Cultures Of Energy

Cymene and Dominic discuss last month’s catastrophic blackout in Venezuela on this week’s podcast. Then (17:39) we’re thrilled to have the chance to chat with Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright about their fascinating, provocative new book, Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future (Verso, 2018). We start with how the book came to be and what they mean by the potential future scenarios of “climate leviathan,” “climate behemoth” and “climate Mao.” We then turn to how climate change might prompt planetary sovereignty and what will happen if global capitalism is allowed to define that sovereignty. We talk about the enduring power of nationalist sentiments and imaginaries, especially in the form of adopting a “war footing” against climate change, and why they think we shouldn’t put all our eggs in the Green New Deal basket. We debate to what extent Keynesianism is really petroknowledge and how the image of leviathan haunts political thinking today. We close with a fourth scenario they term “climat

Cymene and Dominic celebrate a podcast milestone and bid adieu to 1990s Democrats and their market-loving, head-kissing ways on this week’s show. Then (15:40) Dominic has a chance to chat with NYU’s Jerome Whitington who has just published a fascinating book on hydropower in Laos—a country some are calling the “battery of Southeast Asia”—entitled Anthropogenic Rivers: The Production of Uncertainty in Lao Hydropower(Cornell U Press, 2019). We start off with where hydropower fits within the contemporary debate on renewable energy transition and why it receives so much less attention than solar and wind energy. Then we turn to how Jerome got interested in the Theun-Hinboun Dam project in particular and why he decided to frame the study in terms of knowledge and uncertainty. We discuss the importance of an experimental moment in the dam’s history when the power company sought to collaborate with environmental activists to allay concerns about the ecological and social impacts of the dam project. Jerome explains w

Dominic and Cymene talk about the weltschmerz of turning 10, review this week’s flood & fire news and offer handy recycling tips (e.g. don't recycle snakes!) on this week’s podcast. We then (19:08) are delighted to welcome the marvelous video artist, curator and theorist, Ursula Biemann (https://www.geobodies.org) to the conversation; Ursula has thematized energy and environment themes extensively in her work. We start with oil and her 2005 project, Black Sea Files (https://www.geobodies.org/art-and-videos/black-sea-files) which explores how energy infrastructure shapes flows of fuel and people in the Caspian region. We discuss the multiperspectival camera work that is one of her signatures and move from there to Forest Law (2014) which contrasts the logics of oil extraction in the Ecuadorian Amazon with indigenous cosmology of the living forest (https://www.geobodies.org/art-and-videos/forest-law). We talk about forests as future proliferating ecologies, how film can make visible connections between proc

Cymene and Dominic talk corporate irresponsibility—looking at you ITC and Boeing—on this week’s podcast. Then (13:44) we welcome the legendary Tim Ingold to the conversation. We start by talking about his new book, Anthropology: Why it Matters (Polity Press, 2018) and Tim explains why he thinks the practice of science should be grounded in art. We move from there to the importance of amateurism, how much impact phenomenology has had upon Tim’s thinking about biosocial being, and why he wanted to write a manifesto about anthropology’s relevance today. We engage his arguments that anthropology’s attention to different ways of thinking and being in the world are crucial speculative resources and how overcoming the conventional concept of inheritance might be the key to overcoming the opposition between the biological and the social. We turn from there to understanding life as a constant flow of re/productive activity and the temporal and performative basis of shared imagination. That leads us to his second recen

Cymene discovers the joy of Bob Ross on this week’s edition of the podcast and your co-hosts take a moment to discuss the scandal that is pay to play higher education. Then (18:09) we welcome to the pod the dynamite duo of Lauren Berlant and Katie Stewart to talk about their marvelous new book, The Hundreds(https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-hundreds?viewby=subject&categoryid=80&sort=author in which the contributions are all written in multiples of a hundred words. We hear the origin story of the project and its aim to explore ways of documenting ordinariness in which one could develop concepts based on descriptions.  We turn from there to Katie and Lauren’s different writing styles, affectography vs. ethnography, and the magic of shortness.  Our guests discuss whether there is a new critical and collaborative ethics afoot in the human sciences today and muse on the intimacy of misrecognition. We talk about their new series at Duke UP, “Writing Matters”, and how they came to the idea for the unusual index

