Settler colonialism is pollution: Elizabeth Grennan Browning, ‘”We were environmentalists long before it was popular”: Legacies of Settler Colonialism in the Coal-Based Pollution of the Midwest’s 1970s Energy Sector’, Middle West Review, 10, 1, 2023, pp. 127-156 | settler colonial studies blog

Settler colonialism is pollution: Elizabeth Grennan Browning, ‘”We were environmentalists long before it was popular”: Legacies of Settler Colonialism in the Coal-Based Pollution of the Midwest’s 1970s Energy Sector’, Middle West Review, 10, 1, 2023, pp. 127-156

21Nov23

Excerpt: In her 1973 exposé Power Over People, Ohio-based science writer Louise B. Young reflected on the disillusioning aesthetics of the postwar American landscape: “We look around billboards and over superhighways and under transmission lines and pretty soon we don’t really see at all.” Young focused on health concerns stemming from exposure to electromagnetic fields created by rapidly proliferating high-voltage power lines; she argued that in its pursuit of capitalist gains, the electric utility industry had neglected the safety of communities that served as unwilling hosts to towering transmission lines. As notions of American progress became closely intertwined with everyday comforts derived from technology, Young sought to make visible the infrastructure behind mass electrification, as well as the sacrifices required by those whose personal lives and property suffered from its construction and operation. Young’s work invoked the storytelling of Silent Spring, published eleven years earlier in 1962: “As Rachel Carson pointed out, we urgently need an end to false assurances and the little sugar-coated pills of half-truths. We are being asked to assume the biological risks and to pay the hidden costs. In the case of high-voltage transmission lines, the electric companies have the ability to force these risks on all the property owners lying in their path.”

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