Helios

Helios 1: Simon Orpana's Gasoline Dreams

Tagged:

Literature

Activism

Fossil Fuels

Cultural Change

12 Min Read

May 3, 2021

By

Simon Orpana
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.

Download the interview
Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.

Read More

We Were In It: Stories About Energy Transition
The Thread of Energy: Weaving the Fabric of Our Lives
Forum on Fossil Capital Part 1: Self-Sustaining, Self-Devouring Growth

Read More

April 5, 2022

Forum on Carbon Democracy Part 2: Carbon Democracy: Unfinished Business

Bob Johnson

In the second installment in our series of essays on the impact of Timothy Mitchell's "Carbon Democracy," historian and cultural critic Bob Johnson assesses the book's intellectual contributions to the study of energy and society. In so doing, Johnson argues that the book's two main insights have too often been neglected and calls on scholars to consider anew how we might engage more deeply with the implications of Mitchell's work.

Read
December 23, 2025

Trying to Speak Goose

Melanie Dennis Unrau

Melanie Dennis Unrau shares a poem from her new collection, "Goose," and offers some context for it in the life and writing of an unlikely worker-poet, Sidney Clarke Ells, the self-styled “father of the tar sands.” Unrau's work examines how literary form registers the contradictions of settler attachment, ecological destruction, and nation-building at the origins of the tar sands, and what it means to read, and remake, those texts now.

Read
all articles

~

Energy Politics and Discourse in Canada: Probing Progressive Extractivism

~

Putin’s War in Ukraine and Europe’s Carbon Democracies: Paying the Price of Half-Hearted Climate Politics

~

Greening Canada?: Energy and Climate Policy in the 2020 Throne Speech

~

Toxic Prisons, Racial Capital, and the Refuse of Reform 

~

Travelling out of sight? Mapping the flight networks of Canada's gold mining industry

~

Symposium: "From Solar Futures to Future Solidarity”

~

Canadian Refinery Workers Face an Unjust Transition

~

Extractive Bargains: Exploring the State-Society Nexus

~

Low Carbon Justice in Canada's Net-Zero Transition

~

The Anthropocene in Global Media: Neutralizing the Risk: The Project and the Book

~

Forum on Fossil Capital Part 4: From Steam Fetishism to Solar Fetishism

~

Petrocultural Imaginaries in the Halls of Kazakhstan’s Museums

~

"There is no other life”: Gary Snyder’s Double View of Petromodernity

~

The Energized Enclosure of AI

~

As the Hydrocarbon Era Comes to an End, We Need a New Focus for Economics

~

Helios 2: Anne Pasek on Changing Methods in a Changing Climate

~

Helios 3: Rebecca Sharp's Rough Currency

~

Ring of Fire Conflict Reveals Gaps in Ontario’s Economic Nationalist EV Battery Fantasy

~

The Lithium Energy Colony: Introducing "Mining for the Climate" Season 2

~

A Social Ecology of Capital

~

Energy Decolonization and Indigenous Resistance: Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms

~

Hydrogen in the Fossil Fuel Landscape

~

Making and Meeting Online

~

EH in Practice Part 2: Museums and the Challenge of Cultural Decarbonization

~

After Oil 3: Volatile Trajectories Podcast Series

~

What's your energy story?

~

Rogues in the Postcolony: Narrating Extraction and Itinerancy in India

~

Education and Extraction

~

Helios 4: Kazim Ali and Robert Boschman in Conversation

~

Forum on Fossil Capital Part 1: Self-Sustaining, Self-Devouring Growth