Category: Agricultural History

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Saving America’s Forests?

It makes a good story. In the late 1800s demand for wood was insatiable—for houses, for ships, for fuel, for railroad ties. Americans were logging trees all over the country, then moving on to another forest, leaving ugly cutover land behind them. President Theodore Roosevelt expressed fear of a “timber famine.” Trees are being destroyed, he said, “far more rapidly than they are being replaced.”[1]

George Vanderbilt (grandson of the “robber baron” Cornelius Vanderbilt) came to the rescue.

Vanderbilt’s mansion near Asheville, North Carolina, was built on land that included about 125,000 acres of forest, much of it already logged. Vanderbilt hired a young man, Gifford Pinchot, to manage the lands around the Biltmore estate,  with the goals of making money while restoring and protecting the forest. Pinchot hired a German forester, Carl Schenck,  to work for him. Pinchot went on to be the first head of the U.S. Forest Service, and Schenck started the first forestry school in the nation.

“Pinchot implemented a management plan that improved the forest while returning a profit to the landowner, the first of its kind in America and served as a national model,” states the National Forestry Foundation on its website. [2]

But Wait!

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Is State History Dull? Not in Real Life

If you grew up in the United States, you probably took a course in middle school or junior high about your state’s history. I don’t remember a thing about my class except a frantic late-night scramble to finish my “Missouri Scrapbook,” full of notes, photographs, postcards, mementos, etc.

My guess is that you didn’t learn a lot from state history classes, either. Am I wrong?

But state history has much to be said for it. Americans who move from state to state can find vivid confirmations of the themes of American history. I’m thinking of the frontier, our wars of independence—the American Revolution and the Civil War—, the destruction of American Indian tribes, the struggles to build infrastructure, etc.

Local sites may not rise to the fame of, say, the Trail of Tears, Nat Turner’s Rebellion, or the Boston Tea Party, but they help build the story of our past.

Each state’s history offers surprises. Here are a few examples from places I’ve lived in. I welcome you to send me others (for publication).

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Blame the Gristmills

Yates Mill, North Carolina

You may remember the extremely cold winter of 2021. In Texas, the system of electricity collapsed; 4.5 million homes lost power—for days. More than 200 people died, half of them of hypothermia (cold). This wasn’t supposed to happen, of course. Texas’s electric utilities are regulated and the regulation had been modernized beginning in 1999.

Why wasn’t the public interest served?

The issue is so complicated that I can’t answer that question. But the ongoing debate over the Texas tragedy has plunged me into a new project: trying to understand why electric utilities are regulated in the first place. Why do state commissions control the activities of companies like Duke and PNG that produce and send electricity to our homes?

That effort sends us back to colonial days in America. [1]

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Ethanol: Another ‘Bootleggers and Baptists’ Coalition

Ethanol summit meeting in Sao Paolo in 2019

I recently became acquainted with an arcane language containing symbols like RFS, RINs, eRINs, RVOs, WTE, RNG, even HBIIP.  It is spoken by groups with their own esoteric names, such as RFA and ABFA and WTEA.

There is a reason for this obscurity: This is the language of lobbying for the multi-billion-dollar  “renewable fuel industry (RFI).” These speakers don’t want you to know much about them except when they make public announcements like: “lower-cost, lower-carbon ethanol fuel blends are better for the environment and the family budget.”

I’m going to share some of the 50 years of history of this renewable fuels  lobbying. My purpose is to explain two ideas that help me understand political history. One is the economist’s notion of concentrated benefits vs. dispersed costs. Another is the “bootleggers and Baptists” coalition identified many years ago by economist Bruce Yandle. [1]

While I am singling out one big (and burgeoning) industry, that is because I have been examining it for my environmental blog, and I have more details there (including definitions of most of the terms identified above). But there  are plenty of other similar stories (start with sugar and cotton) .

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“Canal Mania”—A Waste of Money?

C & O Canal, Georgetown, a sign of canal mania.

I recently stumbled on the fact that  eight states, mostly in the Midwest,  defaulted on their state bonds in the 1840s. Okay, that may not seem too exciting, but when I learned about it, I also discovered a realm of American history I had not come across before: “canal mania.”

Many of those states had spent a lot of money on canals, much of it borrowed money (bonds rather than taxes), which ultimately they could not pay back. Other problems also plagued these states such as investments in railroads and banks, but canals were big.

Most of these canal ventures were kicked off by one success—the  amazing Erie Canal, which opened in 1825.  A few canals had been built in the East before that, such as the 27-mile canal between the Merrimack River and Boston. But the Erie Canal ran from Albany, New York, across the state to Buffalo: 363 miles. The canal required 83 locks. Continue reading ““Canal Mania”—A Waste of Money?”