The Wild East

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.