12 Min Read
June 6, 2025
By
Karl Emil Rosenbæk has a PhD in comparative literature. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Elite Centre for Understanding Human Relationships with the Environment at the University of Southern Denmark. His current project studies coastal fiction and life-friendly land-sea interaction.
In December 2023, 46 shipping containers fell overboard from a Maersk ship in the North Sea during harsh weather. Four of the containers were washed ashore on Jutland’s west coast. The 42 other containers remain unfound.
Although 46 containers in the North Sea represents a fraction of the hundreds of containers lost at sea every year, the incident spurred commotion in the Danish public.1 Looters rushed to the scene to procure washed up refrigerators, shoes, and more, while concerned citizens sought to clean the beach from this sudden flotsam. Between December 2023 and January 2024, nationwide newspapers reported some 50 times on the Maersk containers washing ashore. Coverage also appeared frequently on local news media outlets in Jutland, in the Danish Broadcasting Agency (DR) output, and in the tabloid media. This omnipresence might in fact not be all that surprising, given Denmark’s low-lying location and comprehensive coastline. Still, this incident—the event itself, the media coverage, and the aftermath—is a microcosmic indication of the Global North’s growing exposure to environmental damage wrought by the world-system of commodity capitalism based on resource extractivism.
The Maersk incident, I argue, is but one example of an enculturation of energy in its myriad forms. This is not simply because the container enterprise is known for its usage of bunker fuel—one of the heaviest and most contaminated fossil fuels in use—but also because containerization in itself must be characterized as a pivotal world-event in the history of fossil fuel distribution, elaborated energy markets, and global commodification.2
According to Laleh Khalili, “Maritime trade, logistics, and hydrocarbon transport are the clearest distillation of how global capitalism operates today.”3 Per her calculations, “Ninety per cent of the world’s goods travel by ship. Crude oil, carried in tankers, constitutes nearly 30 per cent of all maritime cargo; almost 60 per cent of world trade in oil is transported by sea.”4 Our reliance on energy, however, does not stop with shipping. Everything from health care systems to waste management to climate change alleviation and adaptation require increasing amounts of energy. So too do the computing and increasingly artificial intelligence-based networks on which these realms rely. According to the World Economic Forum, “The computational power required for sustaining AI’s rise is doubling roughly every 100 days.”5 What is more, the increasing demand for energy to support these developments takes a toll on valuable resources: from oil and natural gas deposits to critical minerals to the global basin of fresh water. The use and expansion of AI, for instance, “may be accountable for 4.2—6.6 billion cubic meters of water withdrawal in 2027, which is more than the total annual water withdrawal of 4—6 Denmark or half of the United Kingdom.”6 As such, the varied field of energy humanities insists that any critical analysis of a modern phenomenon or problematics must be conscious of the important role energy plays.
Fossil infrastructure has for the past two centuries increasingly defined modern ideations and sociocultural concepts: freedom, mobility, leisure, growth, “the good life,” food and fashion trends, conservation, habitation, and so much more. Moreover, the ingrained existence of fossil energy supporting modern life also means that the turn to renewable energies requires the transformation of lifestyles. As Imre Szeman and Dominic Boyer attest,
The existing language of energy transition is most often defensive, insisting on changes in input in order to preserve global capitalism and its systems of property and profit. […] This constitutes an enormous challenge and is one that we have barely begun to take up. What we need to do is, first, grasp the full intricacies of our imbrication with energy systems (and with fossil fuels in particular), and second, map out other ways of being, behaving, and belonging in relation to both old and new forms of energy. The task is nothing less than to reimagine modernity, and in the process to figure ourselves as different kinds of beings than the ones who have built a civilization on the promises, intensities, and fantasies of a particularly dirty, destructive form of energy.7
To transition away from fossil fuel energy entails a complete rewiring of our self-perception. To do this requires an understanding that modern Denmark (and the Global North as a whole) is founded on Cambodian brick kilns and Indonesian sweat shops.8 To put it in other terms, fossil energy and the encompassing extractivist ideology (that is, the world-system of extractivist capitalism) is everywhere, but it expresses itself differently everywhere.
The recent return to Marxian world literature studies, promoted by Franco Moretti and the Warwick Research Collective in particular, works to disclose how this dialectical relation of different expressions within the capitalist world-system is registered in modern fiction. When containers return to the shores of Denmark—the home of the world’s second largest container shipping company in the world—we Danes are suddenly exposed to the fossil-fueled marine infrastructure that makes the capitalist world go round. We saw a similarly sudden realization in 2021 when the Suez Canal was blocked for six days by the large container vessel Ever Given, which was operated by the Taiwanese firm Evergreen (in hindsight, the company’s name rings of irony). Exposing the often-obscured reality of the global energy infrastructure is at the heart of energy humanities.
