[Sci-tech-public] MIT Seminar on Environmental and Agricultural History : October 6, 2023

[Kathleen Lopes]

Seminar on Environmental and Agricultural History

October 6, 2023
2:30-4 PM

Hybrid Event
MIT Campus, E51-095
Register in advance for zoom link<https://mit.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEtf-urrTssHtDKLLfed_BGZ9VPJYg_WAGX#/registration>


Who Gets to Have an Environmental History, and What Kind? Energy, Property, and the Making of Legible Landscapes in the American South
Abby Spinak, Lecturer in Landscape Architecture at Harvard University

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. In the process, I will highlight some of the alternative land ethics underlying these social movements, as electric landscapes that could have been.

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