw turpentine to be processed, and another group that are called chippers, which have to go and refresh the gases in the tree such that, you know, after a number of years, the gases are go up in the tree. Frederick Law Olmsted famously described as scarifying the tree.

And one of the things that happened there is that they started doing this in the colonial era. When the turpentine demand for turpentine takes off in the 1830s and 1840s, enslavers say, great, we can make a huge profit here if we, instead of just using one side of the tree, if we start to have cavities on three sides of the tree, and they do this knowing that that kind of intensive extraction is going to generate them a lot of profit, but it's also going to kill the tree, right? And so within the course of a generation, you know, this entire industry basically self destructs because. And the trees themselves, look, once they die, they're not replaced by other turpentine trees, they're replaced by other kinds of pine trees, trees that are beautiful but worthless for turpentine production.

And I think that sort of speak, that example of the sort of brutality, the labor on the one hand that enslaved people are doing and extracting from this forest, but the choices there that enslavers are making to value profit over sustainability I think is quite powerful because.

[Brandon Jett]

It'S, I'm just thinking, as you were.

[Dr. David Silkenat]

It's not as if they, in all these cases, they know what they're doing, they know what the consequences will be, and they don't care.

[Brandon Jett]

Yeah. Sustainability never enters into their mindset. Right. It's just like, let's just go and get as much as we can and move on.

[Dr. David Silkenat]

Well, and I think that reflects, obviously, the thing that comes to my mind is more recent debates about sustainability and the choices that we all have been making for the past century.

Where we know going and driving our car is going to destroy the planet, but we do it anyway.

Yeah. So I think there's.

A real ethos that's embedded within slavery as a system that leads to certain kinds of environmental action.

[Brandon Jett]

Absolutely.

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[Brandon Jett]

So we talked a little bit about forests and swamps and how they prove to be major obstacles for enslavers for a number of reasons, both in terms of their. Their plantation kind of dreams and visions, but also as places where, as you suggested, maroon communities could be established. So a threat to their authority and something that needs to be removed. But rivers also formed a really interesting natural resource in the South. You describe them as both the. The arteries for slavery's expansion.

[Dr. David Silkenat]

Right. This.

[Brandon Jett]

This is how enslavers are able to kind of move across the landscape and get their product to and from market. But at the same time, rivers as. As we have found out throughout history. Right. Are incredibly unpredictable, hard to control, subject to flooding and the like. So I was hoping you could explain this kind of dual understanding of waterways in the south as both. And this seems to kind of be a theme in the book, too. These are. These are things that are.

Great for opportunity in terms of expanding slavery, but also present some serious problems in terms of kind of management.

[Dr. David Silkenat]

Right. So, I mean, I think that the great example of this, of course, is the Mississippi, because it's a big example, you know, and that controlling the Mississippi becomes one of the major objectives of.

European colonizers and later by Americans.

And the benefits the Mississippi gives, obviously, it's a great river for navigating up and down, especially when you have a steamboat. It's a great source of nutrients. That the flooding of the Mississippi is what makes the Mississippi Valley so fertile, what makes it so desirable as real estate for enslavers. When we think about where the enormous plantations are in the American south, where the real wealth and power of enslavers were, Mississippi is the epicenter of that, at least in the 19th century.

And enslavers recognized, okay, we want to benefit from the centuries of flooding that the Mississippi has done, but we do not want flooding to happen while we're growing our cotton or sugar or what have you.

You know. And so they start to build levees. And this is. Happens very early on in. In French settlement in Louisiana. It's picked up then by the Spanish and then obviously by. By the United States after that's the Louisiana Purchase. And building this levy system really becomes tied to the growth of slavery within the Mississippi Valley. That enslaved people are the ones who are building the levees. They are the ones who are carrying the burden when.

Levees fail and they need to be repaired, which is extraordinarily dangerous.

[Brandon Jett]

As you describe, constant. It seems like repairing and monitoring these levees requires constant attention and focus.

[Dr. David Silkenat]

Well, enslavers describe.

You know, the vigilance you need in watching your levies with the same kind of language they use for the vigilance. You need to prepare for a slave revolt. You need to constantly be aware of what's happening, because you know that the consequence of the levies failing are tremendous. Just like slave revolt, the consequences are. Could be.

