Cultures of Energy

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 get started with your own exploration of the solarpunk canon. Wishing much holiday merriment to all listeners great and small!

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 change is figuring into his current comparative work on undocumented migration and he explains how the film Sleep Dealer may be more than science fiction. We close by talking about his new photoessay project on Honduran smugglers and hypermasculinity and why working with artistic collaborators is such an important strategy for reaching a wider public.  

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 walking as a form of “recreational salvation” became linked to the valorization of wilderness. We discuss whether American Christianity is exceptional in terms of climate morality and why American political culture has become an incubator for religious radicalism. We then turn to how climate change is now impacting religious systems across the world and how better intergenerational ethics might teach us to think collectively rather than individually. Finally, we discuss another recent book project Evan has undertaken with Rob Albro, Church, Cosmovision, and the Environment: Religion and Social Conflict in Contemporary Latin America (Routledge 2018).

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” is an anti-politics machine, and the first environmentalist victory in Chilean history. We close by discussing her current book project, Loss and Wonder at the World’s End.

California is burning again. So, in solidarity, Cymene and Dominic try to do an intro segment with N95 masks on and quickly realize this isn’t a good way to have to live. To learn more about the evolving field of wildfire management we then (13:40) chat with the amazing Adriana Petryna from U Penn. First we ask how a nice anthropologist like her became famous for studying disasters like Chernobyl. We discuss how she came to her concept of “biological citizenship” and her thinking about risk. That gets us back to wildfires and Adriana’s interest in scientific responses to our unpredictable climate. We get into how current models of fire suppression and prevention are deteriorating as fires become more unpredictable and as firefighters resist the idea that they become a military force tasked with fighting nature. Adriana describes the situation of responding to a changing climate as though it is not changing as “diligent insanity.” We then talk about how denialism is often linked to the idea that we’re protected (by a cult of first responders); about fire as a non-linear process; and about the need to update models of fire behavior to take “new fire” and new fuels into account. Finally. Adriana shares her thoughts on “retreat” as analytic and possible new mode of biopolitics in the Anthropocene. Want to read more? Check out Adriana’s brand new article on wildfires in Cultural Anthropology:https://culanth.org/articles/977-wildfires-at-the-edges-of-science-horizoning-work

Cymene and Dominic get their mojo back as they dip their toes into the blue wave. Then (13:12) we connect with Anne Galloway about her life and work as a scholar and a farmer. We start with Anne’s thoughts on how raising sheep as a farmer has made her part of a flock and how the complexity of those relations have changed how she thinks about the Anthropocene, in particular about death. Anne answers the question, “Can you kill something you love?” and this gets us to talking about ethics, responsibility and kinship in our relations with “livestock animals.” Anne explains why she finds it problematic that academics and activists often equate all animal husbandry with industrial farming practices. We talk about catching flak from farmers as well as academics, about companionate animals named and unnamed, the key characteristics of sheepishness, and turn from there to Anne’s interests in ethnographic and speculative design and her plan to do a second doctorate in creative writing. We close by wondering whether Anne has any chance of getting her sheep into Peter Jackson’s next Tolkien adaptation.

Cymene and Dominic recap their Halloween on this week’s episode of the podcast and plug the spooky new Cultural Anthropology series, “Time of Monsters,” (https://culanth.org/fieldsights/1584-time-of-monsters). Then (15:59) with many eyes on next week’s U.S. midterm election, Paige West joins us in the studio to process the social and environmental stakes of our contemporary political situation. We talk about slogging through the past two years of  Trumpism, the resurgence of interest in local politics, the politicization and erasure of climate issues in the U.S., and how much New Yorkers are still paying attention to climate change years after Hurricane Sandy. A frank conversation follows about what climate-minded scholars can really do to help in these political times and about the need to experiment with new media for public communication to help us find wider audiences. We consider whether we can assemble a coalition of scholars who will pledge to give free lectures on climate change at community colleges around the country. What do you think dear listeners? Would you join us? We close with the indigenous hip hop scene that is better than the punk renaissance we dreamed of in 2016. And we promise Paige an owl. PS You can listen to the Snotty Nose Rez Kids on Soundcloud at: https://soundcloud.com/snottynoserezkids

Dominic tries to sing Ted Cruz out of office on this week’s podcast and retells a story about the senator’s dirty shirt. Then (14:59) fellow anthropologist and environmental humanities podcaster Tim Neale (of Deakin University) joins us from the future in Melbourne. With him we review their very successful recent Anthropocene Campus and its effort to think deep thoughts and deep time through the lens of the elements while visiting exotic local Anthropocene sites like Melbourne’s “poo farm.” We then return to Tim’s own work and talk through his recent book, Wild Articulations: Environmentalism and Indigeneity in Northern Australia (U Hawaii Press, 2017) which traces the rise and fall of Australia’s Wild Rivers Act and the ways in which the aestheticization of environment can contribute to the dispossession of indigenous peoples. We talk about effort to include and exclude rivers and aboriginal peoples from settler liberal politics, the impact of the 1992 Mabo Decision and the negotiation of usufructuary rights, why the Wild Rivers Act was eventually repealed and with what legacy. We then turn to Tim’s new research on fire management, carbon storage and risk modeling in Australia and close by plugging Tim’s own excellent podcast, anthropology@deakin, which you can find at https://soundcloud.com/user-910866758  PS American citizens, please don’t forget to vote!!