A nationally renowned historian lectured at UNM Monday about the effects on land in the southern United States during the slave trade and proliferation of plantation farming that are still being felt today.
Roger Kennedy, who has served as director of the U.S. National Park Service and director of the Smithsonian Institute's National Museum of American History, said that the tragic problem was caused in part by a series of contradictions by our country's leaders.
"Unfortunately, many decisions regarding the future of the U.S. have been made by lazy people who can't rouse themselves to engage in the situation," Kennedy said of the unfortunate demise of precious farming land throughout the country.
Kennedy said that one of the country's most influential forefathers, Thomas Jefferson, advocated a republic of small farmers as a means to build a healthy society, yet he presided over a massive expansion of the slave-holding plantation system.
"It is an unfortunate, sad fact that those in charge during the 1800s found it cheaper to run a battalion of slaves onto land they had taken, then nurture the land they had already run dry of the precious nutrients needed to grow productive crops," Kennedy said. "Much of that land will never recover from the detrimental effects of that time."
The lecture, titled "Mr. Jefferson's Lost Cause," was the first of the annual Aldo Leopold lecture series, named after the nation's pioneer wildlife ecologist, said Roger Schluntz, dean of the Architecture and Planning Department.
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"Aldo's prescription for a healthy wilderness was simple," Schluntz said. "Prohibit roads and hotels, then leave it alone."
Schluntz said that it was through Kennedy's lecture, and those that are to follow, that they honor this brilliant observer and inspiring thinker.
Kennedy, who has appeared in many television documentaries including the Discovery Channel series "Roger Kennedy's Rediscovering America," noted the Louisiana Purchase as having a major impact on land use and the growth of slavery.
He said the great financial interests of the powerful land companies that occupied the country during that time beat down slavery's many opponents in the South itself, including American Indians, Blacks, Appalachian farmers and conscientious opponents of slavery.
He described how the plantation farms staple crops, tobacco and cotton, sickened the soil and how the planters moved from one desolated tract to the next.
Soon, he said, the dominant culture of the entire region - from Maryland to Florida and Carolina to Texas - was that of owners and slaves producing staple crops for international markets.
"The earth itself was impoverished, in many places beyond redemption," Kennedy said.
"Slaves who were forced to tend the land had absolutely no interest in the health of the land, so they neglected it from the care it needed to sustain its crop-producing capabilities." None of this, Kennedy argues, was inevitable. He said the character, ideas, and ambitions of Thomas Jefferson and others were skewed in such a way that citizens of the South had to struggle with the moral dilemmas presented by the presence of American Indian farmers on land they coveted, by the enslavement of their workforce, by the betrayal of their stated hopes, and by the manifest damage being done to the earth itself.
Kennedy has also acted as vice president of the Ford Foundation, and has served six U.S. presidents as an assistant or associate of the Attorney General and worked for Secretaries of Labor and Health, Education and Welfare.
