Overview

It is hard to make a desert in a place that receives sixty inches of rain each year. But after decades of copper mining, all that remained of the old hardwood forests in the Ducktown Mining District of the Southern Appalachian Mountains was a fifty-square mile barren expanse of heavily gullied red hills--a landscape created by sulfur dioxide smoke from copper smelting and destructive logging practices. In Ducktown Smoke , Duncan Maysilles examines this environmental disaster, one of the worst the South has experienced, and its impact on environmental law and Appalachian conservation. Beginning in 1896, the widening destruction wrought in Tennessee, Georgia, and North Carolina by Ducktown copper mining spawned hundreds of private lawsuits, culminating in Georgia v. Tennessee Copper Co. , the U.S. Supreme Court's first air pollution case. In its 1907 decision, the Court recognized for the first time the sovereign right of individual states to protect their natural resources from transborder pollution, a foundational opinion in the formation of American environmental law. Maysilles reveals how the Supreme Court case brought together the disparate forces of agrarian populism, industrial logging, and the forest conservation movement to set a legal precedent that remains relevant in environmental law today. |Maysilles examines one of the South's worst environmental disasters caused by the Ducktown Mining District in the Southern Appalachians, and its impact on environmental law and Appalachian conservation.

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9780807834596

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Reviews

Maysilles combines environmental and legal history in a comprehensive and powerful manner. This exceptional and enlightening book will be an extremely valuable addition to the literature exploring how courts dealt with pollution issues in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. --Joel Tarr, Carnegie Mellon University

With degrees in English, history, and law, Maysilles discusses the topic with a high degree of elegance, knowledge and thoughtful consideration. <br>- H-Net Reviews

Author Information

Duncan Maysilles is a lawyer and a historian. He earned his undergraduate degree at the University of North Carolina, his law degree at Duke University, and his doctorate in history at the University of Georgia.

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