Taking the Trash Out…
As such, with the Danish container incident in mind, I will use the rest of this piece to present a recent work of literary fiction that represents what Hannah Freed-Thall has called the “cracks in a containerized world.”9 The work I will present may at first seem remote from the Danish context. That this, however, is not the case, is exactly the point I wish to make with regards to the aforementioned understanding that extractivist capitalism is everywhere but expresses itself through a variety of means. In other words, I wish to show how literature works to expose the frailty of the idea of containerization, of enclosing and compartmentalizing the effects and consequences of extractivism.
The 2011 novel The Man with the Compound Eyes by the Taiwanese writer Wu Ming-Yi illustrates with rare clarity the world-ecological consequences of global capitalism.10 In Ming-Yi’s novel, Atile’i, an indigenous boy from a sequestered Pacific Island called Wayo Wayo is, as the second son, destined to become a solemn offering to the Sea God. Turning fifteen, Atile’i is sent away from the island by his native tribe on his self-made “grass boat,” or talawaka, to face his destiny in the hands of the vast ocean that they believe constitutes the outer rims of the world.11 Out at sea, the boy’s talawaka begins to take in water. Soon, he abandons it and begins to swim without any clear direction. Deprived of energy, he passes out only to wake up on an immense artificial island, “made not of mud but of a multi-hued mishmash of strange stuff, and there was a weird smell hanging in the air.”12 He lives on this mass of trash, this pacific plastic island, for weeks only to find the island is surrounded by dead sea turtles, whose stomachs are filled with small bits of plastic. Even as he avoids eating anything found in his local environs, he slowly begins to notice that “his body was changing: his gums often bled and his joints ached, too. He could not swim as smoothly as before. Sometimes he even felt dizzy.”13 It is clear to the reader that this floating pile of trash is polluting the seaways, killing the animal life, and harming the human body. Eventually, Atile’i’s troublesome journey on this island comes to a halt as an oceanic storm sends it crashing onto the eastern shore of Taiwan.
As Kunyu Wang, Guidan Zhang, and Lucy Drummond have written in their analysis of the book, Taiwan “has undergone a rapid period of economic growth and industrialization, yet it grapples with the fallout of industrial pollution.”14 In The Man with the Compound Eyes, this development is emblematically shown in a scene about a tunnel drilling project that will save commuters around thirty minutes of travel time. At the quote above exposes, the attitude towards the environmental consequences of rampant economic development is bleak. As such, the trash island reaching the shore of Taiwan in the story, then, reads as a clear example of nature striking back. Concerning the tunnel project, Detlef, the engineer contracted to design the project, assesses “that the difficulties involved in digging the tunnel shouldn’t be insuperable, but it might not be worth the time and money” as “the quartz-like Szeleng sandstone along the route [contained] so much quartz it was basically quartzite. It had a Mohs hardness of between 6 and 7, when steel was only 5!” And yet, the government officials go forward with the line that “the tunnel is feasible no matter what.”15
As much as any other, this passage captures the primary message of this admittedly elaborate and polyvalent novel. The “no matter what”-attitude towards a doubtful enterprise of drilling a hole through a massive mountain in the name of miniscule gains seemingly without any regard for the toil, the energy use, the waste management, the pollution hazard, the wildlife disturbances, or any other aspects related to the project embodies the modern enculturation of the growth paradigm perfectly. As such, the novel is also a succinct ecological parable of the impossibility of stepping outside of this ideology. Even the inhabitants on Wayo Wayo—completely unaware and insulated from this capitalist way of life—are not unaffected by the world-altering consequences of this paradigm. Not only does Atile’i get stranded on a plastic island, the Wayo Wayo-island is eventually “engulfed by [a] tsunami” caused by some unintelligible faraway attempt to geoengineer or seismically explore the deep sea.16
[T]his morning, a silent flotilla was monitoring some remote area of the great ocean and lining up like a firing squad. Each crewman stood at his post, gazing towards the horizon. Before long a beam of light leapt up into the sky, flew level for several thousand kilometres, then dove. Just getting up, the Wayo Wayoans thought a massive shooting star had crashed into the sea.
