Mapping Connecticut’s Citizen Environmental Activism

Project Justification

For our final project, we created a map of the history of climate action in Connecticut. By mapping Connecticut’s activism, we sought to place isolated events into the larger picture of the environmental movement. Connecticut residents may feel like their local environmental struggles are unique to their area, when in fact they are part of a larger pattern of activism in the state as a whole. By showing the scale and frequency of individual protests, our map seeks to encourage support for wide-reaching, holistic climate action and legislation, while also staying attentive to the local contexts of environmental actions. Digital mapping projects provide unique opportunities to engage with hyperlocal practices while simultaneously remaining aware of patterns of action, as described in critical digital projects like HyperCities. The map also aims to place Connecticut’s activism within the larger pattern of the national environmental movement, its history, and its future direction. Our map serves as an educational resource about the environmental movement, illustrating the conceptual and practical shifts in the movement’s focus from conservation to environmentalism to climate activism. By visualizing the dynamics of previous movements, it also serves as an aid for inspecting the successes and failures of past actions, helping contemporary activists strategize for the future.

Our project has significant potential for community involvement. In order to enlarge our dataset, we would hope to partner with environmental groups in the Connecticut area to integrate their internal records into our map. Groups like the Sierra Club and the Sunrise Movement would potentially be able to supply us with the dates and focuses of hundreds of actions that they’ve been involved with over their history. Similar historical information could likely be acquired on a local scale through collaboration with Connecticut historical societies and universities. Historical societies may have newspaper collections that aren’t available through the Wesleyan or state libraries, and many universities may have topic-specific collections or other research resources. Lots of environmental activism has taken place on college campuses, making partnerships with other institutions of higher education invaluable for constructing a comprehensive history of Connecticut’s environmentalist movement. Another ideal partnership would be with other environmental history projects, preferably ones that are text-based. While our map is informative, it could be far more effective when presented alongside an account of Connecticut’s or the country’s environmental history. Our map would be more informative and engaging for the user if it was paired with a timeline of major milestones in the environmental movement, such as the publication of Silent Spring, the first Earth Day, or the rise in prominence of Greta Thunberg. A timeline such as this could also be something that we could produce as part of an ideal project.

Our ideal project would contrast most notably with our current one in its scale. Our map is currently based on coverage of climate action in the Hartford Courant. Ideally, the map would comprehensively illustrate all of Connecticut’s history of climate action, not simply one newspaper’s coverage of it. Our first step would be to expand our newspaper sources to local publications such as the Connecticut Post and New Haven Register. We would then attempt to collaborate with the previously mentioned environmental organizations, historical societies, and university libraries to gather more data that’s unavailable through Onesearch and the CT State Library. Finally, we would like to open up our map to user input, allowing the public to report environmental activism that they’ve personally researched or witnessed. Inspired by the Texas Freedom Colonies Project, this would expand our dataset and increase the community portion of our project’s shared authority. In addition to a larger dataset, our ideal project would have more precise and concrete categorizations for our data. In order to accommodate our relatively small dataset, our current map has broad working definitions for the different categories of focus and methodology. If we had a larger dataset, we could replace our “focus of action” categories of “environmental degradation”, “general environment”, and “climate change” with more specific categories such as “fossil fuels”, “air pollution”, or “Earth Day”. With more data, we would also be able to more comfortably narrow our scope to exclude quasi-activist data points like scientific reports and Forestry Association memos. With these changes, our project would better accomplish its goal of educating the public on Connecticut’s environmental history.

Bibliography

• • Foster, Charles H. W. (ed). Twentieth-Century New England Land Conservation: A Heritage of

• • Civic Engagement. Harvard University Press, 2009.

• • Hartford Courant Database

• • Newspapers of Connecticut Digital Collection. Connecticut State Library

• • Rector, Josiah. Toxic Debt: An Environmental Justice History of Detroit. University of North Carolina Press, 2022.