Cymene’s sushi confessions on this week’s podcast lead us to the idea that supporting daydrinking and carb-heavy lunches in the oil industry might be an effective way to slow down the advance of petroculture (Behold, the Napocalypse!) Then (14:25) we welcome to the podcast the fantastic Lucas Bessire (University of Oklahoma). We talk with Lucas about his award-winning book Behold the Black Caiman (U of Chicago Press, 2014) and how it synthesized years of fieldwork in the Chaco region of Paraguay on indigenous Ayoreo reactions to environmental transformation and devastation. We talk about myths of “first contact” with isolated peoples as a kind of governmental fiction and turn from there to topics such as: Ayoreo irreverence to stable form, anthropology as a bedeviling practice, surviving contact, indigenous radio and poetic realignment, and the need to talk about rebecoming as a value that coexists with loss. We then move to Lucas’s work on the Ayoreo video project https://lucasbessire.net/yocoredie-the-ayore

Cymene and Dominic talk about restaurants failed by their bathrooms and “Human Uber” on this week’s podcast. We are then (14:20) delighted to welcome Kyle Powys Whyte—Tinnick Chair in the Humanities at Michigan State, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and a philosopher whose work brings Indigenous (Neshnabé) philosophy to bear on environmental issues—to the podcast (https://kylewhyte.cal.msu.edu). We start with the need to decolonize the Anthropocene concept because of how it smuggles in traditional prejudices about Indigenous peoples and often serves as a vehicle for settler privilege and what Kyle terms “settler apocalypticism.” We turn from there to settler colonialism as a mode of ecological domination and Neshnabé conceptions of time, responsibility and morality, and climate injustice as a breakdown in consent relationships. Kyle shares his thoughts about climate change as an insidious loop but also his concern that climate talk too often avoids addressing enduring structures of violence and oppr

Is coughing an identity? Well, if it’s your identity your cohosts have the scoop on a reputed new coughing cure on this week’s podcast. We are then (15:26) joined by a dynamic duo—Amanda Lynch (Director of the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society) and Siri Veland (Senior Researcher at the Nordland Research Institute in Bodø, Norway). We talk to them about how their collaboration on climate change adaptation led to a new book, Urgency in the Anthropocene (MIT Press, 2018) which takes a distinctively positivist-meets-constructivist approach to its problem. We talk about the challenges and joys of talking about the Anthropocene across the earth sciences and social sciences.  We discuss the urgency of thinking with greater imagination but also of being careful what kinds of imagination we embrace. From there we turn to the Anthropocene as a kind of myth that enables but also constrains government and policy responses. We talk modes of coexistence and the recognition of dignity as a starting point for li

What’s worse than listening to lovebirds on Valentine’s Day? Surely it is listening to them wondering whether the rideshare model can be applied to socks. So feel free to skip past all that nonsense (15:19) to our special holiday conversation with anthropologist and philosopher Eduardo Kohn. We begin with his influential book, How Forests Think, and how Eduardo’s fieldwork in Amazonia and the semiology of Charles Saunders Peirce helped him break down the nature-culture dualities of much western theory. Eduardo walks us through icons and indexes as ways of knowing and being in the world and discusses how the modern (human) investment in symbols and symbolic abstraction has contributed to the Anthropocene trajectory. We talk about academic resistance to engaging the semiosis of life in its broadest sense, why ethnographic method should be celebrated as a form of (iconic) mindful attention to the world, what’s similar about art and science as modes of knowing, and how sylvan thinking can be an ethical practice i

Dominic and Cymene review the Green New Deal and the erotic life of Adam Smith on this week’s episode of the podcast. Then (18:52) Daromir Rudnyckyj joins us to talk about his new book, Beyond Debt: Islamic Experiments in Global Finance, (U Chicago Press, 2018), which takes us deep into the rapidly evolving world of Islamic finance. Daromir explains to us the spirit and letter of Islamic finance, how its investment and risk-sharing norms depart from those the debt-based model of western finance, and what the implications would be for capitalism were Islamic finance to become the dominant global investment model. We ask him whether a bigger role for Islamic finance would do anything to reign in the growth obsession of contemporary economic thought and practice. Daromir explains how Islamic moral philosophy limits speculative investment and seeks to imagine a form of capitalism beyond debt. We discuss whether the debt jubilee model really breaks with the logic of western capitalism and whether it would be possi

