Alevgül Sorman explains how researchers are using the concept of "social metabolism" to trace how societies process energy at different scales. This body of research shows that we can draw parallels between the benefits of balanced and healthy diets for bodies and societies alike, in which an intake of less does not necessarily mean we are worse off: it can be a pathway to better (social) health.
Barbara Leckie writes about her new book, "Climate Change, Interrupted," and reflects on how many different kinds of breaks in time gave rise to this book and renewed her sense of the larger possibilities that ruptures in time might offer.
The Petrocultures Research Group's After Oil Collective recently began its After Oil 3 (AOS 3) project. One result of the first AOS 3 meeting is a six-episode podcast series called Volatile Trajectories, which has just been released online and as part of the Environmental Humanities Month 2022 Program. The podcast episodes were written and recorded over a day and a half at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in October 2022. They feature leading and emerging energy humanities researchers in conversation about how we move beyond fossil fuels and climate crisis.
Climate fiction stories, sometimes known as "cli-fi", have captured the imagination of writers and their readers. But it isn't yet clear if reading dramatic narratives about climate change can or will translate into action. Amidst a significant push for new narratives to shift climate anxiety into action, researcher Misty Matthews-Roper has turned to book clubs to understand the social power of reading cli-fi. She reports on her preliminary findings about how social reading can create meaningful conversations about how to live and respond to the ongoing climate crisis.
"Climate change," writes Andrew Pendakis, "is not a box on a diplomatic checklist: it’s now the checklist itself." In this provocative essay, Pendakis argues that the increasingly aggressive posture of US policy towards China threatens to undermine the kind of radical and collaborative actions that the climate crisis demands. To have any hope of addressing the crisis, the United States must abandon xenophobic nationalism and adopt a much more open and cooperative position on China.
Anthropologist Zeynep Oguz examines the entanglement of militarization and ecological destruction in the new natural gas frontier of the Eastern Mediterranean. Oguz argues that energy humanities perspectives can intervene in such cases by undermining the conventional worldviews upon which geopolitics, security, and extractivism rely to open up new forms of politics and possible futures.
Helios is a new interview series about cutting edge EH research and the creative processes that bring it to life. Our third installment features Rebecca Sharp, a poet and playwright whose new collection, Rough Currency, explores our individual and collection entanglements with fossil fuels with an eye for the mythic and the magical.
What does religion have to do with climate change? For writer and artist Darren Fleet, the wildfires raging across Western Canada evoke the shared vocabulary of religion and climate change politics, and the urgent need to think seriously about the 'spiritual work' of energy transition and energy justice.
Helios is a new interview series about cutting edge EH research and the creative processes that bring it to life. Our second installment features Anne Pasek, a Canada Research Chair in Media, Culture, and the Environment whose research aims to reshape our understanding of carbon, the Internet, and how humanities scholars think about and do research in a warming world.
Rural communities are often hit hard by climate change but face significant barriers in mitigating its effects. Enock Mac'Ouma describes a project of the UNESCO Chair on Community Radio for Agricultural Education at Rongo University, Kenya, which uses community radio to accelerate rural education and technology transfer in a particularly vulnerable region.
Leslie Sklair, Professor Emeritus in Sociology at the London School of Economics, introduces an important new study on global media coverage of the Anthropocene.
Claire Ravenscroft warns that mere belief in "the science" of climate change is no longer good enough, and that the Democratic Party will only make progess if pushed by a well-organized and insistent grassroots movement.
Despite a recent surge in youth climate activism around the world, climate-related topics remain marginal in formal education in many countries. A team of researchers created the International Youth Deliberation on Energy Futures to fill the gap. Lynette Shultz and Carrie Karsgaard explain what they were up to, and how the students responded.
The shipping of goods around the world keeps economies going. But it comes at an enormous environmental cost – producing more CO₂ than the aviation industry. This problem should be getting urgent international attention and action, but, as Christiaan De Beukelaer explains, it’s not.
The Liberal government's recent Throne Speech made grand environmental policy pronouncements. Imre Szeman finds fault with the Liberal's haphazard approach and questions their continued commitment to resource extraction.
Casey Williams provides a definition and overview of the Energy Humanities. It is a field of studies that attends to the ways energy resources, systems, and use patterns shape the material, social, and cultural conditions of modern life. Understanding what it means to live in a fossil-fueled world—at a moment when planetary warming compels a transition away from fossil energy—is its chief task. What new habits, values, desires, and forms of life and art might obtain in a world “after oil”?
The COVID-19 pandemic has grounded thousands of would-be travellers and forced the organizers of large conferences to rethink how to share knowledge and build professional networks. Energy Humanities researchers Anne Pasek, Emily Roehl, and Caleb Wellum argue that this turn of events is an opportunity to create more sustainable and equitable forms of knowledge exchange. In this white paper, they offer practical advice for conference organizers looking to experiment with low carbon e-conferencing.
