Alabama Paradox, The Land of Extremes

Alabama is a state of paradoxes that are not paradoxes at all, once you know the history. It is, by one count, the most biologically diverse state east of the Mississippi River. The watershed systems here, the Mobile-Tensaw Delta, the Cahaba River, the streams of the Cumberland Plateau, contain more species of freshwater fish, freshwater mussels, and aquatic snails than anywhere else in North America outside of the Tennessee River system proper.

The Cahaba River alone hosts about eighteen species of fish found nowhere else on earth. Biological surveys of the river conducted since the nineteen eighties have consistently placed Alabama's aquatic diversity in a global category by itself. At the same time, the state has among the highest poverty rates in the country.

The Black Belt counties, Wilcox, Lowndes, Perry, Greene, have poverty rates that in some years exceed forty percent. Lowndes County, through which the Selma-to-Montgomery marchers walked, had no public sewage system for many rural residents as recently as the twenty-tens. Raw sewage discharged into drainage ditches and yards.

A twenty-seventeen report by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health found that thirty-four percent of Lowndes County residents had evidence of hookworm infection, a parasitic disease associated with open sewage and bare-soil contact, the kind of infection that was supposed to have been eradicated in the American South generations ago. Alabama also has the most nuclear power plants per capita of any state in the country, providing approximately thirty percent of the state's electricity from facilities on the Tennessee and Alabama rivers. The Tennessee Valley Authority operates Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant near Decatur, one of the largest nuclear generating stations in the United States.

In college football, the rivalry between the University of Alabama Crimson Tide and the Auburn University Tigers, the Iron Bowl, played every November, is not merely a sporting event but a cultural institution that organizes social life across the state. The game has been played since eighteen ninety-three, and the intensity attached to it defies outside comprehension until you have spent a single autumn Saturday in the state. None of these things is unrelated to the others.

The biological diversity is a function of the intact watershed systems that the state's relative poverty helped preserve from industrial development. The poverty is a function of the history, the constitutional structure of eighteen sixty-eight reversed in eighteen seventy-five and nineteen hundred and one, the sharecropping economy, the migration that drew out two generations of workers. The football fervor is, in part, what you build when the institutions that might provide other forms of collective identity, good schools, functional civic life, shared prosperity, have been systematically withheld.

The land is extraordinary. The history explains the rest.