By Hélène B. Ducros and Nicholas Ostrum
In 2017, Imre Szeman and Dominic Boyer edited Energy Humanities: An Anthology (Johns Hopkins University Press), a foundational collection that placed the emerging field—a sidequel of the established “environmental humanities”—at the center of a reflection on transitioning world economies away from unsustainable fossil fuels. The volume triggered a rethinking of the role of humanists and social scientists in responding to concerns about anthropogenic climate change and its societal and political underpinnings. In this interview, Dominic Boyer looks back at that moment when it became clear that the global energy petro-system had critically stretched to its limits and engages with the possibilities and plurality of post-oil futures infused with social justice, a changed relationship with resources and land, and respect for peoples and cultures—beyond mere electrification and renewables development. As Europe, especially since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, has grappled with decarbonization politics and the goal of achieving climate neutrality by 2050 (net-zero emissions), with frequent electoral and industrial backlash against its Green Deal (“greenlash”) leading to a recent reframing of its environmental pursuit into economic security and energy independence policies, Boyer creates a conversational space that includes all actors, among them the “hyposubject.” He offers reasoned ways to approach modernity, human necessity, democracy, and, importantly, imagination and participation in the seeking of solutions to the defining challenge of our time.
Are “energy humanities” a field, a lens, a filter, an approach, or simply an opportunity to bring people together from various disciplines to work on a particular agenda?
Imre Szeman thinks about energy humanities as a crisis discipline that emerged not because people were particularly interested in energy in the abstract but because they faced energy transition as maybe the greatest and most important challenge in the polycrisis, because energy touches so many aspects of modernity. In fact, could there be modernity at all without the high-carbon, wasteful energy regime that we have allowed to predominate? Among energy humanists, energy became a central focus of attention, analytically and politically. Some path-breaking works in this area are Stephanie LeMenager’s Living Oil and Timothy Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy, both in their own way showing that our relationship to energy is a fundamentally existential and political problem that is not as easy to tackle as simply swapping gas pumps for solar panels.
Imre and I wish that in many ways we didn’t have to work on energy. Energy is interesting on an analytical level, and there are always interesting stories coming to the surface about energy. But I have been working on energy steadily since 2009; I am exhausted. However, I still feel it is an urgent enough question and I am deep enough into political work around energy that I cannot let go—or it cannot let me go. I sometimes describe energy humanities as a self-help network, like Alcoholics Anonymous. It is about people finding a way, whether as scholars or non-scholars, to organize their thoughts about energy and to learn about the incredibly deep and intimate political influence of energy across time. As a network, it is also hopefully a place to find allies and strategies to do the very difficult work of decarbonization, which is both about more solar panels but also about fundamentally changing our relationship to growth, consumption, extractivism, and dispossession of Indigenous lands.
Are energy humanities a strictly academic space or is there room for practitioners and grassroots actors such as community organizers? If so, what avenues do the energy humanities enable for interactions between the Academy and the wider world? We hear from energy practitioners and field people a certain frustration about not being heard by academics or feeling out of place around scholarly debates because they do not speak the same language and feel in effect ignored, snubbed. How can the energy humanities provide opportunities to unite these two spheres or build bridges between theory and praxis, which some crave, at least among practitioners.
I have come to think about energy through the lens of infrastructure, that is the essential systems we take for granted even though we rely on them in fundamental ways. This taking for granted began in earnest in the eighteenth century and intensified in the nineteenth century, with the removal of energy from our domesticity—by hiding coal plants out of town, putting wires inside walls—which has limited the kind of interfaces people have with energy systems. This removal has ceded the space of energy over to specific kinds of cultures of expertise—engineers, electricians, nuclear power plant operators. This very crucial, fundamental aspect of our modernity has been left in the hands of folks who—without making any kind of personal or moral judgment about any of them individually, rather speaking about them as a class—have for the most part acted as experts do, in a command-and-control, technocratic fashion to organize an energy system according to the interest of large state entities and non-state entities, i.e., transnational corporations and so on, and by the same token moving energy beyond the reach of democracy.
