Post later

Environmentalism

While trends in the expansion of industrial development and suburbanization continued throughout the century, the last third, the 1970s through 2000, saw Virginia follow national patterns of environmental action. Citizens organized to respond to industrial pollution, chemical pesticide and fertilizer spills, and losses in biodiversity and habitat acreage incurred by earlier activity.

Protesters at North Anna
Power Station

The increasing political attention to problems caused earlier in the century offers a final example of Virginians reflecting and shaping cultural beliefs about nature. The creation of the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1970 represents attention to environmental issues at the national level. Within Virginia, numerous agencies followed the EPA's lead, while many nongovernmental organizations focused on local causes, from the Chesapeake Bay to the Piedmont to the mountains of southwestern Virginia. The Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay (1971), a regional nonprofit organization aimed at the coastal bioregion and Chesapeake watershed, was founded, the organization notes, to build and foster partnerships "to protect and to restore the Bay and its rivers." As examples based in the Piedmont and Shenandoah bioregions and watersheds, environmentally minded citizens founded Friends of the Shenandoah River (1989) and Virginia Save Our Streams (1989), to provide community- and citizen-based support for local habitats. In an example shaped by the context of Virginia's modern environmental history, Appalachian Sustainable Development was founded in Abingdon (1995) to promote local agricultural systems and to redevelop lands once dominated by tobacco culture. In the Appalachians, nonprofit organizations like the Southern Appalachian Mountain Stewards and Mountain Justice (both founded early in the 2000s) helped bring greater public visibility to environmentally and culturally destructive mining practices like MTR.
All told, Virginia has been subject to nature's action over its modern period while the nonhuman environment has been altered to reflect new cultural perceptions of those environments and new cultural goals within them.

Time Line

• 1900 - The population of Virginia is about 1.8 million people. There are about 20 million acres of farmland and 168,000 farms in the state.
• 1904 - The Chestnut Blight begins when the fungus Cryphonectria parasitica spreads within eastern forests, damaging the American Chestnut's health, ultimately decimating more than 3.5 billion trees, removing important habitats for wildlife populations, and leading to economic disaster within the communities that rely on them.
• 1914 - The commonwealth of Virginia creates conservation-based agencies to manage natural resources, including the Department of Forestry.
• 1916 - Virginia establishes the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries.
• 1926 - Virginia's General Assembly creates the Commission on Conservation and Development, and Harry F. Byrd names his good friend William E. Carson as the agency's first chairman.
• 1935 - Construction on the Blue Ridge Parkway begins as part of the depression-era New Deal with help from the Civilian Conservation Corps and Public Works Administration. The parkway provides placid mountainside vistas and idyllic roadside scenery, but also requires displacement of small communities along its path.
• 1937 - The 2,174-mile Appalachian Trail, one-quarter of which wends its way through Virginia, is completed.
• 1939 - Skyline Drive, the road that extends through Shenandoah National Park, is completed.
• 1939 - The Appalachian Electric Power Company dams the New River near Radford, creating the 4,500-acre Claytor Lake to generate hydroelectricity.
• 1963 - The Appalachian Electric Power Company creates the 20,000-acre Smith Mountain Lake by damming the Roanoke River to generate hydroelectricity.
• 1968 - The Virginia Electric and Power Company (later Dominion Power) begins damming the North Anna River in Louisa County to provide cooling water for the North Anna Nuclear Generating Station.
• August 19–20, 1969 - Hurricane Camille lands in Virginia. The storm's unexpected arrival leads to flash floods, extensive road damage, downed communication lines, damaged homes, more than a hundred deaths, millions of dollars in property losses, and the reconfiguring of state emergency response activities.
• 1971 - The Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay, a regional nonprofit organization aimed at the coastal bioregion and Chesapeake watershed, is founded to build and foster partnerships "to protect and to restore the Bay and its rivers."
• 1989 - In the Piedmont and Shenandoah bioregions and watersheds, environmentally minded citizens found Friends of the Shenandoah River and Virginia Save Our Streams, respectively, to provide community- and citizen-based support for local habitats.
• 1995 - Appalachian Sustainable Development is founded in Abingdon to promote local agricultural systems and to redevelop lands once dominated by tobacco culture.
• 2000 - The human population of Virginia is about 7.1 million. There are 8.2 million acres and 41,000 farms by the 1990s.

• Categories

• Twentieth Century History (1901–2000)
• Transportation
• Natural Resources
• Recreation
• Environment and Climate
• Twenty-first Century History (2001– )

Further Reading

Curtin, Philip, Grace Brush, and George Fisher, eds. Discovering the Chesapeake: The History of an Ecosystem. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

Hofstra, Warren. The Planting of New Virginia: Settlement and Landscape in the Shenandoah Valley. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.

Kirby, Jack Temple. "Virginia's Environmental History: A Prospectus," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 99 (1991): 449–488.

Lutts, Ralph, H. "Like Manna from God: The American Chestnut Trade in Southwestern Virginia," Environmental History 9 (2004): 497–525.

Whisnant, Anne Mitchell. Super-Scenic Motorway: A Blue Ridge Parkway History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

Cite This Entry

APA Citation:

Cohen, B. R. Modern Environmental History of Virginia. (2009, January 8). In Encyclopedia Virginia. Retrieved from http://www.EncyclopediaVirginia.org/Modern_Environmental_History_of_Virginia.

MLA Citation:

Cohen, B. R. "Modern Environmental History of Virginia." Encyclopedia Virginia. Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, 8 Jan. 2009. Web. 24 Jun. 2013.

First published: November 6, 2008 | Last modified: January 8, 2009

Contributed by B. R. Cohen, an assistant professor in the Department of Science, Technology, and Society at the University of Virginia.

Give feedback about this entry:  http://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Modern_Environmental_History_of_Virginia