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.
Elizabeth Carolyn Miller discusses her award-winning book "Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion" and makes the case for literature as a unique record of environmental thought that can help us to understand conceptual transformations in new ways.
