ABSTRACT
More than 200 miles east of Los Angeles, California, is the small desert city of Blythe, where activists have been fighting to prevent the construction of a massive solar power array on 7,000 acres of local public land, at least at the time of this writing. Whereas of course, this conflict is about land and resources, the struggle over solar power in Blythe is also a conflict between divergent practices of scripturalization. This particular situation bakes within the ongoing challenges and consequences of the world after modern European imperialism, and the conflicts of scripturalization in Blythe are very much about “the work we make scriptures do for us” (Wimbush 2008: 1, 2011: 9). 2 The ISS’s emphasis on peoples’ relationships to scriptures and to the attendant, nonelectrical power dynamics of scripturalization clarifies why there is no easy, comfortable resolution to the fight between land activists and solar energy corporations in Blythe.