To be sure, there are many kinds of energy practitioners though. The challenge, or mission, of energy humanities is to rebuild or maybe arrive at, for the first time, a true kind of energy democracy, where we are all involved as consumers of energy but also as producers of energy, co-designers of energy systems, with a deep understanding and energy literacy about the various trade-offs among the different kinds of energy sources and systems. This project is open to the practitioner, the lay person, the scholar, or any entrepreneur trying to make something happen in the energy space, which cannot be left only to a certain class of elites or experts to manage. The stakes are too high; the impacts are too broad; and the injustice is too widespread to allow the current system to persist. In that sense, you could think of energy humanities as something that is anchored in the Academy but aspires to be more than academic and, indeed, democratic. A concrete example is the After Oil School series (https://afteroil.ca/) that our colleagues in Canada out of the Petroculture Network have set up. Imre, Sheena Wilson, Mark Simpson, Darin Barney, and many other collaborators have created a series of public-facing events, which they have even persuaded representatives of political parties to attend. Canada does have a different political culture than the US, but having politicians, people who work in energy industry, scholars, critics, all coming together to think about how we imagine and then enact a life after oil is a good example of energy humanities at its best.
Events like the After Oil School are about gathering and sharing information but also in large part about people sitting together to figure out how they can work together to create different scenarios for energy futures. I am very interested in an area of design called “experiential futures design.” Since the future has no content, it is almost always easier for the incumbent powers to tell people that this post-oil future is going to in fact be very scary, although there is no evidence of it. Isn’t it better to deal with the monster you know than to invite something unknown? One thing we can do—working together with folks from the Academy or social movements and really anyone else who wants to be involved—is to create those needed memories of the future through scenario work, collaborative writing, and imagination. There are many such opportunities in the space of energy humanities. Because we have a sense that we must do this work, the urgency and investment creates a better alignment with people working outside the Academy. In the Academy, we can sometimes get very involved in specialized conversations, and I actually do not think there is anything wrong with that. But to face today’s crises, specialized conversations are not enough. Meanwhile, I am sure that like-minded people outside the Academy feel similarly that they cannot just be driven by market interests or state planning exercises. We have to work together to create a more democratic potential around energy.
Energy humanities coalesced under your and Imre Szeman’s guiding hands just over a decade ago. What was the trigger then? What was happening that made this split/branching out from the environmental humanities necessary or particularly useful at that time? What were the main questions you were set to address?
That is an interesting riddle. What was it about that moment? I do not believe it is about genius, but rather about historicity. My Hegelian mind tells me it is about something concretizing in the world to the extent such that it can become an object of reflection. Back in the early 2010s there was an emergent energy humanities group in Edmonton (Canada), and we had a group in Houston, in other words in two global petrocities. We were seemingly committed to the same project but not aware of each other’s existence. So, the easiest and most accurate answer I can give is that there had simply been enough of a critical mass of humanistic scholarship on energy that people were starting to feel that energy was something they should think about more. Once we were able to build an infrastructure—conferences, journal special issues—to channel that interest, a lot came together. Humanists have worked sporadically on energy topics for decades; in anthropology for example there is work dating back to the 1940s. Yet, for me, a self-aware community of energy humanities came into its own between 2012 and 2017. In 2012, Imre and colleagues organized the famous first petro-cultures conference in Alberta. But I was so ignorant, I did not even attend. I did not know what was happening until after it happened. Then, Imre and I got to know each other a couple of years later and began talking and publishing on the topic of energy humanities around 2013-2014. In 2017, our Energy Humanities: An Anthology[i] (Johns Hopkins University Press) was published, which became a good resource text for people, because we brought together some earlier writing on the topic and paired it with interesting contemporary scholarship. Plus art and fiction. The volume helped to consolidate energy humanities as a space of conversations, insights, and shared analytics.
Are there specific events in the world at that time that you can link to in explaining this concretizing of ideas and projects around energy humanities? You mentioned that many people were working on it, albeit disconnected from each other, but what was drawing their attention? What was going on out there?
