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.
