Helios 1: Simon Orpana's Gasoline Dreams

May 3, 2021

Simon Orpana and Caleb Wellum

Welcome to Helios, an EH interview series about new research in the energy humanities and the creative processes that bring it to life.

Our inaugural interview features Simon Orpana, an artist and researcher from Hamilton, ON whose work renders sophisticated concepts and complex histories into arresting graphic narrative form. Fans of Icon Books’ “Graphic Guides” will appreciate Orpana’s ability to create compelling visualizations that retain the integrity of their source material.

EH editor Caleb Wellum sat down with Simon over Zoom on April 9 to talk about his new book with Fordham University Press, his process for turning ideas into images, and the life-affirming wastefulness of art.

Click the download link below to read the full illusrated interview.

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Further Reading

April 7, 2022
Maintaining the Rule of Experts? Interrogating the Contradictions of Energy
Ayesha Vemuri

In the third installment in our series on the impact of Timothy Mitchell's "Carbon Democracy," communication studies researcher Ayesha Vemuri explores Mitchell's larger oeuvre to argue that mainstream responses to address the climate crisis can be understood as extensions of what he calls “the rule of experts.” By maintaining a global hegemony of elite expertise over that of local and indigenous knowledges, efforts to address the ecological crisis uphold structures of power that undergird the ecological crisis. If we want to develop just responses to climate change, we will need a new approach to expertise.

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Feature: The Carbon Convoy: The Climate Emergency Fueling the Far Right’s Big Rigs
Tanner Mirrlees

In late January 2022, hundreds of big rigs bannered with Canadian flags rolled across the nation’s highways in “The Freedom Convoy,” a movement of purportedly ordinary truckers opposed to COVID-19 mandates. Throughout the whole ordeal, however, surprisingly little was said in the news media about the convoy’s energy politics. In this feature essay, Tanner Mirrlees, an Associate Professor in Communication and Digital Media Studies at Ontario Tech University, peels back the layers of energy politics at the heart of the convoy, revealing its alignment with carbon elites.

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