The View from Nowhere: Travels Through the Peripheries of Pine Biomass in Georgia

Abstract

Confronted by escalating planetary environmental crises, the global demand for "green" energy solutions has paradoxically intensified historically extractive practices in peripheral regions. This dissertation studies one such case: pine biomass in the Southeastern United States. Pine biomass is often misrepresented as a carbon-neutral energy source, and its production relies on patterns of social and environmental appropriation inherited from plantation systems established in the 18th and 19th centuries. By foregrounding the role of pine as both an industrial commodity and an arboreal tool of enclosure, this dissertation demonstrates how military, carceral, and logistical landscapes are fragmented, reclassified, and concealed under “greening” agendas to stake political claims to ecology. The View from Nowhere mobilizes an experimental geographic methodology that combines political ecology, environmental history, and critical realist filmmaking to move between scalar frames, from the situated to the systemic. The aim is to interrogate the epistemic frameworks and visual paradigms that render these landscapes inevitable and invisible, with the purpose of illuminating crucial opportunities for reconfiguring our engagements with land, labor, and ecology. At stake is not only an alternative representation of energy transition, but a broader critique of the spatial and economic models that structure our understanding of crises. Through bottom-up accounts of socio-natural processes in Georgia, The View from Nowhere – and its film component, Under Story – resist the dominant technocratic view of “the planetary” as an object of totality and instead seeks to reawaken its productive tensions and inevitable distances. Ultimately, these paradigm shifts seek to assert the political agency of subjects embedded within socio-spatial transformations.