Flora and Fauna of the Civil War: An Environmental Reference Guide

Over the last two decades, environmental historians have paid increasing attention to the American South, producing studies of its plantations, forests, mountain ranges, river deltas, commons, and swamps. Using a cache of more than three hundred letters and diaries (most of them published) as his evidentiary base, Ouchley argues that although the Civil War "caused major landscape alteration on a local scale" (such as the clear-cutting of some woodlands), the impact of wartime use and destruction was short lived, and its effects were comparable to an intense hurricane (pp. 193, 196).