Where There Are Mountains: An Environmental History of the Southern Appalachians. Donald Edward Davis. University of Georgia Press, 2000; 320 pages, illustrated; hardbound only, $40.

"Environmental History" has been around for at least 60 years, and it has been called that for about 30 years. But this is the first overall environmental history of Southern Appalachia. It deals with everywhere that’s mountainous from southern West Virginia down to northern Alabama and Georgia. Lots of separate watersheds within this region would also be enlightening to read detailed environmental histories about, but what Don Davis does mostly is to describe large patterns of change. Davis, who teaches environmental subjects at Dalton State College in the northwest corner of Georgia, puts most of his emphasis on the earlier four of Appalachia’s five centuries, on the 1500's thru the 1800's. On the subject of logging he also says a lot about the 1900's. About the here and now he says that "the ability of the mountains to fully heal themselves remains jeopardized today by Forest Service policies that continue to ignore the cumulative effects of timber harvesting on mountain watersheds."

But logging is one of his special interests -- he doesn’t try to cover everything else right down to the present. Indeed, there are some details about how mountain people have interacted with nature that detain Don Davis more than one might expect in a region-wide book. Davis lingers especially over little-known details about the Cherokee involvement with nature, and about how the patterns of this changed during the early Cherokee interactions with successive white cultures.

For instance, even though peaches and apples originated in the Old World, the Cherokees fell in love with both of them. Peaches reached the Cherokees in the 1600's through the Spanish, and apples arrived in the early 1700's with British fur traders. Cherokee growers then developed highly-popular strains, especially of apples, that Southern Appalachia’s commercial orchards depended on until World War II or so.

Then there’s fishing with traps and weirs, another Indian speciality -- in this case going back in the mountain region before the Cherokees, back to the Mississippian Indian culture. The wrecking of weirs and fish traps by logging operations -- starting in the late 1800's -- is something that obviously makes Don Davis’ blood boil.

As does the pollution that wiped out most of Appalachia’s species of freshwater mussels, and with them a significant amount of local income earned from freshwater pearls.

Not that everything was all peachy (sorry!) in earlier days. Davis gives some statistics on the amount of timber consumed to feed Appalachia’s early iron-making blast furnaces and forges with charcoal. (Several such iron-making furnaces have been preserved in northern West Virginia. They are stone structures that stand about 30 feet high.) Most of the shift from charcoal to coke as the fuel for making iron didn’t occur until the Civil War era. Prior to that, an average blast furnace would produce about two tons of iron a day and in the process would consume charcoal from about an acre of mature hardwoods each day. The charcoal was made by baking four-foot hardwood logs for a week in carefully-stacked mounds that each held about 20 cords of wood. The simmering mounds had to be tended day and night to control their oxygen intake.

Another topic over which Don Davis lingers is the virgin chestnut forest and the profusion of wildlife that it supported. He reproduces photos of some monumental chestnut trees, beside which people appear the size of dolls.

Don Davis organizes his book by cultural periods: Mississippian, Spanish, Cherokee, Frontier, Antebellum, and Industrial. Besides being fascinating reading, the book supplies a plethora of footnotes and bibliographic entries that can point its readers further in any direction they might like to wander.

Paul Salstrom is an historian. He wrote Appalachia's Path to Dependency (1994).