Many people first encounter energy history in museums, where they learn about heroic steam powered engines and fossil-fueled technologies. The history of solar energy technologies, argues Frédéric Caille, is often either forgotten or repressed in these spaces. Such forgetting distorts our understanding of the past and narrows our sense of future possibilities. With his collaborative project to recover, reconstruct, and display forgotten solar water pumps from the 1970s, Caille and his colleagues frame forgotten solar technologies as “cosmograms”: objects which describe the world as it could have been, and could yet become.
Elizabeth Carolyn Miller discusses her award-winning book "Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion" and makes the case for literature as a unique record of environmental thought that can help us to understand conceptual transformations in new ways.
Artist Oliver Ressler's "Barricading the Ice Sheets" project investigates the relationship between art and climate justice movements. In this reflection on the project, Ressler articulates the impossibility of neutrality, the role of representation in creating social movements, and the importance of art as a vital space both to reflect on the multi-dimensional climate crisis and to think beyond it.
Russia and the European Union are substantially linked by trade in energy resources. Katja Bruisch and Benjamin Beuerle argue that these links have put European leaders, who are ostensibly committed to decarbonization, in the difficult position of backtracking on their goals to minimize energy insecurity and economic chaos--a position they could have mitigated or even avoided by more decisive action on fossil fuels. Russia’s brutal, largely oil- and gas-financed invasion of Ukraine brings home in the darkest of ways the dangers of basing international relations, institutions, economies, and lifestyles on fossil fuels.
Maja and Reuben Fowkes, art historians, curators, and co-directors of the Postsocialist Art Centre at University College London, discuss their new book, Ilona Németh: Eastern Sugar. Through essays, interviews, and artistic interventions, the book examines the decline of sugar beet production in Eastern Europe as synecdoche of post-Soviet transition while reckoning with the entangled histories of sugar, colonialism, and extractivism in the Caribbean and Eastern Europe and suggesting alternate futures.
Taste the Waste argues that the Russian government's vision of the energy future will harm both the planet and many groups living on the margins of Russian society.
