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Humanities
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Energy Use and the Humanities
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Energy Use and the Humanities

A special issue of Humanities (ISSN 2076-0787).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (15 January 2016) | Viewed by 44474

Special Issue Editor

Dr. Adam W. Sweeting

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Chair of Humanities, College of General Studies, Boston University, Boston, MA 02215, USA
Interests: climate change literature; American literature; sustainability; urban nature

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue will include papers that explore the intersection of the various Humanities disciplines, with the production and consumption of energy sources, such as petroleum, natural gas, nuclear energy, solar and wind power, and coal (this is only a partial list and papers that explore other energy sources are encouraged as well). The issue aims to build upon existing environmentally inflected Humanities scholarship, by exploring the ways that creative artists, writers, thinkers, and activists have either critically examined energy production and consumption or utilized these practices as subject matter. A major, though not exclusive, focus will be on papers that consider how the Environmental Humanities can address energy use during a period of anthropogenic climate change. Papers that consider any aspect of the literary, visual, cinematic, historical, and ethical implications of energy practices from any part of the globe are welcomed.

Dr. Adam W. Sweeting
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All papers will be peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Humanities is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.



References:

Bamberger, Michelle, The Real Cost of Fracking: How America’s Shale Gas Boom is Threatening our Families, Pets, and Food (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014)

Chakrabarty, Dipesh, “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35:2 (2009), 197-222.

Inman, Mason, “Natural Gas: The Fracking Fallacy.” Nature 516(7529), 03 December 2014, 28-30. Journal of American Studies, 46:2 (May 2012), 269-480. Special issue on oil culture

LeMenager, Stephanie, Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century (London: Oxford UP, 2014).

Martin, Mark, (ed.), I’m with the Bears: Short Stories from a Damaged Planet (London: Verso, 2011)

McKewan, Ian, Solar (New York: Doubleday), 2010

Morton, Timothy, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 2013.

Keywords

  • Ecocriticism
  • Environmental Humanities
  • Climate Change
  • Energy production and use
  • Petroleum
  • Fracking
  • Sustainability

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Published Papers (6 papers)

