Jimmy Carter, Southlander

[The lowdown: 01.07.25]

Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter with a fishing guide, c. 1980 / National Archives

Greetings, Southlanders—I hope your past few weeks of deep winter pause have been restful, despite all the gloom and violence. Among the sadness, of course, was the loss of President Jimmy Carter.

Plenty of paeans have rightly anointed Carter as “the greatest environmental president,” to borrow the headline of this Jeff Goodell essay. And much of his environmental legacy has to do with his prescient understanding of our society’s precarious relationship with fossil fuels. But he was a stalwart defender of public lands, too, and with the passage of one law managed to double the size of the National Park Service—the largest single expansion of protected lands in the nation’s history.

That land was in Alaska, and Carter’s reputation today is yoked to his charitable work across the globe. But his story as an environmentalist has a simple beginning here in the South: It’s here he learned the joy of being amid beauty and, perhaps, the simple pleasures of a modest life. “He fished in the nearby rivers and lakes and learned to castrate a pig before he was old enough to drive,” Goodell writes. In his book An Outdoor Journey, Carter remembers the formative Southern fishing trips of his youth.

Those experiences helped spark some of his first consequential acts in state politics: Carter founded the Georgia Conservancy, created the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, and established the Georgia Heritage Land Trust. These weren't just bureaucratic shuffles—they transformed how Georgians access and protect their natural heritage. The DNR particularly revolutionized how the state managed its hunting and fishing lands, while the Heritage Trust began protecting crucial wildlife corridors and recreation areas that Georgians still use today.

During his time as governor, Carter was part of the first team to run Bull Sluice, the famous rapid on the Chattooga River that was featured in the movie Deliverance. Such experiences led Carter to block many dam projects and protect many rivers. Despite a busy life, he never stopped adventuring—“fishing, fly fishing, upland bird hunting, waterfowl hunting, turkey hunting, snow skiing, whitewater rafting, camping and bird watching,” as Game & Fish notes in their remembrance.

I won’t pretend to be any kind of Carter expert, but I’m struck by his example. He is a best-case scenario—a model of how time outdoors can inspire a moral vision and a good life. He’s a model of what I hope time across the Southlands can inspire: that when you wade into a creek or hike along a ridgeline, the beauty you find can cultivate not just joy but responsibility.

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The reading list

C.C. Lockwood for Garden & Gun

🌲 Finding refuge in the country’s biggest bald cypress (Garden & Gun): I was delighted to have the chance to write this brief little essay about my favorite tree—which sits in the Mississippi’s floodplain in norther Louisiana. (It’s a tree I’ve written about before in this newsletter.) May you, too, be blessed enough to find your favorite tree.

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🍠 Transforming the Delta (Switchyard/FERN): The territory along the southern Mississippi River is some of the country’s most famous farmland—but it mostly grows soybean and corn, little of which is used for food. “If we took 5 percent of the acres and diverted them into almost anything that wasn’t a commodity, it’s literally an additional $2.5 billion in revenue, just at the farm gate,” one of journalist Robert Kunzig’s sources notes in this smart and thought-provoking piece, which explores whether bringing more food production to the region might solve varied woes. One problem? As Kunzig notes, the physical, economic, and even intellectual infrastructure is set up for “large farms and export markets.” Nonetheless—or perhaps because of that—it’s small Black farmers that are beginning to lead the way.

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🤠 Can the rodeo save a historic Black town? (The Atlantic): Though Oklahoma lies beyond many standard definitions of the South, its history is deeply interwound with the region’s. Between 1865 and 1920, more than 50 Black towns arose in the state, attempts to establish the kind of autonomy impossible in the South. This thoughtful piece in The Atlantic explores an attempt to use a local rodeo to bring one such town back to its glory days.

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🐾 Just beyond the porch light (J. Carrol Sain): A mountain lion carcass, discovered in Arkansas, sets off a swirl of paranoia: has the Arkansas government been hiding the resistance of these beasts? Arkansas writer J. Carrol Sain considers the controversy—and the preponderance of panther mythology.

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In season

What’s on tap this month

🦞 Crawfish comin’: Though Louisiana crawfish typically starts in January, some New Orleans restaurants were already serving the crustaceans before the holidays (Nola.com). It’s too early to know for sure, but that may presage a better season than last year.

⛷️ Southern skiing: It’s still balmy in my part of the Southlands, but in this round-up Garden & Gun offers a reminder that there’s plenty of good skiing in the region.

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The briefing

Southern developments

🐊 Okefenokee expands?: Last week, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service approved a plan to expand the south Georgia wildlife refuge by 22,000 acres—which, if the owners agree to sell, could end the long-running battle over a proposed titanium mind (Associated Press).

🛢 An end of oil: President Biden is making moves to ban offshore drilling in various U.S. oceans, including the Atlantic from the Outer Banks to Florida, and potentially parts of the Gulf of Mexico (New York Times).

🦐 Shrimp revival: After years of dogged investigation and legal action, activist Diane Wilson won a $50 million settlement with the plastic company Formosa. Now she’s using much of that money to restart commercial shrimping around Port Lavaca, Texas (Inside Climate News).

🐻 10 bears harvested: Louisiana’s first bear hunt season in decades included a potential record-breaking beast (Daily Iberian).