Cymene and Dominic discuss frostquakes and fyre festivals on this week’s edition of the podcast. Then (15:49) we are joined by a most esteemed guest, Kim Fortun from UC Irvine, author of Advocacy after Bhopal (U Chicago Press, 2001) and President of the 4S association. We start with Kim’s thoughts on late industrialism and why it became such an important concept for her research. We dig into the doubleness of “hyperexpertise” associated with our late industrial contemporary, and ask what is robust and what is ruined. Kim explains why she favors ethnography as a mode of disrupting ossified forms of expertise. And we turn from there to her ongoing work on environmental health issues and how the challenges of collaborative research spurred her interest in developing better datasharing infrastructures and virtual research platforms like PECE (http://worldpece.org) and the The Asthma Files (http://theasthmafiles.org). We talk about the politics of scholarly communication and Kim tells us what she thinks the obstac

Your co-hosts celebrate MLK day, muse over whether Gattaca invented Tinder, toy with the idea of kale eugenics, and if that weren’t enough, Cymene Howe predicts Ragnarok on this week’s edition of the Cultures of Energy podcast. Valhalla will have to wait though because first (16:51) we catch up with the ever dynamic Eben Kirksey, live and direct from the Hart Senate Office Building in DC. We talk about the climate action impasse in the US capital and contrast that with direct action mobilizations to make New York carbon neutral and to protest BP’s LNG project in West Papua. Eben tells us about his current work on CRISPR gene editing and connects it to his earlier and ongoing interest in multispecies relations. He explains why narratives of apocalypse and salvation surrounding gene editing miss the point even as these technologies do point toward new potentialities of life within biocapitalist regimes of inequality and exclusion. We touch on the ethics of bioengineering and geoengineering and Eben suggests tha

Cymene and Dominic talk democratic do-overs, vegan falcons, Hegel’s bagels, and the 1980s arcade game Dig Dug on this week’s edition of the podcast. Then (19:51) we have a chance to catch up with Matt Huber from Syracuse, author of Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital (U Minnesota Press, 2013), about what he’s been up to lately. We start with his thinking about what a truly socialist climate politics would look like and how it would be oriented to the problems of the new working class, what Matt terms “the 63%.” Then Matt explains why he thinks taxing the rich and corporations makes more sense than taxing molecules. We talk about what lessons a Green New Deal could take from the original New Deal, the U.S. as a “rogue state” on climate, who should be striking to pressure elites to take climate change seriously, the pernicious individualization of carbon footprints, and what should be grown and de-grown in a climate woke economy. In closing, Matthew makes a strong case for a total expropriation o

Cymene and Dominic are back and borderline alert for 2019. They recently watched the first half of Netflix’s Bird Box and speculate as to whether the alleged “Bird Box challenge” is further evidence of the doom of our species. Then (16:00) we welcome Icelandic anthropological legend Gísli Palsson to the podcast to talk about his latest book project, Down to Earth: A Memoir, a wonderful discussion of human beings and their relationship with earthquakes, stones and lava. We begin with the 1973 volcanic eruption that indelibly impacted Gísli's life as it destroyed his childhood home and buried his town in ash like an Icelandic Pompeii. We talk about homes and habitats both specific and global, the need for a new geosocial contract, the vitality of rocks, life as geolubricant, and the return to premodernist thinking as we confront that volcano in our living room, the Anthropocene. Gísli tells us about some of the amazing volcano projects artists like Nelly Ben Hayoun are undertaking these days. And we close on ge

This week it’s our end of year special edition of the Cultures of Energy podcast. Dominic and Cymene discusses a couple of energy news stories from 2018, Dominic apparently says Permian “basement” instead of “basin,” and they share heartwarming resolutions for 2019 including doing more yoga in the desert with children. Then (18:55) our search for a holiday movie that somehow thematizes climate change turned up a strange Finnish film, Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale, which turned out to be not really about climate change. But it does feature an evil Santa buried underneath a mountain who is set free by a mining operation. It’ll make a fittingly weird end to your 2018 or beginning to your 2019. In any case, thanks for listening to the podcast this past year!! More great episodes coming soon in the new year!

