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.
Many people first encounter energy history in museums, where they learn about heroic steam powered engines and fossil-fueled technologies. The history of solar energy technologies, argues Frédéric Caille, is often either forgotten or repressed in these spaces. Such forgetting distorts our understanding of the past and narrows our sense of future possibilities. With his collaborative project to recover, reconstruct, and display forgotten solar water pumps from the 1970s, Caille and his colleagues frame forgotten solar technologies as “cosmograms”: objects which describe the world as it could have been, and could yet become.
In this author's note on his new book, Who Owns the Wind?, anthropologist David Hughes offers a tantalizing glimpse of what energy justice could look like, and why it matters.
Deepthi Swamy of the World Resources Institute, India, highlights some of the challenges and complexities of energy transition on the ground in India. If India is to achieve its renewable energy goals, the country must take a democratic, bottom-up view of transition.
COVID-19 may be fueling flight from urban density that will undercut a green recovery. Caleb Wellum questions technocentric approaches to green recovery and explores the TVO series "The Life-Sized City" as a resource for thinking about how to renew city life.
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”?
