Geosciences’ Eve Vogel Guest Edits Special Issue of Journal Focused on Massachusetts’ Use of Quebec Hydropower

Eve Vogel, professor of geography in the Department of Geosciences, has served as guest co-editor of the latest edition of Northern Geographer, the annual journal of The New England-St. Lawrence Valley Geographical Society (NESTVAL). Vogel authored the introduction to the issue, titled “Quebec Hydropower for a Green Massachusetts? Connections, Contradictions, and Contests of Renewable Electricity,” and both she and her co-editor Matt McCourt, a UMass Amherst alumnus and associate professor of geography at the University of Maine at Farmington, contribute articles.

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Vogel, who worked on the issue for more than three years, says that the special issue “makes substantive empirical and theoretical contributions to cutting-edge scholarship on the renewable energy transition and energy justice.

“The effort to import Hydro-Quebec power to Massachusetts is a very current effort with ongoing controversy and policy initiatives in Massachusetts, northern New England and Quebec, and with similar efforts in New York,” she says.

UMass Amherst alumni Clara Silverstein, Molly Autery, Josh Nolan and Alexandra Rinaldi all also contributed articles to the issue, a five-year effort in which New England-based undergraduate students who care about sustainability, justice and critical analysis undertook much of the research.

Vogel says that the issue “illuminates the profound and complex relationship between a serious policy effort to increase renewable electricity as a way to reduce carbon emissions in a densely populated economic region, and the environmental and social changes and political conflicts in more remote rural regions where the necessary infrastructure must be built.”

“This special Issue suggests that to understand and address a full range of justice and sustainability considerations, we must consider the connections, contradictions, and contests of renewable electricity,” Vogel writes in her introduction. “Thinking about connections of renewable electricity means tracing the material and geographical implications of efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, even when advanced through abstract targets, markets, and competitive mechanisms. Thinking about contradictions means analyzing the ways in which renewable electricity promotion is entwined with the political ecologies and political economies of capitalist economic development, which will inevitably have uneven impacts on wider sustainability and justice.”

The complete issue of volume 12 of The Northeastern Geographer co-edited by Vogel is available to read on NESTVAL’s website.