As an agricultural society, the pre-war South's wealth came from exploitation of its environment. Why did the Civil War represent a watershed moment in the history of Southern agriculture? How did practices change and what were the consequences? What did Southerners mean by "redeeming" the land?
1. How did Southern soils and environment present challenges to Southern agriculturalists? How did they adapt to them? How did Southern agriculture function before the war? Why did the long-term viability of slavery depend on new lands and fresh soil? Describe the environmental degradation that Southern shifting agriculture and free-range animal husbandry produced. What agricultural reforms did wealthy planters advocate?
2. How did military defensive works affect the Southern environment? Why was the cotton South especially vulnerable to military operations? How did military operations affect forests and fences? How did armies' resource appropriation affect the land? What was the nutritional effect of the Union blockade? What were the effects of labor shortages and land abandonment? How did Southerners' reliance on extensive land-use practices make the land more vulnerable to degradation during wartime?
3. Why did farmers turn to cotton after the war, and with what ecological consequences? Why had farmers diversified during the war and why did that change? Why did they abandon crop rotation? What was the impact of decline of livestock and why did the decline happen? What were the benefits and problems associated with fertilizer? What was the effect on farmers' self-sufficiency?
4. How did emancipation affect the Southern system of extensive agriculture? Describe the contest between whites and blacks over labor arrangements after the war and how sharecropping became so common. How did this new system affect land maintenance, and with what ecological consequnces? What explains the attempt to close the open range, and with what consequences to the land? How did sharecropping and tenantry change land use and the landscape? Describe how changing laws and customs about free-range animals was a system of racial control.
5. Why did cotton acreage increase so dramatically after the war? Why was the switch from extensive to intensive agriculture a failure? Describe the impacts of soil exhaustion and erosion. Why did abandonment of land not help fertility, as it formerly had? Why did cotton decline in profitability? How do environmental limits explain farmers' inability to get out of cotton production? Describe population movement after the war and reasons for it. How do ecological shifts explain rapid Southern urban growth? How do patterns of environmental change correlate with migration? How did migration spread ecological damage?
Why did the apparent recover of the South after Civil War and Reconstruction fizzle out? What was the impact of ecological calamities? Why was prewar agriculture not sustainable in any case? How did ecoloigcal processes make the agricultural landscape the South's "natural enemy" and the Union's "natural ally"? Why were Southern farmers, black and white, unable after the war to "redeem" the land?