Landscape ArchitectureCharlotte Leib

An Environmental and Energy History of the New Jersey Meadowlands.

“An Environmental and Energy History of the New Jersey Meadowlands” examines how meadow plants, technologies, and ideologies shaped larger patterns of colonization, climate change, and urbanization along the Northeastern Atlantic seaboard during the transition from the organic to fossil economies, using the Meadowlands of New Jersey / Lenapehoking as a central case study. Joining a growing cohort of historians and energy scholars who have mounted a critique of the “energy transition” paradigm, the project clarifies how consecutive energy regimes have combined and recombined to reshape the landscape’s composition and dominant purpose, who or what was valued within it, and conversely rendered expendable. It also provides a new interpretive framework through which to analyze and teach histories of American energy and industrialization: one that centers plants as energy sources as consequential as coal and oil, and that takes seriously the influence of climatic events in early American and US history and in the broader making of the American landscape.

School: Yale University