Blue Ridge Commons: Environmental Activism and Forest History in Western North Carolina

摘要

Kathryn Newfont's book makes an important contribution to southern Appalachian and environmental history. Blue Ridge Commons is centered geographically in western North Carolina, but the narrative interprets the enclosure of natural resource commons and community engagement as a much bigger story. Newfont's first few chapters brilliantly reframe centuries of southern Appalachian residents' behavior in the context of an interconnected "forest commons" (p. 15). Native Americans operated a fishing commons, colonists collected deerskins from the hunting commons, farmers ranged hogs under American chestnut trees in a grazing commons, and pickers harvested plants in the gathering commons.