The Power and the Water: Connecting Pasts with Futures

'The Power and the Water: Connecting Pasts with Futures' examines the nature of environmental 'connectivities' since industrialization and how their legacies challenge us in the early 21st century. Environmental connectivity denotes our understanding of how place, livelihood and community is moulded by interacting processes of multiple spatial scale and different durations, that link local actions to the 'planetary system'. These understandings relate to how infrastructure and its environmental impacts generate new distances but, equally, fresh bonds between places, peoples, institutions and cultures. Our understanding of connectivity also engages with how the construction and sustainment of human communities creates a landscape that can facilitate or interrupt the interactions of species, biodiversity and the resilience of socio-cultural and natural worlds.
We will examine how different environmental narratives are deployed in particular places and contexts; how these narratives interact; how they seek to link communities and their environmental impacts; how they connect designated environmental 'experts' and a variety of publics and policymakers; and how, in turn, they shape identities and forge new communities of understanding, shared infrastructure and political action. We will also consider shared negative experiences that affect community resilience, social learning and environmental policy response.
We will examine how notions of the 'environmental' and 'natural' categorize spaces and demarcate what is worthy of protection, privileging certain ideas of what is valued in nature and how ecological and socio-cultural connections work. In particular, we explore the transformative role of technology across a range of liquid and energy environments - from the manipulation of the Tyne and proposed harnessing of the Severn to the drainage of Peak District mines and massive electricity delivery systems such as pylons.
We can do fullest justice to these questions and this approach through a series of integrated studies that probe key aspects of environmental connectivity in the 20th century and beyond (backwards and forwards). This will allow us to appreciate commonalities and contrasts in environmental experience, and how these relate to specific times, places and communities, as well as social, educational and informational experiences.
The project consists of 3 strands focusing on different types of connectivity, all rooted in considerations of power and energy. 1. River systems and their connected bio-physical, energetic, commercial and cultural flows (with reference to Tyne and Severn). 2. Infrastructure and energy systems/sectors and their connected sites of generation, transmission and consumption (with reference to the national grid's emergence and the energy environments of 20th century Somerset). 3. The infrastructure of constructed watercourses and how they connect notions of natural and cultural heritage and watercourses above and below ground (with reference to soughs [drainage channels/artificial rivers] in Derbyshire's former lead mining district).
Each strand contributes to the generation of consequential new syntheses of environmental history and environmental thought in Britain, demonstrating the historical development and contingency of 'environmental connectivity', but also their place- and context-specific character. These endeavours hook up with themes highlighted in the 'Care for the Future' and 'Connected Communities' programmes. What kind of future envisioning, and possibilities for progress toward sustainable development or risks of degradation and dissolution, are associated with particular forms of environmental connectivity? How far are people and communities aware of connections undergirding their lives? What kind of responsibilities and ideas of stewardship/ownership has this conferred on individuals, systems of knowledge generation, institutions, and, indeed, the 'forces of nature'.

Among the most valuable contributions that historically-minded research in the arts and humanities can bring to understanding perceptions of '(the) environment', processes of environmental change, and questions of environmental sustainability, is to situate them within their wider social, cultural, economic, political, scientific, technological - and temporal - contexts. By identifying differing meanings and articulations that have been given to perceptions of environmental change in different societies and among different groups in different contexts, whether local, national and international, we can come to a better understanding of how they emerge, how they shape behaviour and response, how and why they are durable or prone to surprise.

These insights can help current managers and policymakers appreciate the perceptions and socio-cultural interpretations that act as levers or barriers to managing the 'environment' and engaging various publics in the management of change. Equally, the findings of historical research improve our comprehension of how human agency has long been central to processes of environmental change, just as human action has been intensively shaped by the context of environmental challenges and opportunities. Moreover, a firmer grasp of how places and publics shape environmental discourse can help with developing more effective communication and awareness of the narratives that inform policy.

This project both expands and refines our efforts to provide a vital, yet still largely missing link, between humanities research and the delivery of environmental policy. Academic expertise of the kind we have assembled for this project is often difficult for managers to access and will help them to develop connections and sustainable working relationships with parts of the academic community outside of usual partnerships.

Our research programme on environmental connectivities related to liquid and energy environments is particularly timely for a number of reasons, which include, but are not limited to the following. Firstly, two of our partners, Northumbrian Water and the Quantock Hills AONB Service, are preparing for 'periodic' five-year review of their management plans for the 2015-20 period; this presents us with a unique opportunity to make a meaningful contribution through our projects on the Tyne and Somerset's energy environments. Secondly, our studies of the Severn Barrage and equally contested nuclear and wind energy projects in adjacent Somerset are equally of the moment in view of current UK government efforts to tackle climate change and meet EU carbon emission reduction targets (that 15% of total UK energy consumption derive from renewable sources by 2020 and 60% by 2050). Thirdly, the Peak District National Park's Biodiversity Action Plan for river habitats highlights sough drainage and its impact on river flows and the development of mitigation strategies as a priority research area. Fourthly, the demand for and contestation of major infrastructure development and efforts (such as the National Ecosystem Assessment 2) to anticipate changes in land use and demand for ecosystem services makes a historically-informed understanding of changing attitudes toward the local and national reception of large-scale projects particularly timely, and of high interest to policymakers and the National Trust, another partnership established over previous projects.

Our wide range of partners and associates share our belief that environmental history can have a material impact on policy planning and stimulate productive thinking about their activities. However, we have been working with them long enough to know that, for all the advance attention we can give to pathways to impact, and the wider dissemination of research findings and collaborative activities, the best ideas usually result from the actual process of working together on the ground and in tandem with the emergence of the research findings.