Power-Lined: Electricity, Landscape, and the American Mind by Daniel L. Wuebben (review)

In Power-Lined, infrastructure decay, environmental crisis, and the techno-historical transformation of the North American landscape lead to an interdisciplinary understanding of the region's relationship with energy: how Americans became connected and energy dependent, and how they perceived—and continue to perceive—the energy networks that power their ever growing needs. Daniel Wuebben's study is an important interdisciplinary contribution to environmental humanities. It combines a carefully researched analysis of the history of landscape modifications with a cultural examination of the ambivalence arising from these alterations. The study maps an environmental understanding of shifting, albeit overwhelmingly negative, public reactions to the presence of overhead energy structures. Furthermore, it presents this understanding as crucial to predicting public tolerance for the inevitable overhaul of the energy infrastructure in the United States, which remains in a serious state of disrepair. This infrastructure must be reconsidered also in light of the climate crisis and the need for a swift transition to renewable energy sources. Additionally, Power-Lined analyzes how attitudes toward overhead energy structures appear as subject matter in literature, visual arts, and cinema. The lining of the American landscape with telegraph, telephone, and electric lines is a technological development that supported colonial expansion. From the perspective of the white settler, it embodied progress. Yet, cultural responses to these transformations reveal ambivalence and anxieties that are, Wuebben argues, of an aesthetic nature and may reveal a political positioning.

Chapter one shows how the lining of the American landscape with telegraph poles created an unprecedented connectivity between rural spaces and urban centers. It also depicts how this technology became symbolic of manifest destiny as it embodied the romantic idealization of the pioneer. Wuebben analyzes the telegraph in paintings, such as Asher B. Durand's Progress (The Advance of Civilization) (1853), in which a vision of "pastoral future" is reached through the triangulation of "native past, frontier present, and industrial future" (p. 33), as well as works by Hawthorne, Melville, and Thoreau wherein "the telegraph line inspired and shaped visual, fictional, and theoretical engagements with landscape" (p. 37). If for white settlers the telegraph was an emblem and tool of settler colonialism, Native Americans' resistance to these structures and their repeated sabotage of them reveal a very different experience of the continent's industrialization.

The example of New York at the turn of the twentieth century is the focus of chapter two, a case study that epitomizes "the gulf between two competing readings of overhead infrastructure" (p. 49). These readings move between considering overhead structures as wondrous conduits for electrical power and as "malevolent webs'" (p. 49). Wuebben further establishes the links between ideas of progress, electrification, and national identity by examining the impact of Turner's frontier thesis, the wiring of urban centers, and the harnessing of Niagara Falls to power industry.

Chapter three charts the transformation of the state's landscape through the lens of energy development, from California's hydroelectric wiring to the planting of lattice steel towers. The electrification of California was initially embraced as supportive of the "broader vision of the California dream" (p. 87). Yet, a shift occurs in public perception, whereby increasing aesthetic dissatisfaction with the lines leads to their rejection. The chapter also demonstrates how early cinema, D. W. Griffith's work in particular, represents ambivalences linked to increased communicability between distant places: foregrounding the electric telegraph and distribution lines, Griffith promotes an image of connectivity between rural and city spaces, while simultaneously suggesting crises that could arise if those connections were severed.

Chapter four focuses on public perception of the increasingly visible presence of power lines. Spanning the years 1935–2003, the chapter catalogues manifestations of public opposition and shifts of opinion, for instance, by examining the change from a positive view of the lines to a negative one after the Second World War. Wuebben demonstrates how aesthetic opposition to overhead structures is consistently present through the different historical periods that the book...