Can Canada mine its way to a green economy? In this EH feature, Isaac Thornley examines the contradictions of Ontario’s mines-to-mobility strategy, revealing how calls for economic nationalism serve to mask extractive policies and corporate subsidies. Centered on Ontario’s “Ring of Fire,” the province’s EV battery vision bypasses Indigenous consent, endangers critical peatland ecosystems, and reinscribes the colonial patterns/logic it claims to disrupt.
The hydrogen economy is often imagined as a clean energy solution but its foundations remain tied to fossil fuels. Doctoral researcher Dominique Arsenault traces the ways hydrogen development—particularly through blue hydrogen—reinforces existing oil and gas infrastructure, prolonging fossil fuel dependence under the guise of transition. From Canada’s hydrogen exports to Germany to industry backed visions of a hydrogen-powered future, the promise of decarbonization may be little more than a delay tactic.
Rachel Webb Jekanowski, Giulia Champion, and Mikala Hope-Franklyn uncover how the Gothic—a genre steeped in themes of hauntings, monstrosity, and the uncanny—offers a critical lens for examining the racial and colonial injustices embedded in green energy narratives. At the 2024 International Gothic Association Conference, they introduced a storytelling RPG to investigate how these inequalities permeate policy and public discourse. How might the Gothic expose the systemic power dynamics shaping the push for a "just" energy transition?
Helios is an EH interview series about new research in the energy humanities and the creative processes that bring it to life. In this fifth installment, Nicholas Carby-Denning interviews University of Toronto political scientists Teresa Kramarz and Donald Kingsbury about their book Populist Moments and Extractivist States in Venezuela and Ecuador: The People's Oil? (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). Although this conversation took place in late 2022, its exploration of energy and populist politics continues to resonate in late 2024.
In this author's note, Sibo Chen introduces his new book, Energy Politics and Discourse in Canada, and its argument about the rise of "progressive extractivism" in Canada. By exploring the conflicting narratives that have shaped the politics of natural gas extraction in British Columbia, Chen shows how progressive rhetoric often masks resource extraction and underscores the multifaceted challenges inherent in balancing the economy, the environment, and Indigenous rights in a fraught energy landscape.
Extractive Bargains: Exploring the State-Society Nexus is a new collection of essays, edited by Paul Bowles and Nathan Andrews, that explores how states are responding to conflicting demands around resource extraction. The book's 16 case studies include countries from both the Global North and Global South, as well as some majority Indigenous states, to understand how "extractive bargains" generate social consensus around resource extraction in different places. The book is the first to analyze in detail and in comparative perspective how states have sought to construct discourses and dialogues designed to support particular extractive policies. It demonstrates, however, that pathways are not pre-determined and that there are possibilities for progressive change.
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.
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.
Recent discoveries of large oil reserves are poised to make the small country of Guyana one of the world's largest offshore oil producers. In this EH feature, Janette Bulkan explores the enmeshment of the dominant players from Guyana's old and corrupt natural resources sector (gold) in the new oil boom. In both gold and black gold, the lines between formal and informal, licit and illicit are blurred, with state complicity. Political party interests and private interests, transnational and local interests–all are interwoven for narrow personal gains.
In A Social Ecology of Capital, the Canadian social theorist Éric Pineault proposes an original model of the fossil social metabolism that has sustained the growth of advanced capitalism in the last century. Showing how social relations shape the ecology of capital, Pineault highlights the deep contradictions that humanity now faces.
What do literary narratives have to do with resource extraction? Quite a lot, according to Stacey Balkan. In her book, Rogues in the Postcolony: Narrating Extraction and Itinerancy in India, Balkan challenges developmentalist narratives pushed by industry through an examination of Anglophone Indian picaresque novels, or “rogue” tales. Looking to novels by writers such as Amitav Ghosh, Indra Sinha, and Aravind Adiga, Balkan reveals startling connections between landscape ideology, agricultural improvement, extractive capitalism, and aesthetic expression in British-occupied Bengal, 1980s Bhopal, and the coal-soaked terrain of contemporary Dhanbad.
How might we trace the entanglements of logics of energy in the extractivist projects of the North American West with logics of energy in the body? In this author's note, E Cram sketches the personal and historical inheritances that ground their new book, Violent Inheritance: Sexuality, Land and Energy in Making the North American West.
Adam Carlson teases out how the framing of resource development in Canada often supports authoritarian resource rhetoric and policies. The way we talk about "Canadian oil", it turns out, is deeply political and cannot be separated from ongoing histories of resource extraction and dispossession.
A new book edited by Bart Hawkins Kreps and Clifford W. Cobb explores the collective transformations that will need to take place in a post-fossil fuel, post-economic growth era.
There is a growing body of Canadian ecopoetry that takes as its subject the links between oil, land, and colonialism. Poetry scholar Max Karpinski has studied these poets and explains how one of them--Lesley Battler--subtly reuses the bland terminology of the petrochemical industry to create poetic insights into our fossil-fueled condition.
Maja and Reuben Fowkes, art historians, curators, and co-directors of the Postsocialist Art Centre at University College London, discuss their new book, Ilona Németh: Eastern Sugar. Through essays, interviews, and artistic interventions, the book examines the decline of sugar beet production in Eastern Europe as synecdoche of post-Soviet transition while reckoning with the entangled histories of sugar, colonialism, and extractivism in the Caribbean and Eastern Europe and suggesting alternate futures.
Researcher Sydney Hart explains his web-based project to scrutinize the flight networks that support the operations of some of the world's largest gold mining companies. Rather than "flight shaming" individuals, "Mining Maps" shines a light on corporate responsibility for climate change.
The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted higher education in the United States. Millions of students and faculty have been forced to meet online using digital platforms like Zoom. Literature professor Stacey Balkan argues that Zoom education should not be considered a new normal for the sake of students, faculty, and the planet.