The Owl of Minerva flies at dusk; in other words, one usually begins to understand an era as it ends. Perhaps the era that was ending in the 2010s was based on the faith that we were going to have an orderly, rational process of transition away from fossil fuels. We already had abundant scientific information by then, and the Obama era was very wishy-washy, with its all-of-the-above energy policies. A similar approach was repeated elsewhere in the world, with tepid commitments to energy transition often paired with downplaying or ignoring the cumulative effects of fossil fuel use. In other words, either outrightly clinging to petro-culture or assuming this transition was a 50 or 100 year process, and that was fine because the negative effects would be so incremental. Meanwhile, superstorms such as Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy, the surge in devastating wildfires and historic droughts, breaking temperature records in Australia and many other places, represented mounting experiential evidence that gave people in the early 2010s a new sense of existential precarity and foreboding with regard to the reality of climate change. It was no longer a future problem but a now problem. This sense of urgency is what energy humanities reacted to. We started thinking that, as environmental scholars, if we were going to do anything, we should focus on the energy problem, which had been undermining environmental systems more broadly.
Did the 2008 recession have something to do with the emergence of energy humanities, and the fact that the critique of capitalism and neoliberalism emerged more readily in public discourse because of it?
There is world historical significance to the recession of 2008, not just because it was such a spectacular economic collapse—we have seen those in the past—but because it completed the disenchantment of the neoliberal narrative, an ideology that had promised general flourishing. However, much evidence had already accumulated by 2008 that in fact neoliberalism was not effective at bringing prosperity to more than a very small group of people. But the promise of general prosperity felt vital and plausible through the Clinton era of the 1990s, into the Bush era, and operated residually in the Obama era. The wake-up call for the world in 2008 was that neoliberalism has no future and if anything is a future-killing machine. This realization combined with increasing evidence that we are not going to be able to live safely on this planet if the status quo endures—an event like Hurricane Sandy in 2012 showed that even the world’s financial elites are susceptible to catastrophic climate-enhanced disasters. So I think the combination of the collapse of the futurity of neoliberalism with what was happening in the world of disasters, helped the consciousness of energy humanities to take shape. As a phenomenologist might say, we have a cone of attention, which is where we make meaning, generate narratives, perhaps even where we are constantly constituting our subjectivity. When that cone of attention is forced by sprawling crisis circumstances to focus on precarity, it changes how we think about ourselves and also what else we notice around us. Perhaps energy humanities is also an art of noticing, as Anna Tsing[ii] says—a way of noticing certain things in the flow of the world.
Do you find that there is a certain geography to energy humanities, which may not resonate equally in various parts of the world where the relationship to energy might be different from that in the US, maybe less outwardly dependent on oil, maybe less “petrostate” How do we mobilize every energy context?
It is certainly not accidental that we saw these research clusters appear in Alberta and Texas, petro-states within petrostates. It makes sense there, because energy is more ambiently part of people’s lives. There is only two degrees of separation in Houston from somebody working for an oil and gas firm. Whether walking down the street, meeting colleagues at Rice University, whose partners work for a law firm that works for oil and gas, you cannot be unaware of energy here, which is not most people’s experience. Across Europe, there are people working in this area now; for example, Norway has been very active in energy humanities—again, a petrostate, even if it is one that considers itself the vegetarian running the butcher shop, as my late friend Thomas Hylland Eriksen once put it.
But climate change is not a phenomenon that limits itself to certain countries; super storms, wildfires, droughts, or heatwaves do not respect national borders. It is of no help if your country’s electricity is derived from low carbon sources, because climate change is a planetary condition. In that sense, the experiential encounter overwhelms any given country’s energy mix. That said, energy humanities has thrived in places where energy transition has become a serious and deep social movement. There is amazing scholarship coming out of Europe, for example, because the energy transition is more actively and seriously part of politics there. It is not simply being refused, as it is in the US right now. Interestingly, I have had some inquiries from the country that should be leading the way in energy humanities: China. I have given some remote talks there, and there seems to be growing interest in energy humanities China has been phenomenal in terms of the realization of the possibility of electrification of cars, solar panels, etc. Although at a cost, with sacrifice zones, China has created a pathway for the rest of the world to accomplish certain kinds of decarbonization, which in turn has shaken up geopolitics and created new polarizations between petrostates and so-called electrostates.
Can you explain how creating bridges between the Academy and its outside aligns with your book with Timothy Morton on the “hyposubject”[iii] (Hyposubjects: on becoming human, Open Humanities Press, 2021),[iv] where you talk about imagining the experiential future of design as a non-competitive game, by which you throw some ideas out there, juggle them around, see what actually works, and which ideas take hold and which will die on the table?