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Research

1673 KiB  
Article
Extracting the Past from the Present: Exotic Prizes, Empty Wilderness, and Commercial Conquest in Two Oil Company Advertisements, 1925–2012
by Ian Wereley
Humanities 2016, 5(2), 44; https://doi.org/10.3390/h5020044 - 13 Jun 2016
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 10758
Abstract
This article undertakes a comparative analysis of two oil company advertisements—British Petroleum’s (BP) “Persian Series”, published in London in 1925, and Cenovus Energy’s “Canadian Ideas at Work”, published across Canada in 2012. These advertisements are separated by eighty-seven years, and were produced in [...] Read more.
This article undertakes a comparative analysis of two oil company advertisements—British Petroleum’s (BP) “Persian Series”, published in London in 1925, and Cenovus Energy’s “Canadian Ideas at Work”, published across Canada in 2012. These advertisements are separated by eighty-seven years, and were produced in different countries, by different companies, and for different audiences. Yet, a closer reading of these documents reveals that they are two sides of the same coin: both narrate the extraction of oil as a great game of commercial conquest, whereby exotic prizes trapped beneath wild and empty landscapes are unlocked by oil companies. How could two advertisements that appear so radically distant feel so close? In what ways do the oil cultures of the past inflect those of the present? This article engages with such questions by critically deconstructing and comparing the imagined worlds of oil presented in BP and Cenovus’ advertisements, tracing the ways in which the resource is represented through the binaries of ancient and modern, empty and urban, wild and civilized. By configuring oil as a constellation of ideas rather than a system of things, this investigation reveals how the colonial legacies of the past continue to seep through the oil cultures of the present. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Energy Use and the Humanities)
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244 KiB  
Article
The Birth of Homo Colossus: Energy Consumption and Pre-Familiarization in Joel Barlow’s Vision of Columbus
by Matthew Pangborn
Humanities 2016, 5(2), 39; https://doi.org/10.3390/h5020039 - 3 Jun 2016
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 5308
Abstract
Although Raymond De Young points out the current response to energy descent he terms localization “is not globalization in reverse”, the writers of modernity’s energy ramp-up used many of the same techniques De Young proposes for adapting to the downslope of M. King [...] Read more.
Although Raymond De Young points out the current response to energy descent he terms localization “is not globalization in reverse”, the writers of modernity’s energy ramp-up used many of the same techniques De Young proposes for adapting to the downslope of M. King Hubbert’s fossil-fuels peak. Among these is pre-familiarization, the construction of mental models that “help people to feel at home in a place they have not yet inhabited.” Long before William Catton’s depiction of the West’s outsized energy user as Homo colossus, for example, Joel Barlow provided early national Americans with a reflection of themselves as gigantic consumers of the continent’s bounty in his 1787 Vision of Columbus. In the epic poem, Barlow puts in place foundational elements of the myth of progress that will develop with an increasingly extravagant energy consumption: a refutation of the classical republican model of history as cyclical; a conflation of the process of resource extraction with that of production; a characterization of this “production” as the natural trait of the knowledgeable, moral Western subject; the pairing of this characterization with a racialized discourse; and an assertion of climate melioration that anticipates by two centuries the counter-arguments of anthropogenic climate-change denialists. The poem invites its reader to inhabit the skin of a lofty and distanced observer of natural life, drawing on the earlier century’s infatuation with the prospect view, to help the reader become “pre-familiarized” with an idea of him- or herself fitting an economic model of endless growth. In the work, therefore, might be found not only the blueprints for an as-yet inchoate Anthropocene, but also the design of a new humanity to go along with it. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Energy Use and the Humanities)
3905 KiB  
Article
The Arts of Energy: Between Hoping for the Stars and Despairing in the Detritus
by Josh Wodak
Humanities 2016, 5(2), 38; https://doi.org/10.3390/h5020038 - 3 Jun 2016
Viewed by 5351
Abstract
Fossil fueled energy production and consumption are the basis of global industrialised societies, with the deleterious biophysical effects of such production and consumption also forming the basis of the advent of Anthropocene. In the context of science and environmental policy, hope denotes rapid [...] Read more.
Fossil fueled energy production and consumption are the basis of global industrialised societies, with the deleterious biophysical effects of such production and consumption also forming the basis of the advent of Anthropocene. In the context of science and environmental policy, hope denotes rapid decarbonisation across the globe. Meanwhile, in art and the humanities, the study of such energy and decarbonisation remains nascent and nebulous. To account for these discrepancies, this article outlines the scale of the biophysical challenges by first establishing the relationship between outspoken climate scientists and international organisations determining climate and energy policy. This relationship—between marginalised and mainstream—is used to frame the analogous challenges for two cultural fields that have recently emerged in direct response: energy humanities and the arts of energy. The discussion centers on the challenge common to all fields—between the outspoken marginal and the orthodox mainstream—to speculate on how the arts of energy may recalibrate a context-contingent hope for energy futures, drawing on case studies of ISEA Bright Future and Facing Futures Free From Fear, two installations simultaneously staged by the author in 2013 about the relationship between energy and climate change. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Energy Use and the Humanities)
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213 KiB  
Article
Energy Ontologies: Wind, Biomass, and Fossil Transportation
by Heidi Scott
Humanities 2016, 5(2), 37; https://doi.org/10.3390/h5020037 - 3 Jun 2016
Viewed by 4558
Abstract
This article uses literary sources to draw ontological distinctions among three distinct energy sources: wind power, biomass, and fossil fuels. The primary aim is to demonstrate how radically our fossil fuel regime has changed human ontology in the last two centuries during which [...] Read more.
This article uses literary sources to draw ontological distinctions among three distinct energy sources: wind power, biomass, and fossil fuels. The primary aim is to demonstrate how radically our fossil fuel regime has changed human ontology in the last two centuries during which we have entered the Anthropocene. Because this radical transformation contains myriad elements, this article will focus on transportation: the speed, quality, and quantity of travel permitted by successive energy sources. To consider the comparative literatures of energy as they relate to transportation, we will begin with wind, then consider muscle-driven biomass giving way to coal locomotion, and conclude with the highest octane fuel, petroleum. The central interest is in how the fuel depicted in literature illuminates historical moments in which the interfaces between self, society, and nature are configured by specific energy regimes. By using literature as a source text, we may arrive at an emotionally and philosophically more robust synthesis of energy history than the social and natural sciences, relying upon objective accounts and statistics, are able to provide. By re-reading literature through the lens of the Anthropocene, we gain perspective on how earlier insights into the relationship between energy and experience can inform our explorations of today’s ontological reality. Energy literature instructs us out of the fossil fuel mindset of world domination and back to a physical realm in which we are small actors in a world guided by capricious forces. Such a reality requires hard muscular work and emotional immersion to restore an ethic of care and sustainability. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Energy Use and the Humanities)
194 KiB  
Article
Petromyopia: Oil and the Energy Humanities
by Christopher F. Jones
Humanities 2016, 5(2), 36; https://doi.org/10.3390/h5020036 - 3 Jun 2016
Cited by 11 | Viewed by 8249
Abstract
Oil is currently over-represented in the energy humanities, a state of affairs I describe as petromyopia. While oil constitutes a vital source of energy in the modern world, focusing too heavily on petroleum can distract scholars from giving proper attention to other aspects [...] Read more.
Oil is currently over-represented in the energy humanities, a state of affairs I describe as petromyopia. While oil constitutes a vital source of energy in the modern world, focusing too heavily on petroleum can distract scholars from giving proper attention to other aspects of the social and cultural dimensions of energy. The goal of this article is to encourage those in the energy humanities to cast a broader net in their analyses and recognize the full diversity of energy systems in their scholarship. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Energy Use and the Humanities)
453 KiB  
Article
Greening the Screen: An Environmental Challenge
by Ekin Gündüz Özdemirci
Humanities 2016, 5(2), 35; https://doi.org/10.3390/h5020035 - 3 Jun 2016
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 9100
Abstract
Environmental themes and representations on screen are examined as a part of environmental social studies and can be considered a way of creating awareness of environmental issues. However, how often do we consider the environmental impact of a film or television shoot as [...] Read more.
Environmental themes and representations on screen are examined as a part of environmental social studies and can be considered a way of creating awareness of environmental issues. However, how often do we consider the environmental impact of a film or television shoot as an industrial process? In this article, I examine the sustainability practices in the motion picture industry and challenges to that by focusing on the British film and television industry as a case study. Using the interviews with industry representatives and some case studies, I discuss the possibilities of creating a change in behavior in the film industry, not only in terms of embedding green measures but also reconstituting industrial mechanisms on behalf of environmental sustainability. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Energy Use and the Humanities)
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