In the lead up to the 2011 official U.S. State Department decision on the proposed Keystone XL pipeline--running from the Alberta, Canada Tar Sands to the Gulf of Mexico--the Department held nine public meetings in Fall 2011 in the six U.S. states through which the proposed Keystone XL pipeline project would pass (the Department rejected the proposal; however, a new proposal is under consideration as of this writing). The transcripts of these public meetings are publicly accessible.
Understanding the pipeline as a project of trans-national trade and the global circulation of petrochemicals--including global emissions of carbon dioxide--this paper hones in on one region within one U.S. state: the Nebraskan Sandhills, a cattle ranching region of grass-stabilized sand dunes and inter-dunal valleys stretching 20,000-square miles across the north-central part of the state, under which rests a vast hydrological network, including the largest freshwater aquifer in the world - the Ogallala Aquifer.
This essay argues that we can read the Public Comments as a form of poetic expression, paying attention to the ways the State Department transcription process formatted the oral testimonies into an "official" and sanctioned public document -- instituting line-breaks and other syntactical procedures. Using the tools of literary-critical analysis, this paper makes a case that we can read the Comments as a form of documentary poetry - in the tradition of such American modernist poets as Charles Reznikoff, Muriel Rukeyser, and George Oppen - that explore ecological questions while experimenting with lyric structures. The Comments reveal competing environmental stakeholders' stances - on such topics as Prairie systems ecology and the neoliberal economics of private-public capital markets. In doing so, they subsequently express citizens' various understandings of themselves in relation to landscape, ecology, technology, and geo-politics.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uiowa.edu/oai:ir.uiowa.edu:etd-5270 |
| Date | 01 May 2014 |
| Creators | Siegel, Eric Mitchell |
| Contributors | Hill, Michael D., 1971- |
| Publisher | University of Iowa |
| Source Sets | University of Iowa |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | thesis |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Theses and Dissertations |
| Rights | Copyright 2014 Eric M. Siegel |
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