Enormous. And one of the things that happens with the Mississippi is that as these levee systems get built and they get sort of, they expand up the river, but then they also get larger and larger and larger, is that when the river no longer can spill its banks, the sediment in the river ends up falling down to the base of the bed of the river, which means that the higher the levees get, the higher the bed of the river between the levees gets, which means that by the time you get to the civil War, the river is significantly above the level of the fields that surrounds it.

[Brandon Jett]

You know, what could possibly go wrong.

[Dr. David Silkenat]

Exactly right. And when we think about.

You know, what then does happen when levees break? And levees are. Are inherently, as we know, obviously from Hurricane Katrina and other more recent events, when levees break, it has.

Given the topography of Louisiana, in particular, it's devastating. And often enslaved people are paying the heaviest cost when it does flood. One example I give in the book is of the Bellchase plantation.

This was a sugar plantation near New Orleans. Levees broke in the early 1850s. The flood waters would have inundated slave cabins. Slave cabins tend to be on low ground. The big house where the enslaver lives, of course, is usually on the highest point of land, so he's usually okay. But enslaved quarters are inundated. So whatever property enslaved people keep in their cabins, that's all gone. Their homes are destroyed. You know, the enslaver who owned Belchase plantation said, look, I've lost my sugar crop. What do I do about that? Well, I need to sell off much of my property to make ends meet, and that property sold off for enslaved people. So he has an enormous auction in New Orleans where he sells. He lists the names of all the people he's selling and their ages, and you can sort of reconstruct where their families are, and.

You can sort of think through what are the consequences that led to this moment, led to these families being sold and broken up. And they're embedded within these environmental choices, some of which were quite recent.

And some of which date back decades, if not centuries. And we don't know what happened to these enslaved people when this plantation community gets broken up, but we do know what happens to the Guy who owned Belchase Plantation, he was a guy by the name of Judah P. Benjamin. He ends up getting elected to the Senate from Louisiana shortly thereafter and then goes on to be secretary of everything at some point for Jefferson Davis in the Confederacy. You know, and so he's able to sort of walk away from this environmental destruction.

More or less on the same footing as beforehand. But the people who he enslaved have to have these, you know, series of catastrophes as a consequence. They have to try to fix the levy, they have to. They lose their property and they lose their families and their homes. Absolutely.

[Brandon Jett]

So kind of getting back to that theme that, that, that you started thinking through when you were originally kind of thinking through this idea of the book, this kind of environmentalism, this kind of racism that is embedded in American society. And here is a perfect example of how those two are so firmly interconnected. Another thing that I was thinking through again, I was reading this book in October when I had no power because we were just hit with a hurricane in southwest Florida. And so I was just drawing all of these connections between what we were experiencing and what I was reading in the book. And you made an argument where you said that slavery did not cause an 18th and 19th century version of climate change, but it did, you say, exacerbate the effects that severe weather had on the ecosystem and on the human geography. And as I think you would probably agree, on the lives, or perhaps disproportionately on the lives of enslaved people. So would you kind of walk us through what you mean by that statement, what was going on here in the 18th and 19th century?

[Dr. David Silkenat]

Well, so the American south then is now suffered from hurricanes. We have more of them now for obvious reasons. But, you know, then they were equally destructive, but sometimes in some ways more destructive in part because there's no forecasting, there's no way to know they're coming.

And in what I found was that, you know, enslaved people suffered the worst effects when hurricanes hit. Right. That when they hit the South Carolina low country, when they hit the Gulf coast.

You know, the accounts we have are very often that the houses of enslavers usually survive those storms intact, but the slave quarters don't. Right.

The fragility of those structures and the people living in them.

Are very vulnerable. And slavery is flourishing in locations that are very hurricane prone. Right. So if we think about.

Where is the sort of demographic hearts of American slavery during the colonial era, it's very much like in the low country of South Carolina. Right. Which when the hurricanes hit, multiple hurricanes Hit enslaved people are paying some of the heaviest. They're losing their lives in these hurricanes. If you think about what a rice plantation looks like, that's not where you want to be in a hurricane. These are sites that are already.

Adjacent to a river. They are in many cases flooded land already before the hurricane hits.

And so we have many accounts of enslaved people losing their lives in those cases. There's a really well documented hurricane that hits the Gulf coast.

In the 1850s.

