Search

In the 1970s, powerline protests erupted across rural communities in the United States. Just as a global movement of environmentalists, farmers, and activists fought expansive energy infrastructures, many rural Americans living in the transportation corridors of the electric-grid system directly confronted the political, social, and environmental costs of cheap electricity. This article revisits three well-known powerline protests in the United States-in western Minnesota, Appalachian Ohio, and upstate New York. It argues that rural protestors, by resisting capital-intensive technological growth in the countryside, proved highly receptive to the era's alternative technology movement. The protests show how the alternative technology movement and its democratic vision spread and transmuted within mainstream American culture. Rural communities, leery of large-scale corporate and government control, helped advance renewable energy politics and challenged the "utility consensus" of the American electric power industry. Grassroots revolts blended populist politics with global critiques to make environmental ethics agreeable to rural constituencies.

Drumlines incorporating SMART (Shark-Management-Alert-in-Real-Time) technology are a new tool used in several bather protection programmes globally. In New South Wales (NSW), Australia, the white shark ( Carcharodon carcharias ) is a target species for SMART drumlines because they are often involved in attacks on humans. To understand white shark sensitivity to capture and to establish protocols around acceptable timeframes for responding to alerts, 47 juvenile and subadult white sharks were caught on SMART drumlines at five locations off the east coast of Australia. There was no at-vessel mortality during the sampling period. After capture, blood was sampled from each shark to assess its acute physiological status. Of the 18 metabolites investigated, only lactate and aspartate aminotransferase exhibited significant positive relationships with the capture duration on SMART drumlines. These results indicate that the capture process is relatively benign and that the current response times used here are appropriate to minimize long-term negative impacts on released white sharks. Where white sharks are likely to interact negatively with beachgoers, SMART drumlines can therefore be a useful addition to bather protection programmes that also aim to minimize harm to captured animals. Other shark species captured on SMART drumlines should also be investigated to gain broader understanding of potential physiological consequences of using this new technology.