Full Description
Energy Culture is a provocative book about oil's firm grip on our politics and everyday lives. It brings together essays and artwork produced in a collaborative environment to stimulate new ways of thinking and to achieve a more just and sustainable world.The original work collected in Energy Culture creatively engages energy as a social form through lively arguments and artistic research organized around three vectors of inquiry. The first maps how fossil fuels became, and continue to be, embedded in North American society, from the ideology of tar sands reclamation projects to dreams of fiber optic cables running through the Northwest Passage. The second comprises creative and artistic responses to the dominance of fossil fuels in everyday life and to the challenge of realizing new energy cultures. The final section addresses the conceptual and political challenges posed by energy transition and calls into question established views on energy. Its contributions caution against solar capitalism, explore the politics of sabotage, and imagine an energy efficient transportation system called "the switch." Imbued with a sense of urgency and hope, Energy Culture exposes the deep imbrications of energy and culture while pointing provocatively to ways of thinking and living otherwise.
Contents
Introduction
Part I: Mapping Energy Culture
Oil on Water
Trespassage
The Ocean and the Cloud: Material Metaphors of Hidden Infrastructure
Walking Matters: A Peripatetic Rethinking of Energy Culture
Several Documents Pertaining to the Cascade Energy (transition) Park Corporation Corporation (CORPCORP)
Sustaining Petrocultures: On the Politics and Aesthetics of Oil Sands Reclamation
Part II: Figuring Energy Culture
Capitalism in the Corpse of a Whale
Tilting at Windfarms: Towards a Political Ecology of Energy Humanism and the Literary Aesthetic
Embodied Actants, Fossil Narratives
The Energy Apparatus
Aeolian Survey
Anecdotal Encounters on Driveways: The Aesthetics of Oil in Northern Alberta and Newfoundland
Energy Meets Telepathy Aesthetics and Materialist Consciousness
Part III: The Politics of Energy Culture
Rejecting Solar Capitalism
The Switch
Beyond Carbon Democracy: Energy, Infrastructure, and Sabotage
Strike
Energized Antagonisms: Thinking Beyond 'Energy Culture'
Vortex of Light (Ice Memoriam)