Where it's called the Last Island Hurricane because one of the places it hits the hurricane hits first is an island called Last island, which was an island off the coast of Louisiana that was basically a resort island for planters. So they had milder weather than the mainland. So planters would go there in the summer and of course they would take their enslaved servants and what have you with them. So there was a sort of a hotel and some cottages and lots of slave quarters. Then the hurricane hits and basically splits the entire island in half. You know, who loses their lives? It's, you know, lots of people lose their lives, but you know, the enslaved people on the island are hit disproportionately when the hurricane then hits the mainland. We have the. Have an account by an enslaved person of what that's like from his perspective. He describes seeing slave quarters being lifted hundreds of feet in the air and then smashing to the ground during a hurricane. And you know, I've lived through a couple of hurricanes. I. I know you have. They are very scary when you, when they know they're coming, when you don't know they're coming. You know, that must be even orders of magnitude more, more, more intimidating to have that kind of destruction wrought on you when you're, when you're not prepared for it.

[Brandon Jett]

Absolutely. I was thinking through as I was reading that really compelling description of what this hurricane looked like from the perspective of enslaved people, just how fortunate we are. I have hurricane proof windows and we know it's coming. They're predicting the storm surge. And yeah, when all this stuff just appears, maybe not out of nowhere, but you certainly don't have the, the advanced warning systems that we have today. So maybe a day or two where you're starting to think something doesn't feel right, but just the level of destruction that would be thrust upon people relatively quickly. I couldn't even imagine what that felt like or what that actually was like. As you suggested, hurricanes are terrifying enough and we know some much about them now. So yeah, I was really, really drawn in by that description. So you Already talked about this a little bit. But in the last chapter, you argue that secession was in part a consequence of the environmental destruction that occurred across the south in the 19th century. So, you know, whenever I'm teaching the build up to the Civil War, I often emphasize expansion, but also the political context around that expansion. They need senators, they've got to protect the Senate and the like. But, but you argue that, that there's something else involved, that, that it's the spread of slavery because they need fresh land because they have destroyed what's, what's left behind. And so I'm not going to ask you to just rehash that. But one question I, I had, and you know, Ed Ayers just wrote a book a couple of years ago called Southern Journey. And he says, you know, the south is really peculiar because it's one of the only places he can, he can think of where the elite kind of pick up and move every generation, which is just kind of bizarre. So I don't know if you know the answer to this, and I apologize if this is just a curveball, but was there ever any thought to like, hey, this, this is an unsustainable model. At some point we're going to run out of space and we should, we should rethink this, this kind of approach.

[Dr. David Silkenat]

You know, there are occasionally.

Planters who, who talk about that, who say, look, maybe, maybe what we should do is we should, we should rejig our understanding with the landscape, that we should embrace crop rotation, we should get fertilizer. We should, you know, and, you know, if you read agricultural journals that are these planter journals that become very popular in the 1830s and 1840s, and they give, they have conventions where they get together to talk about different ways of maintaining the soil. What's striking about those is the extent to which people read those journals and then don't do any of it. Yeah, right. Like, they sort of strike me as sort of like fitness magazines. People get them and they say, oh, I know what I'm supposed to do, but I'm going to go have a cheeseburger anyway.

And I think part of it is they sort of recognize that, sure, I could do these things, but, but it doesn't make, it doesn't make financial sense for them to do it. So the handful of the Edmund Ruffins or what have you, who are articulating.

A vision of a different kind of landscape usage.

Are often sort of shouting into the wind because most of their neighbors are not paying attention to it.

[Brandon Jett]

And I guess if the most valuable commodity is human beings. Right? You can transport them. So the kind of idea, well, we need to make this productive in perpetuity is just not necessarily there.

[Dr. David Silkenat]

And if you think about.

The mentality of.

The southern political elite, they are thinking in the 1850s about expansion beyond. Well, we now think, you know, so they're, they're thinking about Cuba, they're thinking about Mexico, they're thinking about other parts of Latin America. They are, they have an expansionist view. Not only, you know, are they going to have slavery in the Mexican session, not only they're going to try to, to, to, you know, Kansas and Nebraska, but they're, they're thinking southward.

About, about where they could, what's the next frontier for them, you know, and some of them were actually doing things about it, you know, filibusters and what have you.

You know. And so that last chapter is in part trying to sort of explain how, how this lands, this environmental worldview leads to secession and civil war. But the other sort of half of that chapter is trying to get at.

