Lecture #16: Planning Against Disaster

Suggested Readings:

Erwin Hargrove & Paul Conkin, TVA: Fifty Years of Grass-roots Bureaucracy, 1983.
Ronald C. Tobey, Saving the Prairies, 1981.  (on Clements & grassland ecology)
Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s, 1979.
Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River, 1995.
Neil M. Maher, Nature's New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American Environmental Movement, 2007.

Outline

I. TVA: Conservation and the Vision of Regional Planning

Tennessee River: most eastern rainfall, great volume, Muscle Shoals 2nd only to Niagara
National Defense Act 1916: nitrate plant at Muscle Shoals, Wilson Dam completed 1925
linkage of hydroelectricity with energy-intensive industry (nitrates, aluminum, nuclear), and hence with military expenditures during wartime; boosted in South as fertilizer and power source for urban-industrial development, with Feds providing capital
Muscle Shoals controversy of 1920s: public vs private power; local development in northern Alabama vs wider power source; regional planning vs particularistic development
Nebraska Sen. George Norris key promoter of hydro development, numerous bills, compromises
factions: N Dems & W/MW Reps support public power; NE Reps oppose govt comp with private
Harding, Coolidge, Hoover all oppose public intervention, but Hoover great conservationist
FDR's election broke deadlock on Tennessee Valley, broadened mandate toward large-scale regional planning which FDR had derived from numerous sources: uncle Frederick Delano, urban & regional planning, Howard Odum's regional studies at Chapel Hill (Odum's sons would go on to be among leading ecologists of next generation), etc.
1933: Tennessee Valley Authority Act creates TVA with goal of region-wide planning
original constitutional basis for Federal water acts‑-navigation, flood control‑-now broadened to include hydropower development regionwide, but also social planning
TVA designed to modernize depressed farming region of eroded hill country: agents educate farm families about anti-erosion measures, construct new houses, electrical methods, business techniques, wage labor in construction, highways, urban links, tourism

II. CCC: Conservation and the Army of Unemployed

Key ally of TVA and other Fed agencies: Civilian Conservation Corps, created 1933:
recruit young men, 17-23 to fight unemployment and supply labor for conservation measures
$30/month, room, board, camps around country for anti-erosion, planting, roads, parks
by 1939, 8.5 mill man-days to conservation, 2.18 mill men employed, 1.575 billion trees planted, 140,000 miles roads & trails built
CCC as scientific management and planning applied to social/economic problems, but also almost incidentally a crucial labor force conservation throughout nation

III. Erosion and Communal Disaster: Soil Conservation

erosion as ruling metaphor for not just ecological, but economic and social failure, waste
varieties of erosive experience: sheet erosion, gully erosion, wind erosion
(NB also big floods of 1920s, attributed to deforestation at river headwaters [cf. Marsh])
painter Alexandre Hogue, b. 1898, as important regionalist/realist painter in late 1930s, Great Plains and desert SW as chief subjects; religious symbolism of crucified land

IV. Rise and Fall of the Grassland School of Ecology

Charles Bessey's botany classes at U. Nebraska, 1880s-90s, attracted star group of students; anti-nature study, sought rigorous scientific training, authored classic botany text: Botany for High Schools & Colleges, 1880, to promote serious HS science
students formed Sem Bot club, leading members: Roscoe Pound & Frederic Edward Clements
Bessey opposed to non-laboratory botany as non-rigorous, too much like natural history
Clements & others attracted to relations among plant species, hence left lab to study plant communities, but applied rigorous Bessey's scientific techniques to work
1905: Research Methods in Ecology promoted transect, bisect (roots), and quadrat to map co-occurrence of species, led to quantitative approach to ecological research
Clements argued that essential ecological unit of vegetation was formation, a super-organism with an identity apart from individual species comprising it, with genuine life cycle of its own, passing through regular phases toward maturity
sequence of stages was succession; stable mature stage, capability of existing indefinitely in the absence of disturbance, was climax
(succession concept anticipated by Eugene Warming in Denmark, Henry C. Cowles in Chicago)
super-organism actually a very problematic concept, as later ecologists would demonstrate
crisis in Clements' paradigm would come in 1930s, when serious drought succeeded in destroying the supposedly "stable" climax; Clementsian school eventually declined, drifted into range management without guiding vision of stable climax
scientific techniques would be among those called into service of regional planning

V. Dust Bowl

Plains drought worst in nation's history, 9 years below ave rain, 1934 worst ever at 9", origins not merely climatic, however: overgrazing, land plowed too deep by dry-farming techniques, WWI expansion had prompted massive investment in new land, tractors, equipment, and subsequent depression brought bankruptcy
net result was that land was no longer protected by crop cover, open to winds
May 1934 ushered in Dust Bowl when 9 May storm carried 350 million tons to East Coast in single storm; massive duststorms eroded hundreds of millions tons of soil
govt intervention: shelterbelts (cf. Marsh's climatic theories), contour plowing to compensate for grid field boundaries, Resettlement Administration to relocate farms off of marginal lands (end of frontier vision), Taylor Grazing Act to end homesteading on rangelands; reliance on experts to redirect social destiny of rural land & people
Alexandre Hogue"s "Mother Earth Laid Bare" (1938), "The Crucified Land" (1939): icons
technology to solve technological prob: but what of underlying social/economic system?