Tobacco, cotton, and pine plantations seem to represent the environmental impacts on the South, as discussed in Southern United States: An Environmental History, edited by Donald Davis et al. Further, the activities of war typically cause a huge amount of environmental destruction. Because more battles of the Civil War took place in the South, the southern landscape suffered much more than that of the North. Lisa Brady describes these outcomes in War upon the Land: Military Strategy and the Transformation of Southern Landscapes during the American Civil War.
Although the settlement at Plymouth, Massachusetts, was called Plimouth Plantation, the real plantations were in the South, and S. Max Edelson describes them in Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina. Two important books focus on the Carolinas, specifically, Charleston, South Carolina, and the Blue Ridge Mountains, a major region of the Appalachians in North Carolina. They are Angela Halfacre’s A Delicate Balance: Constructing a Conservation Culture in the South Carolina Lowcountry and Kathryn Newfont’s Blue Ridge Commons: Environmental Activism and Forest History in Western North Carolina.