How the environment shapes how we should think about emancipation. That, you know, the, the past couple of generations there's been this real debate, I think, as most listeners know, about how we're supposed to understand emancipation. Does Is emancipation a sort of top down Lincoln Emancipation Proclamation model or is it a bottom up enslaved people liberating themselves by running away and what have you.

And I guess more recently people have said, well, actually we need to add the role of the army and the ways in which geography and the specificity of that shapes emancipation.

And what I wanted to do in that chapter is say, well, okay, all those things are important conversations to have. But we should also think about how landscape factors into that and how the knowledge that enslaved people had about the environment helped them both to escape from bondage, but also how that helped them to be.

To aid the Union war effort in defeating the Confederacy. So you know, the enslaved people know how to navigate through swamps, they know how to navigate through southern forests. They know how to forage and they know what crops, you know, what, what wild foods are edible and they know to avoid poison ivy, right? Like there's all these things that they know how to do that shape the way that emancipation unfolds. And there's some very specific environmental things that happened during the war that also shaped the nature of emancipation. So there's a drought at a certain point, rivers are low. And so you can think about, you know, rivers that are usually unfordable all of a sudden become you know, easy to walk across. There's a famous image of enslaved people crossing the Rappahannock, you know, which is usually not something you can do very easily, but in the one particular summer the river is very low and they're able to walk across. For those people, their freedom was predicated upon a particular climate and or weather circumstances, I should say.

[Brandon Jett]

Absolutely.

[Dr. David Silkenat]

So I was trying to sort of, you know, try to explore this long standing debate about how emancipation works. But adding in the environment and the environmental knowledge that enslaved people had into.

[Brandon Jett]

That conversation, you also make an argument about the way in which emancipation prompted white and black Southerners to really re evaluate their relationship to the land. I'd love it if you could maybe explain to us what that reevaluation looked like and what some of the consequences of that reevaluation were.

[Dr. David Silkenat]

Sure. So one of the things that the book does at the very end, sort of foreshadowing what's to come over the next century, is that the end of slavery and the rise of sharecropping and other kinds of free but semi free labor in some ways.

Leads to very different kinds of choices about the landscape. One of the things you see with sharecropping is that formerly enslaved people are now farming the same land over and over and over again. The sort of mobility that was embedded within slavery, that this constant expansion of finding new land, that that gets replaced by relatively static conceptions of land ownership, you know, and that former enslavers really become landlords, much more so than they were prior to the Civil War and manifested in different kinds of land usage. I mean, one of the ways in which that's evident is that before the Civil War, under slavery, the south is the region of the country that uses the least amount of fertilizer. Fertilizer was widespread in the mid 19th century in Europe, in American North. But in the antebellum south it was very rarely used, simply because there was always ways in which you could acquire new land and transform it into.

Land for cultivation.

One of the things you start to see is as the south becomes the region that uses the most fertilizer, starting really in the 1870s and 1880s, and they sort of see fertilizer as a way of rejuvenating the soil that had been.

Ruined in many ways by both erosion and depletion from repeatedly cultivating the same crop over and over again, their dependence on fertilizer really signifies a very different kind of relationship to the land than what had existed before the Civil War.

[Brandon Jett]

Absolutely. And what about for black Southerners, how is their understanding of the land changing as a result of emancipation?

[Dr. David Silkenat]

Oh, well, one of the things that happens. And there's a. There's a. There's a conversation that happens during the war itself and in the immediate aftermath about what claims formerly enslaved people have to the land.

You know, what are the. What is owed to African Americans for in some cases, centuries of unpaid labor. Unpaid. Were transforming the landscape. Do they have. Does that lead to some kind of claim to a particular land?

You know, there's a very famous meeting that Sherman has with formerly enslaved people and their representatives at the end of the March of the Sea where they tell him, look, we. What we want more than anything else is the claim to the lands that we have worked for generations, that we feel that our labor entitles us to that. And obviously, those kinds of land redistribution doesn't happen, at least not on any significant scale.

[Brandon Jett]

Right.

[Dr. David Silkenat]

But there is a sense among African Americans that.

The land is going to be fertile in a way that it hasn't been. There's a speech that I quote in the book by Frederick Douglass where he's talking about.

This is. Well, after emancipation. He's talking about how this land that had been punished through slavery now has a chance to be productive for free workers, and that leads to a reinvention of what the land is and how African Americans understand their relationship to it.

