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By the early decades of the twentieth century, southern New England's Connecticut Valley had become a center of shade tobacco production and a destination for seasonal farmworkers drawn from sources inside and outside of New England. This paper explores the history of three groups of seasonal workers-children from area cities and towns; white southern high school students: and young African American men from southern high schools and black colleges-with an eye to assessing the impact of their presence on the form and meaning of the Connecticut Valley. My first goal is to add depth to the historiography of twentieth-century New England farming by drawing attention to the largely overlooked story of non-rural and extra-regional seasonal farmworkers. My second goal is to frame the case of Connecticut tobacco labor according to the study of mobility and its relationship to landscape. The mobility of workers into and within the region, I suggest, made possible the success of the shade tobacco economy while at the same time posing challenges to popularized cultural conventions about regional identity. For this reason, I argue, the history of Connecticut's shade tobacco landscape was informed by the efforts of shade tobacco growers to direct and control a confluence of environmental conditions, group and place-based identities, and the mechanics and meanings of mobility among seasonal workers. By hiring non-local, seasonal workers and by attempting to control their mobility, large-scale, corporate growers and their spokespeople ultimately sought to maintain control over the development and identity of the valley's rural landscape. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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Between 2001 and 2003, Roxanne Quimby - then the sole owner of a natural personal-care products company named Burt's Bees - invested millions of dollars of her company's profits in tens of thousands of acres of forestland in northern Maine. Her intention was to donate that land to the United States government on behalf of a controversial national park proposed for the region - the Maine Woods National Park. Quimby's actions set off sharp debates between policy makers, environmentalists and residents of northern Maine. As this article suggests, those debates were informed in part by their association with green consumerism. When consumers purchase `environmentally friendly' products like those made by Burt's Bees, they typically envision their actions as having positive consequences for places associated directly with the production and consumption of that product. In this case, however, profits from a green consumer product were reinvested outside its immediate commodity chain, thereby implicating green-consumer decisions in a politics of identity and landscape control beyond that product's lifecycle. This paper explores that process, suggesting that even the most well-intended consumer choices can carry social and environmental consequences into new and perhaps unexpected terrain. When we shop to save, we can never be quite certain of what it is that we are saving.
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Broadwater Energy is one of a number of recent proposals to construct a liquefied natural gas facility along the East Coast of the United States. The proposal calls for the construction of an import and regasification terminal in Long Island Sound, roughly halfway between the states of New York and Connecticut. First made public in 2004 by its sponsors, TransCanada and Shell, the Broadwater proposal has inspired opposition from a range of interest groups. An examination of the Broadwater debate with a focus on arguments made by Connecticut residents in the months leading up to the release in late 2006 of the proposal's Draft Environmental Impact Statement reveals explicit and implicit points of overlap between concerns about the facility's environmental impacts and concerns about its status as a potential terrorist target. Discussions about terrorism deployed in the Broadwater debate have initiated and informed a politics of scale through which themes common to environmental debates have been transformed. This transformation, in turn, highlights the discursive and material influence of terrorism in contemporary U.S. society. Concerns about terrorist attacks have been deployed by activists to enhance the strength of an otherwise environmental debate and, in the process, those concerns have developed the potential to shape land use policy in Long Island Sound. Key Words: environmentalism, liquefied natural gas, Long Island Sound, scale, terrorism.
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