The project offers the first place-based history of the material and ideological consequences of the middle-Atlantic organic economy's development as it intersected with an ascendant fossil economy in eighteenth-century colonial America, and later, in the nineteenth and twentieth-century United States.​

At base, the project is a study of the New Jersey Meadowlands and the larger landscapes it participated in and helped to produce. By focusing upon the myriad ways in which the site has been manipulated and reinvented during times of crisis, scarcity, and war, and analyzing the far-reaching consequences of the landscape ideologies and technologies adopted during those transformations, the project offers new perspectives and methods through which to understand histories of climate change, colonialism, energy use, urbanization, and capitalism.