[Brandon Jett]

Absolutely. Okay, so bear with me on this one, but I don't want to present you as a presentist in the historical profession. I know there was quite a bit of controversy about that idea a few months ago, but honestly, it's impossible to avoid connections between the arguments you make in your book and the climate crisis today. So do you see any lessons to be learned or connections between then and now, between. From your work on this book?

What's the big takeaway for all of us?

[Dr. David Silkenat]

Do you think so? I mean, the label of presentist is, I guess, a slur in the historical profession, at least among some quarters. Sure.

In my mind, everything I've ever written historically, any question that interests me.

They interest me in part because they interest me about events in the past, but they also are questions that interest me because they interest me in the present.

[Brandon Jett]

As you suggest it, with Hurricane Katrina kind of prompting your thinking along these lines.

[Dr. David Silkenat]

Well, I mean, everything that I've written in my career has been in some ways shaped by the world in which I am living. And.

When we think about how scholarship evolves over time.

You know, one tenth of it, I think, is scholars responding to Other scholars and the work happening internally within the profession. But the other nine, ten is about how the world around us is changing. And, you know, I'm never consciously doing that, saying the glue. I'm looking right about Black Lives Matter and about the climate crisis.

[Brandon Jett]

Right.

[Dr. David Silkenat]

But the questions I gravitate to or the questions that interest me, you know, that we're thinking about today and we're wrestling with today. And I think history, to be relevant, needs to address questions that people are wrestling with right now. And I think the fact that we as a species are wrestling with such tremendous environmental challenges and that we as Americans are.

Continuing to wrestle with the legacies of slavery and segregation and centuries of profound racism and white supremacy, I think we're all.

To not address those things seems to be. To be failing what the job of the historian is. I think we're supposed to be truthful to the past. We're supposed to be, you know, to listen to our sources and to let them dictate to some degree the evidence and the interpretations that we put forward.

But, you know, if what we write, what we research, doesn't have any.

Resonance with the present, then why bother?

[Brandon Jett]

Yeah.

[Dr. David Silkenat]

What are we doing other than just a, you know, writing things for our own amusement? You know, I think scholarship needs to speak to the present moment and provide some context. You know, I think part of the argument I'm making in the book more implicitly than explicitly, although explicitly in some places, the scars on the land, to use the title, you know, these are scars that were inflicted during.

Two centuries of slavery, but that, you know, scars take a long time to heal, if they ever heal at all. And if you understand this history, it will help to explain.

At least in a small part, some of the challenges we continue to face.

You know, if we look at the places in the south right now that are so struggling the most with environmental challenges, whether that's rising sea levels or Greece, hurricanes, what have you. And you sort of map onto that, the history of racism and slavery, Those things are connected.

If we look at Louisiana and look at where Cancer Alley is and the ways in which.

Chemical pollutions of a variety of kinds have led to, you know, whole communities suffering tremendously in the present. You know, those are connected to the history of petroleum development in the 20th century, but it's also connected to the development of sugar cultivation in the. In the 18th and 19th centuries. And.

I mean, all. All of which is to say I, you know, I'm constantly thinking about the present when I'm writing about the past, because I'm living in the present and I'm writing for people in the present. You know, I'm not. People in the past are dead. I can't write for them, I can write about them, but I'm writing for the present and for the future, hopefully, you know, and that involves understanding where we are now and what challenges we face.

[Brandon Jett]

Yeah, absolutely. And I think one of the things that just will stay with me forever after having read this book is just the mindset. I think oftentimes when we think of agriculture, it's seems like it's a little more natural. Right. And, and you think that people are more in tuned with the natural world, but in many ways what, what you're arguing is like, yeah, they know what they're doing is really, really problematic, but they just don't care. They think they can, can always move to the next place. And as we're finding out now, we don't really have another place to move to that's viable as of yet. So maybe we should really do more to make the place we're on more sustainable. Mars.

[Dr. David Silkenat]

Right. This is, this is planet we've got.

And we've not done a great job taking care of it and we've not done a great job of dealing with.

The legacies of centuries of racism. And I think we need to deal with those and many other problems we want to survive.

[Brandon Jett]

Absolutely. Well, the book is Scars on the An Environmental History of the Slavery in the American south and it is available now through Oxford University Press. David Silknett, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

[Dr. David Silkenat]

Oh well, thank you so much for having me. I really, really enjoyed our conversation and.

[Brandon Jett]

Thank you for listening to new books in the.