Hyposubjects has an interesting backstory. It was a collaborative speaking and writing exercise. We came to think of it as “improv philosophy,” a kind of philosophical work that is not scripted and uses the rules of improv comedy—“yes-and” for example—rather than doing the usual work of criticism and negation that specialized scholarship does. Interesting ideas came out of those conversations, such as subscendence[v] as an ethical strategy for exiting the era of hypersubjects and hyperobjects. While transcendence entails moving up and out, in a search for the Archimedean point from which you can look down and control the situation, subscendence means moving down and in. In the spirit of Donna Haraway, it means seeking to re-enmesh ourselves in the web of life, taking seriously our fragility and our dependence on other species, and creating refuges to endure the hard times we are living through now, so that hopefully this crisis will not end in collapse. Although that is certainly a scenario on the table, there may be ways we can work through and past these conditions towards the more sustainable, less competitive, less extractive world many people desire. Right now, this may sound utopian, but as Tim Morton was fond of saying in that project, “the United States is much less than a polar bear”: The reason why the US has to have such a large military is because there is only one of it and meanwhile so many of us. When you start looking past the powerful political fictions and performances of state sovereignty, you see “the state” is filled with gaps and cracks and fissures that are full of alternative political possibilities. Subscendence is about learning to be aware of the weedy life that thrives in those fissures.
The most recent chapter of my energy humanities adventure has been focused on the petrostate. I am increasingly convinced that what we see in the world now is actually more a sign of the fragility and dismantling of the petrostate than a sign of its newfound vitality in the era of neo-fascism. So, yes, I do think there is a connection between the hyposubject and energy humanities. Tim and I are actually working on a sequel now: “hypostition”—as opposed to hyperstition, a term the Deleuzians and accelerationists of the Warwick School came up with in 1990s, the idea that we should get out of the way of capital and technology because of the inevitable advance toward the singularity. Rather, hypostition, like hyposubjects, entails embracing the non-inevitable imaginings and life projects and futuring of folks who are not agents of technology and capital. I see a lot of hypostition happening currently, sometimes in unexpected places. Oftentimes, the struggle against the forms of state violence we have seen in the US recently—in Minneapolis, obviously—is also part of the project of futuring a different world, different from the one we inherited and thought we were sad of losing, but which actually increasingly nobody was satisfied with. That general restless condition of disenchantment allowed a figure like Donald Trump to come to power.
My too soon departed friend, David Graeber, in his book on debt concluded that late stage capitalism appears to be a giant machine designed to kill imagination to squelch out, police, defame, and destroy even small imaginings that run counter to it, let alone big imaginings like the anti-WTO and Occupy projects with which Graeber was involved. This applies today because it is clear on the streets of Minneapolis, for example, who the enemy is. It is not as clear what future is being fought for, which is good in some ways because that future remains myriad and heterogeneous; what is certain though is that the future is not a return to the neoliberal order that preceded it, which has exhausted itself and in whose ruins—radioactive ruins—we still live.
Energy humanities is a similar kind of feeling forward into the unknown. We have not exactly worked out what an after-oil world will look like. To say we have, to say it is just about electrifying the existing petrostate and petroculture would be a disaster, because what that points to for me is the kind of electro-fascist visions that people like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and others are pushing forward—these very avid accelerationists. Going back to the beginning of contemporary environmental politics in the 1970s, when the degrowth movement was first born and the wonderful thinker André Gorz coined the term of décroissance, he was already warning of electro-fascism, saying that we not only have to address the threat of petroliberalism but also of reactionary movements trying to seize on the energy transition for their own purposes. Hence, energy humanities has to be more than a good citizen revolt against oil and a steady march towards the sanctuary of electricity. It is also not really an academic discipline, but to the extent that it is one, it is a pretty unruly and probably dysfunctional discipline that does not sit well with the powers that be. I teach at a university in Houston, an epicenter of the white-collar fossil fuel industry, and the largest corporate donor to my university is Exxon Mobil. While I am grateful that I am not overtly censored as I might be at a public university in Texas now, in all sorts of ways what I say is nothing the administration of the university wants to hear. It is grating, irritating to them, embarrassing even, though to their credit they maintain the liberal spirit of letting conversation flourish. Still, energy humanities can only expect tepid support from institutions deeply entangled in the planetary petrostate.
