Sugar, coal, oil: No more fossils.

University of Minnesota Press

What is fossil civilization? In the book No More Fossils, Dominic Boyer tells the story of how we came to rationalize fossil fuel use through successive phases of sucropolitics (plantation sugar), carbopolitics (industrial coal), and petropolitics (oil and plastics), showing what tethers us to petroculture today and what it will take to overcome the forces that mire us in place. What can we do to make electroculture a more just and sustainable alternative? In this episode, Boyer is joined in conversation about modern energy politics with Cara Daggett.

Dominic Boyer is an anthropologist, media maker, and environmental researcher who teaches at Rice University. His books include No More Fossils, Energopolitics, and Hyposubjects.

Cara Daggett is associate professor of political science at Virginia Tech and author of The Birth of Energy.

References:

The Birth of Energy / Cara Daggett

Anna Tsing

Carbon Democracy / Timothy Mitchell

Michel Foucault on biopower

Sweetness and Power / Sidney Mintz

Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History / Susan Buck-Morss

Fossil Capital / Andreas Malm

15-Minute City

John Locke

Alexander Dunlap on Fossil Fuel+

Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More / Alexei Yurchak

Staying with the Trouble / Donna Haraway

Ariella Azoulay

Kyle Powys Whyte

Geontologies / Elizabeth Povinelli

Low Carbon Pleasure / a collaborative experimental art and performance project by Dominic Boyer, Cymene Howe, and others

Stacy Alaimo / ecophilia

No More Fossils is available from University of Minnesota Press. An open-access edition is available to read free online at manifold.umn.edu.