Describing his childhood experience traversing South Carolina while heading to different beaches, William Boyd opens this history of the pulp and paper industry by recalling tree farms, race and class divisions, industrial plants, and warnings about contamination, which he later realized meant “a different kind of violence at work here—silent, invisible, latent” (xi-xii). Those childhood memories continue to resonate in Slain Wood, which investigates the emergence of a new regional industrial system from the 1930s to the present. Pulp and paper industry leaders and major companies such as International Paper and Union Bag play prominent roles, but Boyd also carefully studies the roles of independent contractors, African American labor, and environmental transformations. These transformations saw the region emerge as a national and global leader in pulp and paper. In the early twentieth century, the South remained heavily rural, agricultural, and dependent on outside capital. Cheap land and labor beckoned and the pulp and paper industry saw opportunity. Slain Wood highlights the process of regional industrialization and the public–private cooperation and contestation that came to shape the industry and region.

Divided into five chapters, the book explores the creation of an industrialized forest; demonstrates how companies secured access to wood, managed capital, and maintained a stable workforce by accommodating existing inequalities; and considers how the industry battled the environmental movement. Boyd suggests historians of southern industrialization can do more to examine forest products and industrial forests, particularly given the importance of public–private cooperation and state intervention. As such, he highlights federal examinations of forest resources in the Capper and Copeland reports, the development of new methods for effective fire control and protection, and state involvement in the establishment of nurseries to foster forest regeneration. From New Deal efforts to the 1956 Soil Bank Act, Boyd notes the power of public incentives to alter land use and transform institutions. In doing so, he highlights the cooperative culture that emerged within the industry as it partnered with university researchers to intensify forest regeneration. By the 1950s, the industry was on sound footing, reshaping the southern economy and environment.

Procurement and delivery methods for moving wood from forests to mills depended on a decentralized system of wood dealers who operated as independent contractors, helping the industry minimize risk since they operated as both timber brokers and labor contractors. Boyd sees woods workers hamstrung by their economic marginality and political invisibility. They lacked protections, and the reality of a decentralized rural workforce limited the ability to organize. In discussing the landscape of risk, vulnerability, danger, and low wages that woods workers faced while working in nature, Boyd might consider Thomas Andrews’s concept of a “workscape” ^{Footnote 1} in order to better integrate labor and environmental history. Pulp and paper mills also stood out compared to other southern industries because they initially operated as union shops. In the wake of broader mechanization, growing environmental concerns, and federal court cases in the 1970s, a non-union model emerged in new mills. For much of its history, the industry operated with a segregated workforce and unions excluded black workers.

The heart of Boyd’s analysis resides in Chapter 4, with its focus on the industry’s environmental impact. For many southerners, pollution was the price of progress and concerns were either cast aside or not noticed. The law was increasingly crafted to serve the needs of industrial development. However, the rising environmental movement also pushed the industry into emphasizing states’ rights arguments when it came to pollution-control regulations. Boyd highlights both numerous nuisance claims tied to water pollution and state cases in the decades after World War II to demonstrate that court actions ultimately proved incapable of dealing with the scale of pollution. Initial federal efforts lacked teeth, but growing public recognition of dangers after publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, combined with new rights-based discourse, contributed to pollution control efforts, first for water, then for air, and finally in the battles over dioxin contamination. Boyd demonstrates how the industry curried favor with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in obscuring the reality that woodpulping introduced dioxin into waterways. Southern labor raised concerns about new regulations and the industry worked to convince the EPA of regulatory overreach, helping minimize pulp and paper companies concerns about liability. In this sense, Boyd highlights how industry and labor cooperated to influence the regulatory process with little recompense for dioxin’s impact on southern environments and communities.

Chapter 4 closes by briefly discussing environmental justice, suggesting that economically vulnerable and politically marginal populations experienced larger-scale environmental pollution. For Boyd, economics is the determining factor. Given the work of scholars exploring environmental racism, several of whom are cited in his chapter on sources, Boyd might grapple with the combination of race and class more directly. The book draws on a range of rich and compelling sources, but Boyd’s use of over 100 confidential interviews raised some concerns for this reader. He notes that interviewees felt more comfortable opening up about the pulp and paper industry. As a reader, it is not easy to assess interviewee motivation, memory, or perspective, given the anonymous citing in the footnotes. Boyd also opens every chapter and subsection with a quotation. Although this provides cohesion and highlights the work of others, it also limits the possibilities for introducing subject matter and key actors in more compelling ways.

Clearly, the southern pulp and paper industry is crucial to the social, political, and ecological history of the modern South. Boyd offers a story of political economy focused on the relationship between capital and nature and how law impacts workers, corporations, and the environment. For business and labor historians, Slain Wood offers a cogent analysis of this industry’s rise to global prominence and its racialized workforce, whereas his analysis of the industrialization of nature adds to a growing scholarship in southern environmental history. As a story of regional industrialization, it is also deeply rooted in the region’s experience of inequality—a history that continues to shape the relationship between people and nature in today’s American South.