Interrogating Naturalization and Romanticization in Rural Extractive Environments: The American Midwest and Scotland

Session Submission Type: Complete Panel

Abstract

This panel delves into the histories and implications of rural built environments in agricultural places where aesthetic representation has naturalized extractive practices. Each paper examines how claims of romanticized wilderness coexist with utilitarian “working landscapes.” The panel crosses the Atlantic to cover two cultural contexts—two papers trace agro-environmental change in the US Midwest, focusing on the nineteenth-century transformations of the Prairie Peninsula, including the “Prairie Pothole” and Corn Belt. The other two discuss the clearance landscapes and contested culture of the Scottish Highlands.

This interdisciplinary group explores how naturalization narratives emerge within extractive environments. We deploy methods such as natural science-based inquiries of deep history and deep mapping, analysis of agro-environmental debates informed by social and political critique, and a queer ecology lens that integrates ecocritical and STS perspectives. Collectively, this panel places aesthetic and literary representations at the heart of the debate over how landscapes have been classified in industrializing societies. Our collective research shows that industrialized landscapes—in Scotland and the US Midwest—are commonly represented as idyllic. From this standpoint, each paper evaluates claims of “usefulness” and valuation of the rural environments based on the criteria established by cultures of extraction.

Kristen Greteman explains the importance of extensive but hidden water drainage systems employed to adapt US Midwestern wetlands to Corn Belt farming. Michael Belding argues that trees, not corn, give the region’s agricultural landscape its classic aesthetic and conceal its industrial character dating back to the late nineteenth century. Across the Atlantic, Christianna Bennett situates the Jacobite Rebellion within a longer history of Highland land use contestation and change. Finally, Hillary Loomis shows how twentieth-century Scottish films erased social and environmental violence and depicted nation-making landscapes in the late Hanoverian period to fit a Scottish national identity within the wider British Empire.

Sub Unit

• ASEH Annual Conference

Individual Presentations

• Draining Iowa: An Environment of Slow Violence - Kristen Greteman, Iowa State University

• The Middle Border’s Middle Borders: Trees and the Making of the Corn Belt - Michael Belding, Iowa State University

• Reclaiming Wet History: Examining Peat to Uncover Suppressed Highlander Environmental Perspectives - Christianna Bennett, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

• Farming on Film: The Portrayal of Environmental Myths and Legends on Screen in Early-Twentieth-Century Scotland - Hillary Loomis, Southern Illinois University

Chair

• Lawrence Culver, Utah State University