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Sunday, August 6th

January 30, 2024

Carrie Karsgaard, Assistant Professor in the Education Department at Cape Breton University, discusses her recent book, Instagram as Public Pedagogy: Online Activism and the Trans Mountain Pipeline. The book uses digital methods to explore the educative potential and limits of social media in anti-pipeline activism.

January 12, 2024

Visualizing A Sustainable Energy Future

Cutler J. Cleveland and Heather Clifford introduce Visualizing Energy, a new project of the Boston University Institute for Global Sustainability. Visualizing Energy is an open access, interdisciplinary science communication project that aims to increase actionable knowledge about a sustainable and just energy transition. The project knits data analysis, visualizations, and the written word into stories that reveal how our energy system can be transformed to reduce inequity, steer humanity from climate disaster, improve health and other social outcomes, and lead to healthy natural systems. Visualizing Energy is a public good; its motivations and methods are transparent, and its data products are freely available to all, making it an excellent tool for both research and teaching.

November 30, 2023

Solar Energy at the Museum of the Future

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.

October 31, 2023

Environment, Energy, and the History of US-Canada Relations

Historian Daniel Macfarlane introduces his new book, Natural Allies: Environment, Energy, and the History of US-Canada Relations from McGill-Queen's University Press. The book shows that the Canada-U.S. energy/environmental relationship is historically the most consequential in the world, spawning important changes in international environmental law and transboundary governance, while also fostering the voracious consumption of resources and and large-scale ecosystem change. In addition to analyzing this history, Macfarlane offers the concept of "natural security" as a potential guide to international environmental agreements and pathways.

October 6, 2023

Solar Technology and Global Environmental Justice: The Vision and the Reality

Andreas Roos' new book, Solar Technology and Global Environmental Justice: The Vision and the Reality, is both a sober critique of techno-optimistic visions of solar power and a call for “realistic envisioning.” In this Author's Note, Roos discusses the moment he realized that the current structure of solar energy has a darker side, as well as his hope that the book will inspire communities to explore better ways of harnessing solar energy to create new social metabolisms.

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