The Power and the Water Project: Connecting Pasts with Futures (website). http://powerwaterproject.net/.
The Power and the Water: Connecting Pasts with Futures examines the nature of environmental connectivities since industrialization and how their legacies challenge us in the early 21st century. Our understanding of environmental connectivity relates to how infrastructure and its environmental impacts generate both new distances and fresh bonds between places, peoples, institutions and cultures. The notion of environmental connectivity also engages with how the construction and sustainment of human communities create landscapes that can facilitate or interrupt the interactions of species and the resilience of socio-cultural and natural worlds.
We will also consider shared negative experiences that affect community resilience, social learning and environmental policy response. We will examine how notions of the “environmental” and “natural” categorize spaces and demarcate what is worthy of protection, privileging certain ideas of what is valued in nature and how ecological and socio-cultural connections work. In particular, we will explore the transformative role of technology across a range of liquid and energy environments—from the manipulation of the River Tyne and proposed harnessing of the Severn Estuary’s powerful tides to the drainage of Peak District mines and massive electricity delivery systems such as pylons.
We can do fullest justice to these questions and this approach through a series of integrated studies that probe key aspects of environmental connectivity in the 20th century and beyond, both backwards and forwards in time. This allows us to appreciate commonalities and contrasts in environmental experience, and how these relate to specific times, places and communities, as well as social, educational and informational experiences.
This project is a collaboration between the Universities of Bristol, East Anglia and Nottingham. It is being pursued under the “Care for the Future: Thinking Forward through the Past” Theme—one of four current AHRC themes that provide a funding focus for emerging areas of interest to arts and humanities researchers. Within Care for the Future, the project has been designed to respond to a highlight call on “Environmental Change and Sustainability.” (Text from The Power and the Water Project)
The Power and the Water project website hosts a blog, podcasts and videos, and avenues of engagement and impact. One can follow the project on Twitter using the tag @envirohistories, or sign up to their email list. The project logo was created by Jonny Aldrich, a student of Graphic Communication at Plymouth University, UK. Jonny took the locations of the three universities involved in the project and joined them together to represent Connection and Landscape. He then duplicated and rotated the triangle to form an abstract star to represent Energy/Power/Electricity (Gold), Environment (Green), and Water (Blue).