Why the Noö South?
An Introduction
Not long after the Civil War, many Southerners began to describe their region as the “New South.” For example, an influential editor of the Atlanta Constitution named Henry Grady delivered a widely publicized speech in 1886 to an audience in New York. Grady’s message was meant to motivate northerners to invest economically in the Southern states, which had been decimated by the Civil War. Grady insisted that the South had moved beyond its history of racial conflicts. He also argued that economic development and industrialization would bring the region into the modern era by creating greater ties between black and white citizens. While the South had engaged in an “honorable” struggle, Grady claimed, it was time for a new era of industrially progressive development.
The birth of Jim Crow-era lynching was the underside of Grady’s “New South.” According to the Equal Justice Initiative, there were 595 lynchings in Grady’s home state of Georgia between 1877 and 1950. Rather than signaling a break from the horrors of chattel slavery, racial violence and systemic inequality in the “New South” were not even papered over: it became a common practice for photographs and detailed narratives of lynchings to appear in major newspapers. For example, in the November 27, 1883, issue of The Atlanta Constitution, there is an extended report on a lynching in Birmingham, AL. The journalist recounts, “There has been a great deal of excitement on the streets since the lynching of the negro, Lewis Houston,” who was murdered by a mob for supposedly attempting “to rape [a white] widow lady Friday night.” There was a mob of 150 men, according to the report, which details the violence that Lewis Houston suffered.
Lynchings, rather than being a phenomenon of the nineteenth century, continued to be a prominent form of violence well into the 1940s.
Lynchings were of course extralegal forms of terror that attempted to ensure white supremacy, but lynchings were also public entertainment in the New South. They attracted large crowds, often including children, and regularly ended with picnic lunches around the lynched body. Whatever was meant to be “new” about the South as a result of the region’s slow industrialization beginning in the 1880s, this “newness” in fact only replicated a longstanding tradition of violence against African Americans.
The idea of the “New South” has resurfaced repeatedly since Henry Grady’s 1886 speech. Most often, those who have since used this language invoke the South’s newness as a way to signal a break with the past. George Packer, for instance, describes the “New South” that developed as a consequence of the political realignments following the upheavals of the civil-rights era. As the South became more Republican, Packer argues, it entered the new arena of modern politics. In September 2015, the governor of South Carolina, Nikki Haley, delivered a speech entitled “Lessons from the New South” to the National Press Club. In each subsequent iteration, the idea of the “New South” acts as a refrain for the region’s avowed self-cleansing — a line that Southerners sing to drone out the noise of the disturbing continuity underlying its cultural and institutional practices.
If “New South” vocabulary attempts to distance the region from its history of chattel slavery, it also draws on deep-seated associations between Southern identity and a benign agrarian lifestyle. “The soldier stepped from the trenches into the furrow,” Henry Grady claims in his 1886 speech, “and fields that ran red with human blood in April were green with the harvest in June.” Following the Civil War, the South putatively returned to a way of life rooted in the wilderness, fields, and agrarian virtues of the antebellum era. The “New South” is not only language that elides terror lynchings and Jim Crow laws but also relies on the notion of an idyllic relationship between the region’s natural environment and its inhabitants.
The collection of articles published in the coming weeks will complicate this relationship between human culture and the environment in the American South, both historically and in the contemporary moment. The ideas of a pristine wilderness or benign agrarian past are in fact historically chimerical. The environment of the South was from its beginning deeply shaped by human activity. To explain the intersection of environmental, social, and cultural issues in the region, the work of our collective of writers employs the notion of the “Noö South.”
The idea of the Noö South comes from a term coined during the 1930s and 1940s by the Russian scientist Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky, who helped formulate the concept of the noösphere as a new model of geologic time and human evolutionary change. In a 1945 article published in American Scientist, Vernadsky says, “man, under our very eyes, is becoming a mighty and ever-growing geological force.” According to Vernadsky, the new technological capacities of human beings are “the result of ‘cephalization,’ the growth of man’s brain and the work directed by his brain.” The human capacity of thought, in other words, has changed the very material and geological conditions of life on the planet. The ways we have thought about our existence have wrought vast changes to the environments we inhabit.
Vernadsky’s idea of the noösphere is an early version of what researchers have more recently termed the Anthropocene, or the geological age in which human activity has been the dominant influence on the environment and climate. In contrast to conceptions of the Anthropocene by the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Paul J. Crutzen and others, Vernadsky takes a more benevolent view of these changes. For example, Vernadsky’s term for this new “anthropogenic era” foregrounds the Greek word nous or “mind.” For Vernadsky, the planetary significance of humanity centers on the capacity for thought and conscious action. While later scientists would instead emphasize our species’ deleterious effects on biodiversity, for instance, Vernadsky’s term places its conceptual accent on the mind.
The environmental science in the decades following Vernadsky’s conception of the noösphere shows how little room for optimism we have. Rather than subsequent generations approaching their “blossoming,” as Vernadsky argues, the decades following the Second World War instead saw the rapid proliferation of environmentally deleterious social, industrial, and statist practices. The concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide is skyrocketing; global population trends cast doubt on whether our species will be able to feed itself. The capacities of the human mind have visited species-level catastrophes upon our planet.
Yet Vernadsky’s idea that our forms of thinking affect the “face of our planet,” as he later says, also identifies an important line of inquiry. Understanding how we think might in part help us better understand how our forms of living affect the environment. What if we look to human culture to understand some of the ways of thinking and living that underwrite our vast impacts on the environment?
The Noö South takes this line of inquiry as its aspiration. Our writers take the American South as a focal point for evidence-based writing that investigates the relationship between human culture and the environment. How have Southern industries, technologies, cultural artifacts, and institutions shaped the region’s environmental history? In offering a variety of answers to this question in the coming weeks, the Noö South collective explores a region no longer measured against false images of idyllic landscapes untouched by the material and environmental consequences of Southern culture. Instead, to study the American South is to discover the wide footprint of human activity — institutions, industries, cultural ideas, and social formations.
We hope you’ll read more in the coming weeks as our collective of writers investigate Southern culture, the region’s changing ecological conditions, and their intersections with issues of social and environmental justice.