The beam of light plunged beneath the waves and kept boring its way down into an abyssal trench. Never seen before by man, the trench was home to bizarre creatures who could have come from outer space. Suddenly, every creature in the entire ocean heard a deafening sound, like no sound that had ever been heard before, as if some mighty being were departing. A great gash opened up deep in the trench, and a shock wave was transmitted towards the two ends, raising a tsunami of unprecedented power.17
Whatever the intent of the light beam—is it perhaps even a weapon testing of sorts?—the consequence is clear. Wayo Wayo is whipped out and “a week later, a pod of several hundred sperm whales would be discovered beached on the shores of Valparaíso, Chile, with grim eyes, cracked skin and crushed ribs.”18
Reading The Man with the Compound Eyes, one cannot omit the hypocrisy of the Danish attention towards 46 contains washing ashore in Jutland. Indeed, Denmark continues to export up to 50 percent of its plastic waste (some 50,000 tons) yearly even though Danes are crucially aware that this waste ends up in Asian landfills and waterways.19 There is in fact no outside. One way or the other, Ming-Yi’s novel and the Maersk incident reveal that “the great ocean will dump back all the trash people dump in it.”20 As such, the floodings, the plastic islands, and the seabed desolation that currently transpire as a direct consequence of the fossil energy paradigm are no longer just examples of "cracks in a containerized world.” Rather, the cracks are becoming wide open, and the world is talking under water at an enormous speed due to the containerized ignorance of the Global North.
Articles in this series
Introduction: Energy Humanities in Practice: Teaching, Technology, Transition
EH in Practice 1: Libraries and Laboratories: Teaching Energy Humanities in Literary Studies
EH in Practice 2: The World of Energy and The Myth of Containerization
EH in Practice 3: Museums and the Challenge of Cultural Decarbonization
EH in Practice 4: Preserving Oil: In Conversation with Educators at the Norwegian Petroleum Museum and Oil Museum of Canada
EH in Practice 5: Virtue Ethics and Ecosabotage
EH in Practice 6: The Rise and Fall of Energiewende: A Case Study in Horse Racing Syndrome
Notes
1. According to the latest figures from the World Shipping Council, 661 containers were lost at sea in 2022, which “represents less than one thousandth of 1% (0.00048%) of the 250 million packed and empty containers currently shipped each year.” World Shipping Council, Containers Lost at Sea – 2023 Update, https://www.worldshipping.org
2. Craig Martin, Shipping Container (Bloomsbury, 2016).
3. Laleh Khalili, Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula (Verso, 2020), 3.
4. Ibid., 1.
5. Beena Ammanath, “How to Manage AI ‘s Energy Demand – Today, Tomorrow and in the Future,” World Economic Forum, April 2024, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2024/04/how-to-manage-ais-energy-demand-today-tomorrow-and-in-the-future/
6. Pengfei Li et al., “Making AI Less ‘Thirsty’: Uncovering and Addressing the Secret Water Footprint of AI Models,” ArXiv preprint, arXiv:2304.03271, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.03271
7. Imre Szeman and Dominic Boyer, “Introduction: On the Energy Humanities,” in Energy Humanities: An Anthology, edited by Imre Szeman and Dominic Boyer (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), 3.
8. Laurie Parsons, Carbon Colonialisms: How Rich Countries Export Climate Breakdown (Manchester University Press, 2023).
9. Hannah Freed-Thall, “Beaches and Ports,” Comparative Literature 73, no. 2 (June 2021): 141, https://doi.org/10.1215/00104124-8874051
10. For more on world-ecology, see Jason Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (Verso, 2015).
11. Wu Ming-Yi, The Man with the Compound Eyes (Vintage Books, 2014), 13.
12. Ibid., 31.
13. Ibid., 126.
14. Kunyu Wang, Guidan Zhang, and Lucy Drummond, “Island, Identity, and Trauma: The Three Ecologies of Wu Ming-Yi’s The Man with the Compound Eyes,” Island Studies Journal 20, vol. 1 (November 2023): 7, https://doi.org/10.24043/001c.89379
15. Ibid., 201.
16. Ibid., 200.
17. Ibid., 298.
18. Ibid., 299.
19. Birgitte Dalgaard, “What Happens to Our Plastic Waste?” University of Southern Denmark, https://www.sdu.dk/en/om_sdu/fakulteterne/teknik/nyt_fra_det_tekniske_fakultet/hvad_sker_der_med_plastikaffald
20. Wu, The Man with the Compound Eyes, 292.
