Articles

In this thought-in-progress piece, historian Juan Felipe Hernandez Gomez, traces the ecological violence embedded in lithium extraction across two desert sites: Rhyolite Ridge in Nevada and the Salar de Llamara in northern Chile. In the face of the threatened extinction of Tiehm’s buckwheat and the precarity of brine-dependent microbial life, Hernandez Gomez asks what kind of green future is being built when decarbonization depends on new forms of sacrifice.

In this author’s note, Mona Damluji reflects on the archival and personal origins of Pipeline Cinema, her history of oil company filmmaking in Iran and Iraq. Beginning with a mid-century corporate documentary discovered on YouTube, Damluji traces how multinational petroleum companies used film to shape narratives of modernization, progress, and national development. The piece moves from corporate propaganda to family history, confronting the uneasy proximity between critique and complicity

Francesco Gerali reviews Reflecting Oil, edited by Ernst Logar, a volume grounded in a five-year arts-based research project that places crude oil at the center of inquiry. The book treats oil as a substance, a system, and a structuring condition of modern life. Gerali situates the volume within energy humanities and argues that it offers a methodological intervention: artistic research can function as a form of knowledge production capable of reframing how we understand petroculture and transition.

In this installment of Helios, Amy Janzwood speaks with Darin Barney about her book Mega Pipelines, Mega Resistance, which examines pipeline politics, social movements, and state power in Canada. Focusing on the Northern Gateway and Trans Mountain expansion projects, their conversation traces why pipelines become sites of democratic conflict, how resistance takes shape across Indigenous nations, environmental organizations, and local communities, and how regulators and governments structure extractive outcomes. Together, they discuss infrastructure as a political object, the constraints of regulatory participation, and the conditions under which large-scale resistance forms in periods of renewed extractivism.