Renewable Energy? Socio-environmental Consequences of Hydropower Extraction in the Alps

Session Submission Type: Complete Panel

Abstract

While environmental historians have long offered histories that demonstrate the negative environmental impacts associated with extracting energy from "renewable" sources, recently scholars have begun to approach the label with a revived critical eye. Alongside considerations of the ecological consequences of energy production have also come questions about the ability of societies to supply energy in a democratic, equitable, and thus socially sustainable manner.

The papers in this panel explore these concepts in relation to one of the most important historical forms of renewable energy in a region where it was extracted on a grand scale. In the modern period, no renewable source of energy has generated more electricity than hydropower, and one of the early global centers of hydropower production was the European Alps. Over the course of the first half of the twentieth century, Europeans transformed the Alps into one of the region’s most important energy landscapes.

The individual papers investigate hydropower extractivism and its socio-environmental impacts on the basis of several cases from throughout the Alpine arc. The first paper looks at the ways that hydropower development affected daily life in riverine villages in Slovenia, a region that to date has received much less scholarly attention than other parts of the Alps. The next paper offers a comparative study of reservoir construction and population displacement in the countries of Italy and Switzerland from 1918 to 1945. By juxtaposing these cases, it is possible to identify differences but also similarities in how nominally fascist and democratic societies operated in this regard. The final paper explores debates about hydropower extractivism in National Socialist Austria and their effects on the Alpine landscape and German war economy’s energy supply. By choosing a chair whose research focus lies outside of Europe, we also hope to permit potential comparisons beyond the Alps.

Sub Unit

• ASEH Annual Conference

Individual Presentations

• The land of Carniola will get a regional hydropower plant: The Završnica hydroelectric power plant and its socio-environmental consequences at the beginning of the 20th century - Sara Šifrar Krajnik, University of Bern

• White Coal's Burden: A Social Historical Comparison of alpine Hydro-Extraction between Switzerland and Italy (1918–1945) - Sebastian De Pretto, University of Bern

• National Socialism, Hydropower Extractivism, and Climate Change in the Austrian Alps, 1938-1945 - Marc Landry, University of New Orleans

Chair

• Christopher Allan Conte, Utah State University