The best book I have read about the Academy is The Undercommons,[vi] by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney. It is a relentless critique of the audit culture and bureaucratization of the modern university that spotlights what is so devious and reactionary about the neoliberal era. But the book is also equally uncompromising in its insistence that because the university gathers strange people who would not find a home in most societal institutions, it has an intellectual political energy that makes it a very special, important space of refuge. For any academic wondering about how to impact the world and be more politically engaged, The Undercommons gives not only courage but very specific ideas about where to invest energy to make that happen. In that sense, energy humanities is an undercommoning project, which can exist and thrive in the basements and dark alleys of academic life in the hope that someday we can put the skills we have developed to better use, perhaps to make a less hierarchical and statist kind of university education.
In the fifteen years since the emergence of energy humanities, have the questions you initially asked shifted or evolved? In particular, in the contemporary context of the war in Ukraine that has so many threads leading to the question of energy—production, (over)consumption, access—how can the energy humanities help us understand conflict and more precisely geopolitical conflict over oil? Is the politicization of oil necessarily negative, or can it help with mobilizing people, by making these issues more public, even as simply as having them present in the media?
I wrote a short piece on the energopolitics of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. As I dug into it, I realized there is really an energy story behind the invasion. In some sense, we know it is an energy story, because we know that much of Russia’s relationship to Europe must be viewed through the lens of fossil fuel dependency. It has been a war filled with horrors. I do not mean to diminish any of them, but probably the most horrible part has been the Battle of Bakhmut (from August 2022 to May 2023). Bakhmut is a little town, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. Tens if not hundreds of thousands human beings died in campaigns to control this little town. You might say, that’s just war, but it seems to me not incidental that Bakhmut is the edge of the Yuzivska gas field, which is where Ukraine planned to develop a very large gas play that would challenge Russia’s dominance over the European natural gas market. In other words, before the invasion Ukraine was actively planning to supplant Russia’s regional energy dominance. Just before Russia invaded Crimea (in 2014), Ukraine had invited US oil majors—among them Chevron—to help manage the natural gas extraction from the Yuzivska field, because it required unconventional drilling techniques such as fracking to gain the resource, and Ukraine did not have that knowledge. Because Ukraine is seemingly more European in its openness to European liberalism and is interested in joining NATO, this move presented a significant threat to the Russian petrostate. The usual explanation of the invasion we have heard in the US is that Putin is obsessed with resurrecting the Soviet Union and perhaps has weird mythological ideas in his head about Ukraine. So on the basis of these strange dreams, Putin is willing to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of lives to conquer Ukraine, just as Donald Trump has weird ideas in his head about Greenland. But I would say actually that the energo-political rationale is more persuasive. This is war about gas and who controls gas production in the region. If Russia cannot own Yuzivska, the next best thing is to arrange a permanent state of war on top of that gas field, which means no one else can develop it.
So, I think you can look at many aspects of conflict and find an energy story. It is not the only story though. It is always a little bit of a concern in a field such as energy humanities that when we have seen the energy dimension of something, we decide that something is all about energy, which it is usually not. For example, there are not too many mistakes in Timothy Mitchell’s carbon democracy project, but one may be that he leans a little too heavily on the energy narrative. As other people have looked at that narrative, they found more nuance in the story of why we shift from a coal standard to an oil standard in Europe in the twentieth century. So, while I do not mean to say that all conflicts are driven by energy politics, I do think that in contemporary conflicts like the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we should try to surface the energy politics more. Hopefully, if we applied a similar lens to other conflicts elsewhere, we might be able to gain an understanding of this perpetual state of war—which, of course, has the added benefit of burning a lot of oil because tanks and warplanes are not fully electrified machines, at least not yet. With the drone revolution, things might be different in the future. But I think it is fair to say that war machines today run on fossil fuels, whether directly via fuel or by virtue of materials such as steel that require the energy density of fossil fuels for their manufacture.
