Articles

A recent spate of climate protests and mass-movement civil disobedience events has reinvigorated mainstream discussions of the ethics of civil disobedience, direct action, and various forms of ecosabotage. In this paper, I examine the present-day case for both non-violent civil disobedience and more extreme forms of "direct action" in response to the global climate emergency. In particular, I explore how the framework of virtue ethics can be applied in this context, yielding conclusions that will be disappointing to prospective eco-saboteurs but encouraging to those committed to non-violent resistance.

The essay provides an historical overview of the German transition to a post-fossil energy regime. It stresses the crucial link between the nuclear phaseout, the demise of monopolies in the electric power sector, and the creation of a context for investments in wind and solar power. It shows that the present strength of the German renewable electric power sector is the product of a favorable climate for these investments between 1990 and 2000. With the last major bottleneck now several decades in the past, it seems imperative to comment on long-term investments and sophisticated political housekeeping and to challenge energy mythologies that fail to make the crucial link outlined above.

When five containers washed ashore on the western coast of Jutland, Denmark, it was a miniscule event. Yet that event is indicative of the ways in which the world-system of commodity capitalism based on resource extractivism has increasingly exposed the Global North to environmental wrought. Connecting the event in Denmark to The Man with the Compound Eye, a 2011 novel by Taiwanese writer Wu Ming-Yi, shows literature’s ability to uncover the frailty of the idea of containerization and of enclosing and compartmentalizing the effects of extractivism.

Cultural institutions are beginning to confront their deep entanglement with the high-carbon systems that have driven the climate crisis, recognizing operational, existential, and epistemological challenges in a decarbonizing world. Exhibitions have historically celebrated fossil energy as progress, and museums now face the complex task of balancing this legacy with urgent climate narratives that promote societal transformation. Energy humanities offer a critical lens to support cultural institutions in reshaping their societal roles and future visions to ethically contribute to a low-carbon future.