Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 2: Dam Crazy for White Coal in the New
South
In his 1932 topic,
Human Geography of the South: A Study in Regional Resources and Hu-
man Adequacy
, Rupert Vance declared that “there are two great economic complexes that
may be expected to force” states to abandon selfish or provincial attitudes in exchange for
regional or national outlooks. Vance's study provided solutions for building a modern re-
gion and challenging long-standing assumptions that the South was a colonial outpost be-
deviled by race relations and that it could be nothing more than a poor land inhabited by
poor people. Born in Arkansas, Vance contributed to the liberal strain of regionalist ana-
lysis at the University of North Carolina in the 1930s; he saw a way out of the regional
backwardness as the United States entered the global Great Depression. As the first com-
plex, Vance considered continued railroad network development for connecting crops and
peripheries to markets and central cores. More recently, scholars have examined the eco-
nomic, cultural, and environmental consequences of America's railroads and have demon-
strated that transportation and technical systems integrated those regions into the national
fabric. But Vance's second complex, hydroelectric development in the humid and generally
water-blessed Southeast, is still poorly understood as a force of change in the first three dec-
ades of the twentieth century. In a region well-endowed with flowing water, Vance argued,
rivers were prime renewable energy resources that could be “harnessed” to benefit farm-
ers and factory workers. Vance's travels and collaborative research throughout the Southeast
revealed an extensive privately capitalized network of hydroelectric dams, reservoirs, and
transmission lines that stretched from North Carolina to Mississippi. Relying on these obser-
vations, Vance advocated for a publicly funded and publicly owned regional hydro-complex
that mimicked the private energy corporations' modern systems. When Vance looked across
the “Piedmont crescent of industry” one year before President Franklin D. Roosevelt created
the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) in 1933, water appeared as one of the most under-
utilized natural resources and as a renewable energy source monopolized by a few private
energy companies and industries. Vance saw the fruits and inequity of the New South eco-
nomy, and he embraced hydroelectric power and cheap organic energy as tools to shape a
new future.
1
White coal, in Vance's estimation, could redefine the New South's relationship with the
rest of the nation and improve southerners' daily lives. Reassessing Rupert Vance's ideas
