270 | The Electrical Trees

Join hosts Nikol & Laura to hear about a topic which has rarely been explored in the context of urban environmental history, something which has gone unremarked and is often invisible in our everyday lives: telephone poles and wires. The interviewee, Michael Feagan, explains the use and status of telephone poles within cities, and how they reflected social, economic, and political value of technology in the late nineteenth-century. Michael also highlights the importance of how the poles and wires were physically constructed, and how they interacted with natural elements such as plants and the weather. Give this a listen and we guarantee you will have a completely different view on telephone poles because after all, electrical poles are simultaneously so like trees but yet so different.

To find more about Michael, you can follow on Twitter as @mrfeagan and check his work at Photographing Environmental History

Produced by Laura Muñoz