Since the Civil War, Southern boosters have promoted a “New South.” A bright future always beckoned—one that included industry, everyday efficiencies, and legitimate wealth amassed by modern rather than extractive methods. For most historians, though, the genuine New South did not arrive until after World War II. New Deal agricultural and labor policies broke the regime of cotton tenancy, federal largess sponsored the proliferation of military installations and high-tech firms, capital and investment flowed in, and a certain measure of economic, demographic, and political convergence occurred. Obviously, poverty endured and racial inequality was refashioned to fit the new framework. But as a question of business strategy or of regional macroeconomic character, the southern environment and its natural resources usually fall dramatically outside of the “Sunbelt” story. The vast and colonized southern landscape—its abused soils and its cutover pinelands—belong to an earlier era. So too does its rural underclass.

The Slain Wood, an economic and environmental history of the pulpwood and paper industry, brilliantly stitches these eras back together and demonstrates how postwar industrialization required these firms to engage continuously with the region's distinctive institutional heritage and its biophysical characteristics. As Boyd makes clear, the paper business was no sideshow; it was a shining light of southern modernity and industrial success for most of the second half of the twentieth century. By the 1950s, the South led the nation in the production of pulp and paper. It contained half of the world's industrial timber acreage and was the global leader in the production of pulp and paper based on the intensive cultivation of these plantations. Paper mills, moreover, paid high wages to union workers. As Alabama governor George Wallace famously put it, the sulfurous stink emanating from the mills was the “smell of prosperity.”

But what created this success story? What sustained it? Here Boyd takes aim at models of regional comparative advantage in which branch plants controlled by northern corporations responded to straightforward factor endowments. Not so. The paper companies actually needed to construct the social and ecological conditions favorable to their ascent. The first chapter explores how these firms created industrial forests and how timber replaced cotton as the region's top cash crop. Companies such as Union Bag and Paper, which in 1936 began construction on the world's largest pulp and paper complex in Savannah, Georgia, could not move in search of timber; the wood had to come to it. Even though most firms acquired enough of their own timberland to stabilize local pulpwood markets, small farmers and private landholders still controlled two-thirds of the supply. Southerners had to grow trees like a crop; business and government had to build institutional and environmental conditions that served the logic of continuous-flow production. This process, which began during the Progressive era and peaked during the 1950s, involved considerable public-private investments in fire protection, tax and credit reform, forest regeneration, and cooperative scientific research across competitive firms.

The second chapter takes up the question of getting the wood to the mills. Beginning in the 1930s, pulp and paper companies relied on wood dealers, or independent contractors, to purchase timber from landowners and to arrange the labor needed for harvesting and transportation. Small African American logging crews received financing from the dealers and operated within an exploitative system akin to sharecropping. Over time, as pulpwood production expanded, as mechanization accelerated, and as other opportunities drew rural workers out of the woods, mills abandoned the dealer system and began to purchase lumber directly from owners. But they persisted in contracting out logging operations, a strategy that continued to shield the companies from liability and neatly displaced risk and uncertainty onto unprotected workers. Chapter 3 leaves the forest and examines the workings of the mills. With regard to labor, pulp and paper workers organized comparatively early, and company officials showed little resistance to collective bargaining given the industry's capital intensity, its high-volume throughput, and its reliance on raw material that spoiled in storage. But as the industry expanded into the South, it replicated regional racial hierarchies even as it brought good jobs to white workers. Moreover, civil rights–era gains in labor law and union practices were undercut by the loss of employment in the mills brought about by automation and by the 1970s cocktail of stagnation, foreign competition, and antiunion corporate ideology.

The final chapter returns to the world outside the mills—the water and air. By the late 1950s, the pulp and paper business was generating a fourth of the entire organic wastewater pollution load of all American industry combined; it also discharged an enormous volume of particulates and other pollutants into the air. And here Boyd makes one of the most important arguments of the book: it makes little sense to view pollution as a simple “externality.” Acquiring such profound ecological access was a continuous and decades-long political and legal process. “The firms,” he explains, “considered the absorptive capacity of the environment as important a resource as the trees themselves” (p. 150). Charting how the industry acquired rights to discharge effluent and how it managed those enormous pollution loads—from early nuisance suits, to state laws, to the nationalization of pollution control in the 1970s, to the more recent discovery and enduring controversy over dioxin contamination—Boyd advances a model in which such impacts were no mere spillovers, but instead part of the very fabric of the industry's “industrial metabolism” (p. 152).

While The Slain Wood is a remarkable contribution to southern economic and environmental history, and will stand as such, it also advances two broadly portable arguments that wider audiences should chew on. First, capitalism is a political and legal process that harnesses and subordinates biophysical systems to industrialism, creating unforeseen vulnerabilities and weaknesses. Second, while unevenness, inequity, and locational specificity always characterize modern industrial systems, competitive advantage arises from the management and manipulation of distinct and historically situated constellations of regional institutions and resources.