In this installment of Helios, Amy Janzwood speaks with Darin Barney about her book Mega Pipelines, Mega Resistance, which examines pipeline politics, social movements, and state power in Canada. Focusing on the Northern Gateway and Trans Mountain expansion projects, their conversation traces why pipelines become sites of democratic conflict, how resistance takes shape across Indigenous nations, environmental organizations, and local communities, and how regulators and governments structure extractive outcomes. Together, they discuss infrastructure as a political object, the constraints of regulatory participation, and the conditions under which large-scale resistance forms in periods of renewed extractivism.
Harry Pitt Scott examines the growing prominence of “electrify everything” as the guiding narrative of the energy transition. He traces how the International Energy Agency and advocates like Saul Griffith frame electrification as both necessary and sufficient, even as clean power lags behind demand. For Scott, the appeal of this vision lies in its promise of continuity, one that sees electricity as a clean replacement that leaves political and social arrangements unchanged.
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A recent spate of climate protests and mass-movement civil disobedience events has reinvigorated mainstream discussions of the ethics of civil disobedience, direct action, and various forms of ecosabotage. In this paper, I examine the present-day case for both non-violent civil disobedience and more extreme forms of "direct action" in response to the global climate emergency. In particular, I explore how the framework of virtue ethics can be applied in this context, yielding conclusions that will be disappointing to prospective eco-saboteurs but encouraging to those committed to non-violent resistance.
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This series introduction situates energy humanities in a rapidly changing global context marked by war, climate disasters, political backlash, and stalled transitions. Revisiting the foundational claims of Szeman and Boyer’s Energy Humanities (2017), Hélène Ducros and Nicholas Ostrum argue that technology functions both as infrastructure and as ideology, shaping how energy systems have come to structure modern life. The essays that follow examine how energy informs culture, pedagogy, politics, and ethics, and how new ways of thinking might point toward more just and sustainable futures.
Every day, up to 540,000 barrels of natural gas liquids and crude oil flow under the Great Lakes in the Enbridge Line 5 pipline connecting Western Canada to Eastern Canada. Jeffrey Insko--energy humanities scholar and Michigan resident--explains why a grassroots coalition of indigenous groups, politicians, environmentalists, and other concerned citizens wants the pipeline shut down, as well as what makes this pipline battle different.