I do not want to claim that energo-politics constitutes a more fundamental level of truth, just that it is a level of truth. By identifying it, it can help us understand that talk of Greater Russia or the restoration of Soviet glory are hiding something that is not nostalgia but rather a future politics of energy. Interestingly, when I looked at the concept of nostalgia in the context of my work on East-West German cultural relationships, people would talk about Ostalgie—or nostalgia for the East. West Germans would often explain that East Germans are so problematic because they cannot stop yearning to get the GDR back. I went back to read the original late-seventeenth century doctoral thesis of Johannes Hofer, the fellow who coined the term nostalgia, and what became clear is that nostalgia, even back then, was about a politics of the future. He noticed that people who had nostalgia were young people who had been forced to move away from their homes at a time when the radius of life in Europe was likely ten or at most fifty kilometers for most people. So, when they were sent to faraway towns or to work for families as indentured servants they would become overwhelmed by what Germans call Heimweh—pain, grief for home. But the final case in the thesis really complicated Hofer’s argument. In it, a young Swiss servant working in Paris was absolutely overwhelmed by grief for the return home. After he complained and complained, saying incessantly he needed to be home, finally, his employer, probably fed up listening to his complaints, just told him he could just go. Interestingly, Hofer then notes how this offer immediately dispelled the servant’s state of nostalgia, replacing it with “sudden joy.” And so the servant never left Paris. What he wanted evidently was not an actual return home; he wanted the right of future determination. So with nostalgia, we always see politics of the future, where the past is pretext. For example, we know that Trump’s obsession with the mid-twentieth century is not so much about time travel to the past, but his right, as a sovereign white man to tell everyone else what their future is going to be.
So, certainly, I think energy humanities can help illuminate some of the interests that are involved in perpetuating endless conflict, but not just in Russia and Ukraine, also in the Middle East, in Gaza, in Israel, in Iran. Petro-power is a real thing. Reza Negarestani wrote a weird little book, Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (Re.Press, 2008) that is a speculative realist book, very difficult to read but with an amazing premise for a world. It involves sentient oil that works beneath the ground to create conflict on the surface, since the war machines that are spawned by these conflicts bring oil up to the surface, allowing oil to command the surface of the world in an epic struggle against the sun. Even if you do not accept the metaphysics, the metaphor is striking.
About the politics of energy and democratization, in your book Energopolitics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene (Duke University Press, 2008), you balance conventional expert opinions with the counter-expertise coming out of protest movements, but also aware of the danger of resulting relativism in the post-truth era some say we live in and where actually not knowing something gives you credibility to weigh in on it. How do we balance these two understandings? On the one hand, community protesters lining up against massive windmill projects do have legitimate objections. On the one hand, community protesters lining up against massive windmill projects do have legitimate objections. On the other hand, science has its own legitimate arguments—supported by measurements and projected outcomes—that may undermine some of the protestors’ claims. But science can also be off, even if ideally self-correcting. How do we give everyone a voice?
I have two lines of thought about this question, but they do not intersect directly. The first thread is that we saw these contentious politics of renewable energy development up close and personal when my partner, Cymene Howe, and I were doing fieldwork in southern Mexico on the Oaxacan “wind rush,” an area that would eventually host the densest corridor of onshore wind turbines anywhere in the world. The wind corridor was created in a very short time, almost entirely with transnational capital and mostly on Indigenous Zapotec and Huave lands. I remember going to protests against these wind parks in Mexico City and overhearing people making jokes about NIMBYism[vii] having come to Mexico. But I found it was not at all what was happening, having come to know people in that resistance movement, as well as people who supported the parks. As anthropologists, we talked to everyone we could over a period of about sixteen months of fieldwork. As we describe in our duograph, the local concerns were not aesthetic, they were about land tenure and the rapid industrialization of an agricultural region, with no plan for people whose foodways were going to be disrupted by certain of these park projects. I came away with the sense that part of the resistance to rapid renewable energy development across the world is that an energy transition, if we want to call it that, in which everything stays the same except the energy source, will replicate the problems that made it necessary to build wind parks in the first place. In southern Mexico, the resistance movement was quite aware that building wind parks to service Walmart is not actually dealing with the root problem, which is this relentless metastasizing and ultimately ecocidal and indigenicidal form of global capitalism.
The second thread entails thinking about the politics of expertise today. I started my career as a media scholar, writing a couple of books about journalism. The second one was about journalism in the age of digital media—the transition from analog to digital journalism more or less. In our lifetime, we have seen a transition from a primarily broadcast-driven media model, which offered two to four channels on TV—a stark difference from the thousands of channels available today, in addition to those on the internet and social media. We have gone from a system that principally distributed information along what I call radial, hub-spoke pathways—large central informational clusters radiating out their epistemic power—to a situation that is much more lateral, peer-to-peer, and networked. I actually think there is a positive side to it; it is good that more people get to tell their truths in this system, but the system has unfortunately been allowed to evolve in a way that its organization is principally driven by large media corporations’ ability to sell screen time and clicks to advertisers to fund their ventures. So, the entire structuring of, say, social media today, and the algorithms that drive its traffic, are about keeping people glued to their devices and on their platforms as much as possible. This warps the positive possibility of what social media could be. If we had made the internet a commons domain, as many people in the free and open source software movement have fought and continue to fight for—with some successes—if we had had that type of a standard and had thought of the internet more like a drinking water system, rather than as a new way to command labor time and deliver commodities, we would be seeing much less of a problem with post-truth than we do. Science used to be able to rely upon that radial patterning and these strong broadcast institutions that would give access to a limited number of authoritative voices, voices that could be counted on for the most part to reinforce the idea that science was true, that scientific consensus amounted to fact, and that regular people should not veer too far from scientific consensus in going about their daily business. Science now finds itself playing a game it is ill-equipped to play, one that asks scientists to become the most charismatic face and voice on TikTok. Katharine Hayhoe, who has achieved so much as a scientist and who never asked for the job of doing media but does it really well, is also going chapel to chapel in West Texas talking to Evangelicals about why they should not be frightened to use the term climate change to describe what they are seeing with their own eyes. People like her are legendary to me. But it is also unfortunate that we have to rely upon those heroic efforts to do something that could have been better maintained if the internet and social media had not been allowed to be completely dominated, privatized, and economized under corporate control and ultimately made to serve and reinforce the narcissism and self-interests of a wide consumer network. Of course, social media did not invent American narcissism; they just fed and bloated it. We have seen in our own lifetimes how the unfortunate decision to economize and marketize these new digital informational tools makes it difficult to propose any kind of consensus truth anymore. Instead, we have a wealth of digital echo chambers and within them a lot of shouting, and a lot of half-truths and partial truths. Many people feel empowered to tell truths, which I am not against, but we have seen the results, especially when some of those people say things that support the attitudes that certain companies and certain political movements like to hear—the Charlie Kirks of the world—and they get boosted into relative stardom, while other people find that their voices are heavily muted, even though they have a lot to say.
Let us talk about the future. You conclude Energopolitics with a probing and poetic thought: “Part of building a future that does not endlessly repeat the Anthropocene trajectory is caring about forms of enablement that exceed those with which we are familiar, disabling our engines of epistemic and political universalization and rebalancing our analytical attentions and worldly engagements in favor of what is meaningful and valuable in the localities where the wind blows.” How do we do this? Where do we go from here and what role can and should the energy humanities play in so radically reimagining the possibilities of the present and future?
I have talked in recent years about the need to build “revolutionary infrastructure.” The connection between infrastructure and energy—the root of this idea of energopolitics draws upon the thinking of Michel Foucault, who coined the term biopolitics. In French, that is biopouvoir. In French, pouvoir, like the Spanish poder, is both a noun and a verb—a modal verb. I have always thought the key thing about Foucault that Americans often do not get is that Foucault was talking about power less as a noun and more as a modal verb. Power is not a thing itself but a modality that helps other things happen. The way you know that power is working is because other things happen. When I was developing this concept of energopolitics, I had in mind that sense of energo-“pouvoir,” as energy allows something else to happen. We rarely know energy in its immediate form but rather in the form that appears to us through indexical encounters with other things in our lives. Infrastructure similarly has that capacity. Something is infrastructure only to the extent that it allows something else to happen. The same material object can infrastructure different relationships under different conditions and with different partners. In that spirit, revolutionary infrastructure are the projects you can use to enable alternatives to an ecocidal, genocidal status quo. They can be small; there is no codex to them. What I have done personally along these lines is dig rain gardens in Houston or organize funerals for glaciers. These are two weird things to do, but they both have an infrastructural purpose because they offer platforms for more people to gather and engage in resilience and refuge work, what I have also called “decompositional politics.”
I cannot advise that digging rain gardens and mourning glaciers is what everyone should do, because that would be insanity. Much of the process of figuring out what is to be done is not operating at the manifesto level, which would be hyperstition rather than hypostition, i.e., an effort to command from above, a ten-point plan that everyone is forced to comply with so that we create this better future. I actually place much more faith in hyposubjects’ ability to figure out what they can do in their circumstances to help both with dealing with the crisis at hand and building towards the future. If we gave more respect to those myriad efforts and less attention to the ten-point plan, there would be better outcomes overall. It is going to sound a lot like anarchism, although deep down I am an early Hegelian Marxist who believes that the work of communism is to negate and transcend alienation. Building the civilization that comes after alienation is a huge project, a species level project that, if you believe Uncle Karl, we will accomplish eventually. To circle back to The Undercommons, if you find yourself inspired to work within the creative and intellectual spaces that are available to you within higher education, you should do it, but you should also not let yourself be amputated, in Fanon’s sense that any subjectivity or identity is ultimately an amputation of some aspect of your humanity. So thinking of yourself as “an academic” is already amputating yourself as a human being. It is a trade-off, because you may get skills and institutional power and authority, but you do not want to lose the fundamental interconnectedness that we need to move ourselves toward a future that does not simply repeat the past. When it comes to the past of petroculture, we know this trajectory points forward only toward death and collapse. So, part of what academics have to do is talk ourselves off the pedestal of being academics and try to re-engage other folks where they stand. Meeting the world half-way; it is a nice feeling. People are very grateful. I have met and worked with folks from all walks of life via our community green infrastructure projects in Houston. They are really grateful when somebody shows up from the university to help, to put a shovel in the ground. It makes all of us feel like we are doing something important and meaningful. We can all do that for each other in our own humble ways. Whatever the project, it is just about trying to stay true to an ethics of not passing down the ecocidal, genocidal relationships that we have inherited. In other words, if we actively do no harm, whatever we do will be contributing to the imagining and making of a better future.
Dominic Boyer directs the Social Design Lab at Rice University where he also serves on the Board of Governors of the Rice Sustainability Institute. As one of the founders of the field of Energy Humanities, he has been writing on energy politics and energy transition for many years. The author of nine books and volumes and more than 100 research articles, Boyer’s latest book is No More Fossils (University of Minnesota Press, 2023), an analysis of the fossil gerontocracy that seeks to hold us in its ecocidal grasp and the coming transition from petroculture to electroculture. He is a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow.
Hélène B. Ducros (JD, PhD, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill) is a human geographer focused on the reinvention of territories through heritage-making. She has published in various venues, including the Journal of Sustainable Tourism, Global Environmental Politics, Island Studies Journal, Explorations in Place Attachment, the Handbook of Place, and International Handbook of Walking. She co-edited Decentering European Studies: Perspectives on Europe from its Beyond(UNESP – World Society Foundation, 2025) and Justice in Climate Action Planning (Springer, 2022). She is the founder and editor of GlobalEurope.
Nicholas Ostrum is Assistant Professor of History at Kent State University and holds a PhD from Stony Brook University. He has published research and reviews in various fora, including the International History Review, Central European History, Energy Humanities, EuropeNow, Journal of World History, and edited volumes on global Germany. His current project analyzes West Germany’s petroleum, development, and political relations with Syria and Libya from the 1950s through the 1973/4 Oil Crisis.
[i] https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/11492/energy-humanities
[ii] “Arts of Noticing” (2015), by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, in The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Duke University Press.
[iii] “Hyposubjects” are the plural species of the Anthropocene; they do not pretend to absolute knowledge or power but are adaptive, skeptical, caring, revolutionary, and unplugged from carbon gridlife (Boyer and Morton 2021).
[iv] Book available in open access here: https://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/hyposubjects/
[v] The idea that the whole is actually less than the sum of its parts.
[vi] The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, AK Press, 2013. https://www.akpress.org/the-undercommons.html
[vii] NIMBY: Not in my backyard
