The classic environmental history of the Great Smoky Mountains, updated with a view from the twenty-first century

The Wild East
explores
the social, political, and environmental changes in the Great Smoky
Mountains during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although this
national park is most often portrayed as a triumph of wilderness
preservation, Margaret Lynn Brown concludes that the largest forested
region in the eastern United States is actually a re-created
wilderness—a product of restoration and even manipulation of the land.
Several
hundred years before white settlement, Cherokees farmed and hunted this
land. Between 1910 and 1920, corporate lumbermen built railroads into
the region’s most remote watersheds and removed more than 60 percent of
the old-growth forest. Despite this level of human impact, those who
promoted the establishment of a national park in 1934 represented the
land as an untouched wilderness and described the people living there as
pioneers.
Toward the end of the twentieth century, Brown
writes, the Smokies faced the consequences of decades of management
decisions that fluctuated between promoting human tourism and ensuring
environmental preservation. Nearly 25 years after the book’s first
publication, this revised edition discusses current research, citizen
science initiatives, and land management practices that are restoring
native plants and wildlife populations in the twenty-first century.
Margaret Lynn Brown emphasizes the extraordinary treasure that is the
Great Smoky Mountains and the importance of continuing to invest in the
park’s protection for years to come.