Let Us Now Praise Famous Gullies by Paul S Sutter

Let Us Now Praise Famous Gullies by Paul S Sutter

Uses the unlikely story of Providence Canyon - and the 1930s contest over its origins and meaning - to recount the larger history of dramatic human-induced soil erosion across the South and to highlight the role that the region and its erosive agricultural history played in the rise of soil science and soil conservation in America.

Paul Sutter finds in these thousand acres of backwoods Georgia a powerful and complicated story of humans on the landHe is a wonderful storyteller, but more, he digs deeply into the past to explain how and why this place became both a “park” and a “horrible example" of soil erosion. This is one of the finest local environmental histories we have, and it offers important insights for all of us today.

-- Donald Worster * author of A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir *

So what is there in a book about west Georgia gullies for academic readers? Quite a bit, actually, for these are very instructive gullies that illustrate the use and abuse of soil worldwide. Writing skillfully, with a wry eye for environmental irony, historian Sutter traces a history of Providence Canyon, where erosion of ill-kept farmland resulted in some of the most spectacular gullies in the world during the 19th century.

-- B. E. Johansen * Choice *

Public historians will be particularly pleased to read Sutter’s arguments for interpreting this story to visitors at Providence Canyon Park. . . . His vision for bringing the complexities of environmental history to our public parks and forests is certainly a welcome one, and an approach full of exciting possibilities.

-- Al Hester * H-Net Reviews *

Let Us Now Praise Famous Gullies is not light reading, but the book is essential to those interested in the history of geologic surveys and soil conservation from a national perspective, and it is vital to the understanding of a lost economy based on farming, and of how an economically depressed area might rise from the gullies to reinvent itself.

-- A. W. Blalock * Northeast Georgia Living *

This is a great history of forest use, agricultural practice, market dictates, federal policy, and the soils on which they all act. Sutter put in considerable research trying to find any and all mentions of the gullies, unearthing some that might easily have been missed. Not many people, even among environmental historians, go this deeply into the soils and subsurface geology for answers. This book makes clear a host of reasons why we should.

-- James H. Tuten * Environmental History *

Every landscape has two histories, a physical one and a cultural one. In Let Us Now Praise Famous Gullies: Providence Canyon and the Soils of the South, Paul Sutter masterfully integrates these two histories to shed new light on our most underappreciated natural resource and its influence on the history of American conservation. . . . What makes a great environmental history text is the use of multiple lines of evidence and the inclusion of different perspectives. Like historical soil erosion in the American South, Sutter's insight is both broad and deep.

-- Jason P. Julian * Journal of Historical Geography *

PAUL S. SUTTER is an associate professor of history at University of Colorado, Boulder. He is the author of Driven Wild: How the Fight against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780820353821
ISBN 10	0820353825
Title	Let Us Now Praise Famous Gullies
Author	Paul S Sutter
Series	Environmental History And The American South
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	University of Georgia Press
Year published	2018-03-15
Number of pages	288
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.