Cymene and Dominic wonder whether there’s a holiday film out there that also addresses Anthropocene issues and wonder whether the Grinch was actually woke to climate change. Then (12:40) we welcome our good friend Rhys Williams, from the University of Glasgow, to the podcast to talk to us about the emerging genre of solarpunk fiction. We start with the basics: what solarpunk is, what its origins are, and why its online community is just as interesting as its literary products if not more so? Rhys explains what’s punk about the movement’s unapologetically optimistic take on the future despite our dark times. We talk speculative worlds, glowing aesthetics, the work of light and the joy of community. Rhys explains why he thinks it’s important for energy humanities to move “outside the text” and also to take fantasy seriously. We then explore some solarpunk narratives that Rhys finds particularly compelling and discuss how the stories exert agency beyond themselves. In closing, Rhys offers suggestions as to where

Dominic and Cymene wonder whether there isn’t some way to make the academic job market experience slightly less spirit-killing on this week’s podcast. Then (14:36) we are most fortunate to get U Michigan anthropologist Jason De León (http://undocumentedmigrationproject.com) on the phone to talk about his book The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail (U California Press 2015) and its exploration of “desert necroviolence” in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. We talk about the long-standing U.S. “prevention through deterrence” border policy, its use of landscape as weapon, how multispecies relations and nonhuman forces factored so significantly into the story of migration he wanted to tell, and whether the Trump regime has altered previous patterns of necroviolence. We discuss governmental discourse on the desert as killer, the materiality and industry of undocumented border migration, the phenomenology of migration and why migrants often say it’s impossible to go back. We ask Jason how climate

Dominic and Cymene talk about gloomy climate news and dogs that can judge the goodness in human souls on this week’s podcast. Then (19:16) we catch up with environmental artist Maria Whiteman at her residency at the Environmental Resilience Institute at Indiana University. We engage several of her art projects from the past decade and talk about touching as a way of remembering, what fascinates her about animals and landscapes, tactile encounters with taxidermy, the impact of the deaths of Leonard Cohen and David Bowie, truckstops as muses, and finally her current work with fungi as proxies for thinking about climate change and the Anthropocene. Check out all of Maria’s work at http://maria-whiteman.squarespace.com

Cymene and Dominic rediscover the Violent Femmes on this week's podcast and that prompts a discussion of the best albums of all time. We then (18:54) welcome American U’s Evan Berry to the podcast, author of Devoted to Nature: The Religious Roots of American Environmentalism (U California Press, 2015) and the PI of a Luce Foundation funded project on “Religion and Climate Change in Cross-Regional Comparison.” We start with the Pope and his views on climate change and then quickly move on to Evan’s argument that much apparently secular environmentalist thinking has deep affinities with Christian theology. We revisit Lynn White’s famous argument that Christianity devalues nature, discuss the need to move past “great man” narratives of the evolution of environmentalism, and ruminate on what 19th century Christian environmentalists considered to be the “moral salubriousness of nature.” Evan shares his thoughts on how Protestant nominalism may have informed American climate denialism over time and also about how w

Dominic and Cymene talk urban turkey encounters on this week’s edition of the Cultures of Energy podcast. With multispecies on our minds, we then (8:59) check in with Dartmouth’s Laura Ogden. We begin with her experience growing up in the Everglades and how it sparked a life long interest in multispecies relations and the hidden histories of landscapes often regarded as “wilderness.” We touch on her 2011 book Swamplife and talk alligator subjectivity, their relations with humans and the special challenges of thinking about predator-predator relations within multispecies ethnography. Laura gives us her take on the environmental challenges facing swamplife in the Everglades today and then we turn to her current work on invasive species in Tierra del Fuego. We hear how Peronism brought Canadian beavers to Argentina and how their spread into Chile helped her to rethink species assemblages. We talk about Laura’s collaborations with feminist performance artists and ecologists, why she thinks the term “resilience” i