Homeplace Geography: Essays for Appalachia.

Homeplace Geography: Essays for Appalachia. By Donald Edward Davis. (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2006. Pp. [x], 221. $25.00, ISBN 978-0-88146-014-8.)

Author Donald Edward Davis describes the engagement of communities with their environment, both historically and in the present, as having several dimensions, including the daily use of resources, historical and cultural memory, and political activism in the defense of the first two. The term homeplace geography for Davis encapsulates these multi-varied and localistic interactions, with particular emphasis on communities' political encounters with national and state government. Most of the articles have already been published, but some appeared in small journals that are now defunct, and one understands why Davis wants to see his work collected in accessible form. Originally published for diverse purposes, some of the articles overlap in content, while others seem too slight to be included. The result will strike most readers as idiosyncratic but compelling and introspective nonetheless.

One of Davis's recurring themes is that humans can interact and have interacted with their ecosystems in sustainable ways. Here, Davis means especially the Mississippian and Cherokee peoples who lived in the mountains before the arrival of European settlers, as described in chapter 11. But he also means white settlers, whose small-scale, localized use of resources was mostly benign, as found in chapter 13, chapter 18, and an especially poignant chapter 8. Only large-scale, corporate resource exploitation has, in very recent years, caused irrevocable environmental damage (note chapter 14, a short piece on mountaintop removal mining practices, and chapter 12). Davis contends that white settlement has always been commercial as well as subsistence-oriented and that even small farmers gained marketable value from their natural surroundings. Davis argues, therefore, that ecological health and economic health fit together, a least on a local level. One implication is to undercut the oft-repeated canard that environmental concern harms economic well-being; another is to question the work of the Nature Conservancy and other wilderness groups for unnecessarily eliminating a human presence in the preservation of healthy ecologies (see chapter 4).

Davis's concern for localized, community-based action (whether economic or political) leads him to a critique of large-scale management of land and resources, from governmental agencies as well as from corporations. Most federal environmental policy, Davis says, especially as represented by the U.S. Forest Service, is misguided in its top-down approach that sacrifices local use of resources for corporate use. Even wilderness programs might do more ecological harm than good by bringing in "masses of urbanites" whose interests in recreation will take precedence over local rural living (p. 51). As an alternative, Davis lauds the actions of several community-based organizations that stem from--in the most over-used term in the book--the "grassroots" (p. 4). Organizations such as Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, Save Our Cumberland Mountains, and the Armuchee Alliance represent for Davis the most successful and meaningful organizational efforts that have yet been taken toward local community integrity. These are, Davis says, "membership-based" groups rather than single-issue groups; they engage the holistic well-being of local, rural life, in which ecological health is an essential component (p. 54).

ROBERT S. WEISE

Eastern Kentucky University