Working Watersheds

Bill Conlogue is Professor of English at Marywood University and author of Undermined in Coal Country: On the Measures in a Working Land, Here and There: Reading Pennsylvania's Working Landscapes, and Working the Garden: American Writers and the Industrialization of Agriculture.

“Focused on the unique water systems and human culture of the Lackawanna Valley, Working Watersheds is innovative and informative. Conlogue’s entirely unique perspective brings the reader insights to this place and its stories while also demonstrating a way of viewing-a template-that might be applied to any site that blends natural and human tales. In this merging of disciplinary approaches, we find an entirely unique portrait of how to understand our industrial heritage. Acknowledging the implications of mining and development allows readers to come full circle, and Conlogue is our best guide to understand eastern Pennsylvania-where it has been and where it will go in the future.”-Brian C. Black, Distinguished Professor of History and Environmental Studies at Penn State Altoona, and author of Petrolia: The Landscape of America’s First Oil Boom “Pennsylvania’s Lackawanna Valley exemplifies what it means to be a working watershed with a fraught history of coal mining and fracking, but its qualities are both unique and universal. Bill Conlogue’s eloquent exploration of his home territory provides a model for historical and literary meditation on the meaning of place that could be applied anywhere on earth. This multiscalar, multidisciplinary, authoritative, and intimate narrative, which vividly exposes the inextricability of water and energy, offers an impressive example of how the environmental humanities can help us recognize our troubled past and imagine the possibility of a better world.”-Scott Slovic, Oregon Research Institute, and founding president of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment