Notes
1. Living with Fossils
Adrienne Mayor, The First Fossil Hunters (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000).
Ibn Sīnā, “Upon Mountains,” in Kitāb al-shifāʾ (Cairo, 22 volumes edited by various scholars, 1952–1983).
Sir Thomas Palmer, An Essay of the Meanes how to Make Our Travailes, Into Forraine Countries, the More Profitable and Honourable (London: Mathew Lownes, 1606), 83–84.
Martin Rudwick, Earth’s Deep History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 38.
Karen Pinkus, Fuel (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 12.
G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History (New York: Dover, 1956), 75.
Michael Wise, Encyclopedia of Geology, Second Edition (London: Elsevier, 2021).
Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016), 97.
2. Sucro, Carbo, Petro, or What Made This World That Needs to Be Remade
Noël Deerr, The History of Sugar, 2 vols. (London: Chapman and Hall, 1949), 1:63.
Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power (London: Penguin, 1985), 23.
Herbert Klein, “The Atlantic Slave Trade to 1650” in Tropical Babylons, ed. Stuart N. Schwartz (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 204.
Sidney W. Mintz in Ramiro Guerra y Sanchez, Sugar and Society in the Caribbean (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), xiv.
Richard B. Sheridan, “The Plantation Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, 1625–1775,” Caribbean Studies 9, no. 3 (1969): 5–25.
Stuart B. Schwartz, “A Commonwealth within Itself,” in Tropical Babylons, ed. Stuart N. Schwartz (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 176.
Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 50.
Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972), 198–200.
John Daniels and Christian Daniels, “The Origin of the Sugarcane Roller Mill,” Technology and Culture 29, no. 3 (1988): 493–535.
John E. Crowley, “Sugar Machines: Picturing Industrialized Slavery,” American Historical Review April 2016: 403–436.
See, e.g., Samuel Martin, An Essay on Plantership (Antigua: Robert Mearns, 1785).
Schwartz, “A Commonwealth within Itself,” 166.
Mintz, Sweetness and Power, 38.
Richard B. Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974).
Noel Deerr and Alexander Brooks, “The Early Use of Steam Power in the Cane Sugar Industry,” Transactions of the Newcomen Society 21(1) 1940: 14.
John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, “The Sugar Industry in the Seventeenth Century,” in Tropical Babylons, ed. Stuart N. Schwartz (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 301.
See, e.g., Douglas Hall, In Miserable Slavery (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 1999) and Richard Ligon, A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados (Cambridge: Hackett, 2011).
Mintz, Sweetness and Power, 157.
Cited in David Scott, “Modernity that Predated the Modern: Sidney Mintz’s Caribbean,” History Workshop Journal 58 (Autumn) 2004: 191.
See, e.g., Eric Eustace Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944).
Martin, An Essay, 9.
Charles de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 250.
Susan Buck-Morss, “Hegel and Haiti,” Critical Inquiry 26 (Summer) 2000: 821.
Julius Scott, The Common Wind (London: Verso, 2020), 6.
James E. McLellan III, Colonialism and Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 63.
Saint-Domingue Constitution of 1801, Article 5.
Buck-Morss, “Hegel and Haiti,” 835.
Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 88.
David Pretel and Nadia Fernández de Pinedo, “Technology Transfer and Expert Migration in Nineteenth-Century Cuba,” EUI Working Paper MWP 2013/34, 6.
José Guadalupe Ortega, “Machines, Modernity, and Sugar: The Greater Caribbean in a Global Context, 1812–50,” Journal of Global History 9, no. 1 (March 2014): 1–25.
Nicholas Fiori, “Plantation Energy: From Slave Labor to Machine Discipline,” American Quarterly 72, no. 3 (September 2020): 563.
E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past & Present 38 (December 1967): 78.
John Evelyn, Fumifugium (London: W. Godbid), 1661.
Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital (London: Verso), 2016.
Ian Barbour, Harvey Brooks, Sanford Lakoff, and John Opie, “Energy and the Rise of the American Industrial Society,” in Ian Barbour et al., Energy and American Values (New York: Praeger, 1982), 1–23.
Leo Marx, A Machine in the Garden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), 195.
Marx, 199.
Cara New Daggett, The Birth of Energy (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019).
Daggett, 49.
Daggett, 53.
On Barak, Powering Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2020), 4.
Thomas Hughes, Networks of Power (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 286.
David Nye, American Illuminations (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2019).
John J. O’Neill, “Enter Atomic Power,” Harper’s 181 (June 1940):1–10.
C. O. Billow, “The Use of Oil for Fuel,” Houston Daily Post, March 31, 1901, 28.
Nathan Heller, “Was the Automobile Era a Terrible Mistake?” The New Yorker, July 22, 2019.
Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy (London: Verso, 2011), 19.
Timothy Mitchell, “Carbon Democracy,” Economy and Society 38, no. 3 (2009): 399–432, 417.
André Gorz, Ecology as Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1980).
Stephanie LeMenager, Living Oil (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 3.
Matthew Huber, Lifeblood (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
Roland Barthes, Mythologies (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972), 97.
Sheena Wilson, Imre Szeman, and Adam Carlson, “On Petrocultures: Or, Why We Need to Understand Oil to Understand Everything Else,” in Petrocultures, ed. Adam Carlson, Imre Szeman, and Sheena Wilson, (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017).
3. Fossil Gerontocracy, or What Sticks Us Where We Are
J. J. Fazy, De la gerontocratie ou abus de la sagesse des vieillards dans le gouvernement de la France (Paris: Delaforest, 1828), 11.
Fazy, De la gerontocratie, 21.
Fazy, De la gerontocratie, 1.
Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), 1.
Yurchak, 256–57.
Forbes, “Be My Guest—But Don’t Get Any Fancy Ideas” (April 15, 1975): 80.
Terry Lynn Karl, The Paradox of Plenty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 26.
Steven Sexton, JunJie Wu, and David Zilberman, “How High Gas Prices Triggered the Housing Crisis: Theory and Empirical Evidence,” January 18, 2012, Unpublished paper, Microsoft Word file.
Max Weber, Politics As a Vocation (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1965).
Oliver Belcher, Patrick Bigger, Ben Neimark, and Cara Kennelly, “Hidden Carbon Costs of the ‘Everywhere War’: Logistics, Geopolitical Ecology, and the Carbon Boot-Print of the US Military.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 45 (2020): 65–80.
Belcher et al, 74.
Louis Peck, “New Mission for U.S. Military: Breaking its Dependence on Oil,” Yale Environment 360, December 8, 2010, https://e360.yale.edu/features/new_mission_for_us_military_breaking_its_dependence_on_oil.
Pierre Bourdieu, Homo Academicus (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988), 216.
Sivan Kartha, Eric Kemp-Benedict, Emily Ghosh, and Anisha Nazareth, The Carbon Inequality Era (Stockholm Environmental Institute and Oxfam, September 2020).
Mike Berners-Lee, The Carbon Footprint of Everything (London: Greystone Books, 2022), 11.
Stefan Gössling, “Celebrities, Air travel, and Social Norms,” Annals of Tourism Research 79 (2019).
Laura Cozzi, Olivia Chen and Hyeji Kim, “The World’s Top 1% of Emitters Produce over 1000 Times More CO2 than the Bottom 1%,” International Energy Agency, February 22, 2023, https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-world-s-top-1-of-emitters-produce-over-1000-times-more-co2-than-the-bottom-1.
Stefan Gössling and Andreas Humpe, “The Global Scale, Distribution, and Growth of Aviation: Implications for Climate Change,” Global Environmental Change 65 (2020).
Gössling, 8.
André Gorz, Ecology as Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1980).
Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), 16.
Dominic Boyer, The Life Informatic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013), 173–74.
Kathleen Hartnett White, “Fossil Fuels Offer Human Benefits that Renewable Energy Sources Can’t Match,” Houston Chronicle, June 21, 2014, https://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/outlook/article/Fossil-fuels-offer-human-benefits-that-renewable-5569986.php.
Chemical engineer and hydrogen expert Paul Martin eloquently explains how the current hydrogen hype is a fossil fuel industry delay strategy. “For the fossil fuel industry, hydrogen’s the no-lose bet. It’s win-win. Either it delays electrification. And by so doing, the oil and gas companies win as a result of that delay, or they get dragged into the future of energy supply in a decarbonized future by virtue of massive amounts of government subsidy for the production of hydrogen, from their fossil assets.” https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-hc-insider-podcast/id1512721188?i=1000538440409
See, e.g., https://mashable.com/article/how-to-get-university-college-divest-fossil-fuels.
4. Revolutionary Infrastructure, or What Is to Be Done
Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha, Soak: Mumbai in an Estuary (New Delhi: Rupa, 2009).
Larry Albert, “Houston Wet.” Master’s thesis, Rice University, 1997, 144. https://hdl.handle.net/1911/71304.
Dominic Boyer, “Infrastructure, Potential Energy, Revolution,” in The Promise of Infrastructure, ed. Nikhil Anand, Hannah Appel, and Akhil Gupta (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 223–243.
Timothy Morton and Dominic Boyer, Hyposubjects (London: Open Humanities Press), 2021.
Joseph Campana, “Power Down,” in Veer Ecology: A Companion for Environmental Thinking, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 64–65.
Joseph Campana, “Power Down,” 65.
Alongside the CENHS energy humanities collective we developed at Rice (2013–2019) and our sibling troublemakers in the Canadian Petrocultures network (https://www.petrocultures.com), I like to shout out the massively inspirational work of the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR) lab at Memorial University (https://civiclaboratory.nl) under founding director Max Liboiron as well as that of the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities (PPEH) under founding director Bethany Wiggin (https://ppeh.sas.upenn.edu). Both CLEAR and PPEH epitomize how academics can subscend their own transcendent inclinations and help model new decolonial, community-focused, and creative norms of environmental research and action.
See, e.g., episode 166 of the Cultures of Energy podcast featuring Whyte: https://scholarship.rice.edu/handle/1911/112872
See, e.g., Robert D. Bullard, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class and Environmental Quality, 3rd ed. (Boulder: Westview, 2000); Dina Gilio-Whitaker, As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock (Boston: Beacon, 2019); Leah Penniman, Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land (White River Junction, Vt.: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2018); and The Red Nation, The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth (Common Notions, 2021) among many others, as well as the tireless environmental justice work of organizations like the West Atlanta Watershed Alliance (https://www.wawa-online.org) and t.e.j.a.s. (https://www.tejasbarrios.org).
Kate Raworth, Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist (New York: Random House, 2018); Jason Hickel, Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World (New York: Penguin Random House, 2020); and Giorgos Kallis, Degrowth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).
See, e.g., Christine Bauhardt, “Degrowth and Ecofeminism: Perspectives for Economic Analysis and Political Engagement” (4th International Conference on Degrowth for Ecological and Sustainability and Social Equity, Leipzig, 2014); Bruna Bianchi, “Ecofeminist Thought and Practice” (3rd International Conference on Degrowth for Ecological and Sustainability and Social Equity, Venice, 2012).
Stacy Alaimo, Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016).
Collaborators included Dominic Boyer, Cymene Howe, Graeme MacDonald, Rhys Williams, and the A + E Collective (Finn Arschavir, Ane Lopez, Maria Sledmere, and Lucy Watkins).
We’d encourage you to create your own card lists. But if you would like to use readymades, here are the ones we generated: Feeling Cards = Scared, Lost, Joy, Connection, Desire, Confusion, Weird, Warmth, Surprise, Curious, Hungry, Anxious, Hilarious, Love, Creative, High, Ruined, Talkative, Excited, Free, Stable, Easy, Relaxed, Sheltered, Yearning, Present, Absent, Trashy, Hopeful, Bumpy, Persistent. Action Cards = Bounce, Move, Grow, Lick, Intensify, Hug, Communicate, Retreat, Reveal, Walk, Listen, Give, Eat, Illuminate, Warm, Kiss, Smell, Shout, Whisper, Like, Ignore, Jump, Write, Dance, Laugh, Shape, Shout, Whisper, Wink, Play, Argue. Object Cards = Window, Mammal, Cloud, Fish, Stump, Sail, Fruit, Wheel, Rock, Dust, Bubble, Styrofoam, Shoe, Leaf, Trash, Cake, Bicycle, Roots, String, Grass, Wall, Plastic, Insect, Wood, Mesh, Ball, Tube, Web, Bread, Machine, Book. Wild Cards = Soil, Rain, Secret, Underground, Sunshine, Shadows, Memory, Intimate, Infinite, Cauliflower, Shimmer, Green, Water, Infrastructure, Energy, Weather, Body, Found, Dark, Light, Reuse, Precious, Art, Silver, Wonder, Escape, Becoming, Cardboard, Dream, Emerge, Challenge.