Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Old South, energy production and consumption in organic regimes took place where fires
burned or at riverside mills and gins. In the middle of the nineteenth century, in parts of the
nation described by Henry David Thoreau and John Muir, fishermen with an agrarian past
clashed with dam operators, who represented a new economic force. Dreamers also iden-
tified electricity as a key to the New South's post-Civil War economic reconstruction and
resurrection.
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, New South energy companies
separated energy production and consumption. New transmission and electrical generation
technologies—not to mention concentrations of capital—made it possible for factories to
slip the restraints of geography. As the organic energy regime evolved, electricity be-
came an invisible power for residential, commercial, and industrial consumers across the
nation. This separation—made possible due to transmission lines—increasingly masked
white coal's role in Henry Grady's and William Church Whitner's New South economic
juggernaut. During the critical New South period, textile mill owners and energy company
executives laid claim to the area's rivers and put families to work in factory towns scattered
across a Piedmont region cultivated by tenants and sharecroppers.
Divergent visions of the New South's future hardened between the wars. Thomas Martin
and William S. Murray considered the privatized Super Power electrical transmission sys-
tem as a symbol of modernization. They clashed with Rupert Vance and Howard W. Odum,
who countered the old water and power dynamic with their own modern liberal economic
planning models. The regional planners and New Dealers looked at the monopolistic Super
Power system and responded with a big dam consensus, the Tennessee Valley Authority
(TVA) experiment, the Rural Electrification Administration, and similar programs designed
to use and distribute resources equitably while balancing industry with agriculture. Only
after the dramatic droughts of the 1920s did energy generators begin a shift from organic
energy sources back to fossil fuels. In the process, the New South abandoned the long quest
for an energy regime fueled by renewable and indigenous sources. The New South capit-
alists initially embraced a diversified energy mix but eventually turned to a system domin-
ated by black coal.
The end of World War II empowered the old independent utility operators. Private en-
ergy companies fired back and successfully lobbied against the TVA, but their success em-
boldened a sleeping giant as water and power continued to drive the Sun Belt's econom-
ic and environmental future. After 1945, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers embarked on
a program to build multiple-purpose dams and reservoirs born out of New Deal regional
planning but transformed into pork barrel projects. Some of those projects had higher
value, while others—such as the Mississippi flood control reservoir William Faulkner
lamented—had narrow missions. In this context, the energy corporations found a new en-
emy in the Corps' public energy mission. The Corps and investor-owned utilities soon
