Sarah L. Hitchner

slhitchn@uga.edu

January 2022

Forests as Fuel:

Energy, Landscape, Climate, and Race in the U.S. South

Sarah Hitchner, John Schelhas, and J. Peter Brosius


In the U.S. South, wood-based bioenergy schemes are being promoted and implemented through a powerful vision merging social, environmental, and economic benefits for rural, forest-dependent communities. While this dominant narrative has led to heavy investment in experimental technologies and rural development, many complexities and complications have emerged during implementation. Forests as Fuel draws on extensive multi-sited ethnography to ground the story of wood-based bioenergy in the biophysical, economic, political, social, and cultural landscape of this region. This book contextualizes energy issues within the history and potential futures of the region’s forested landscapes, highlighting the impacts of varying perceptions of climate change and complex racial dynamics. Eschewing simple answers, the authors illuminate the points of friction that occur as competing visions of bioenergy development confront each other to variously support, reshape, contest, or reject bioenergy development. Building on recent conceptual advances in studies of sociotechnical imaginaries, environmental history, and energy justice, the authors present a careful and nuanced analysis that can provide guidance for promoting meaningful participation of local community members in renewable energy policy and production while recognizing the complex interplay of factors affecting its implementation in local places.

Order Here (use code LXFANDF30 for a 30% discount): 

https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781793632340/Forests-as-Fuel-Energy-Landscape-Climate-and-Race-in-the-US-South

June 2017

Indigeneity and the Sacred:

Indigenous Revival and the Conservation of Sacred Natural Sites in the Americas

Edited by Fausto Sarmiento and Sarah Hitchner

This book presents current research in the political ecology of indigenous revival and its role in nature conservation in critical areas in the Americas. An important contribution to evolving studies on conservation of sacred natural sites (SNS), the book elucidates the complexity of development scenarios within cultural landscapes related to the appropriation of religion, environmental change in indigenous territories, and new conservation management approaches. Indigeneity and the Sacred explores how these struggles for land, rights, and political power are embedded within physical landscapes, and how indigenous identity is reconstituted as globalizing forces simultaneously threaten and promote the notion of indigeneity.

Order here:

https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/SarmientoIndigeneity

Sarah L. Hitchner

Anthropologist, Researcher, Writer, Instructor, and Editor

 I am an Assistant Research Scientist and an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Anthropology at University of Georgia. I hold a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Georgia and have conducted long-term ethnographic research in Malaysia, Indonesia, and the U.S. South on cultural landscapes, conservation and indigenous communities, local impacts of bioenergy development, perceptions of climate change, and African American forest management. I am Co-Director of UGA's Bali & Beyond study abroad program in Bali, Indonesia, where I teach Ethnographic Writing.

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Please feel free to send a message. I am happy to respond to inquiries regarding speaking engagements, research and writing collaborations, and options for proofreading, copyediting, and editing services for academic publications in the natural and social sciences.
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