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<div style="text-align:start"><b><font face="Times">Seminar on Environmental and Agricultural History </font></b></div>
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<div style="text-align:start"><b><font face="Times">October 6, 2023</font></b></div>
<div style="text-align:start"><b><font face="Times">2:30-4 PM</font></b></div>
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<div><font face="Times">Hybrid Event</font></div>
<div><font face="Times">MIT Campus, E51-095</font></div>
<div><font face="Times">Register in advance for </font><a href="https://mit.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEtf-urrTssHtDKLLfed_BGZ9VPJYg_WAGX#/registration">zoom link</a></div>
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<div style="text-align:start"><b><font face="Times">Who Gets to Have an Environmental History, and What Kind? Energy, Property, and the Making of Legible Landscapes in the American South</font></b></div>
<div style="text-align:start"><font face="Times">Abby Spinak, Lecturer in Landscape Architecture at Harvard University </font></div>
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<div><font face="Times">Building on my forthcoming book on a New Deal rural electrification program that funded hundreds of community-owned electric cooperatives across the United States, this talk will be a contemplation on how large scale networked infrastructures
continue to shape people's relationships to land over decades. The talk will focus on two electric co-op territories in the American South, where members who felt excluded from their co-ops' decision-making processes organized to "redemocratize" their utilities.
I will explore how these co-op member movements faced major opposition locally - due to entrenched racism, corporate influence, and a range of exclusionary co-op policies - and ultimately turned to other forms of activism beyond co-op democracy. While celebrating
the broader influence of these activists, I also want to consider the limits of their ability to engage in local environmental change. I will use these case studies to ask who gets to participate, and under what circumstances, in the path dependent, landscape
scale environment-making of networked infrastructures like electricity. </font><span style="font-family:Times">In the process, I will highlight some of the alternative land ethics underlying these social movements, as electric landscapes that could have been.</span></div>
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