Droughts, Diasporas, and Climate Change: New Serpents next to Old in the Southern Garden
Since English colonization began there in the 17th century, writers have celebrated the temperate climate and fertile lands of the American Southeast to support the notion of the South" as a unique cultural region. For just as long, southerners have also complicated and challenged this link between the environment, regional culture, and regional identity, with many contemporary writers further questioning the roles of agrarianism and a southern sense of place" in defining a postmodern, post-southern" South. The increasingly apparent effects of global warming raise new questions about how the culture of the South might change as its environment changes. These new threats to the region's distinctiveness and more importantly to the southerners on the ground have been made particularly urgent by the widespread devastation and human diasporas caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and the ongoing danger to life and agriculture caused by the droughts of 2007 and 20008 the worst since records began in 1895 and possibly the worst in 800 years, when the first English colony at Roanoke, Virginia, disappeared" in part because of impossible drought conditions.This paper will examine the complex relationship between human settlement, the environment, and southern identity by considering the new" threat of climate change alongside old but enduring problems of southern agrarianism, land ownership, and racial exploitation. I will discuss these political and ideological links between environment, race, and southern culture through an analysis of Scott Elliott's 2003 novel Coiled in the Heart, which depicts a white southerner's attempt to restore the original landscape of his ancestral plantation home without restoring the oppressive racial politics connected to the old plantation. As the novel traces these attempts to re-materialize the southern garden," I will ask to what extent climate change and 21st-century racial politics might finally destroy, for better and for worse, the very notion of a unique and plentiful southern garden."
Michael P. Bibler, The University of Manchester