Hazards So Grave
Anthropology and Energy
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7276804 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Stephanie Paladino, Jeanne Simonelli |
| Year | 2013 |
| Volume | 35 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 1-3 |
| Publication date | 2013-06-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Culture Agriculture Food and Environment (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2153-9553 • E-ISSN: 2153-9561 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/cuag.12000 |
| OpenAlex | W2116483841 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 5 |
These are hazards so grave that every citizen should have a voice in deciding whether this is the road to energy independence we—or anyone—should take. ... (Margaret Mead 1976, in Townsend 2013, this issue) As Pat Townsend, in her article in this special CAFE issue on energy and anthropology reminds us, we should not be surprised to find that “Margaret Mead has been there before us.” Writing about nuclear energy in 1976, Margaret Mead and coauthors pointedly captured the sense of urgency and purpose that is now driving a growing wave of anthropological engagements with energy. This sense of urgency, one of the main impulses behind the organization of panels on energy and anthropology at the 2012 Society for Applied Anthropology and American Anthropological Association meetings by ourselves and colleagues, led to our coeditorship of this special issue. In turn, these have sparked a wave of purposeful networking and collaborations among anthropologists and allied social scientists working across energy sites and systems. These emerging efforts continue a long history of anthropological engagement with energy. Beginning in mid-last century, anthropologists and ecologists made significant contributions to placing human activities in ecological context. One of the signal contributions of this work was to make visible the energetic relations underlying production systems and associated social relations. They compared, for instance, the energy efficiency of food production based exclusively on human labor to the energy inefficiency of industrialized agricultural, with its dependence on material and energy importations into local systems and the energy losses incurred in the process. This work pointed to the disruptions caused among ecosystems by the movements, transformations, and discharges of energy. It also indicated that the ability of a society to engage in increasingly intensive production is predicated on it having access to socio-natural landscapes as sources of extraction. In addition, anthropologists in and outside of the academy have produced an abundant body of knowledge documenting why, where, and how these transformations and movements of energy have come about, and how they are differentially experienced, constructed, and influenced. Working from fields as diverse as development anthropology, human rights, farming research, and public health, for instance, anthropologists have traced the displacements and dispossessions caused by hydroelectric dams and mining sites; the patterned effects of and responses to disasters; and the disproportionate exposure of the poor and minorities to illness and social disruption from industrial energy practices. Anthropologists have played a significant role in documenting the effective sacrifice of cultural and natural landscapes, as well as the rights, health, and possible futures of whole populations, to the production, distribution, and management of energy. Where an earlier body of ecology-oriented anthropology helped make visible the energetic and ecological consequences of increasingly intensified production practices, subsequent work has made visible the causes and uneven distribution of their consequences to human beings. Despite so much good work and detailed knowledge of the enduring hazards but fleeting nature of the dominant high-risk, high-stakes energy models of today, we remain entrenched in them. Despite the decades-long existence of alternatives, little political and economic space has been carved for their insertion into the grid on a significant level. Despite the tragic reminder to our collective memory of the dangers of nuclear energy by the Fukushima disaster, nuclear construction has begun anew in the United States, with scant public attention. Despite the predictable needs to monitor and prevent the health effects of chemicals and materials emitted by energy production processes, the institutional responses and supporting science continue to come long after the damages have been done and many have suffered. Conflicting and confusing messages abound: national security and energy self-sufficiency are invoked as reasons to exploit all available energy sources, regardless of their net carbon contributions, as well as to justify the need for local sacrifices in the name of the wider, public good. Yet, domestically produced fuel is shipped to whatever market offers the best price; reports emerge that enough fossil fuel resources are located and in hand to supply the U.S. economy for decades; and scientists warn that actually using these reserves will push the globe into irreversible warming. Much of the emerging anthropology of energy takes its sense of urgency and focus from this confusion of “expert knowledge,” the continued structuring of energy into patterns of high human and environmental risk, and the potential for the trifecta of energy, water, and climate change to radically transform life as we know it. Contributors to this body of work reflect a move to theorize the cultural and physical production of energy across types, sources, places, and time. They look at the forces that shape prevailing, high-technology, capital-intensive, and corporate-dominated energy productions systems, as well as the rarer, decentralized and renewables-based approaches. They examine issues of power imbalances and the lagging development of adequate institutions for energy governance. A frequent thread is the emergence of local-level actions, often merging constructs of place-based identity, heritage, and ecosystems, which then network across regions to fill the gaps left by formal governance. Fundamental questions of the relative roles and rights of government, markets, civil society, corporations, and morality in the cultural production of energy are addressed, and their impacts on democratic processes, social equity, and sustainability analyzed. In this issue, we introduce readers to new collections of works and approaches that are creating this anthropology of energy. The articles and reviews provide a wealth of resources to inform research and practice, as well as teaching in the areas of sustainability, environmental studies, and energy. In “Energy Policy in American Faith Communities: ‘The Power to Change,’ ” Pat Townsend uses the case of the Presbyterian Church (USA) to look at how faith-based groups, in “reaching forward to future generations ... and back to the religious creation stories” can frame a long view of energy engagement that integrates moral values and influences policy. In the second article, Jason Morris notes that debates about energy governance in the United States have centered around questions of scale, control, and distribution of benefits since the inception of electricity production. In “The Evolving Localism (and Neoliberalism) of Urban Renewable Energy Projects,” Morris frames an emerging research project on the role of recurring “localist” renewable energy projects in creating new political economies of energy production, distribution, and ownership. Hydraulic fracturing is the focus of a trio of timely and critical Research Reports that offer complementary analyses of “fracking” in three different settings. In “Frac Sand Mining in Wisconsin: Understanding Emerging Conflicts and Community Organizing,” Thomas Pearson shows how commodity chains, corporate interests, and regulatory voids reproduce the conflicts, imbalances of power, health risks, and “indelible” transformations to “environmental, social, and ideological landscapes” far from the actual sites of energy extraction and distribution. Moving across the globe, Kim de Rijke's “The Agri-Gas Fields of Australia: Black Soil, Food, and Unconventional Gas,” describes how fracking activities target the few, agriculturally productive soils in Australia. Though industry and government frame fracking as a short-term activity compatible with agriculture, the realities of scarce water and social and environmental disruptions threaten to permanently destroy farming viability. In both of these settings, local residents organize to fill legal and regulatory voids but also face internal community divisions and conflicts of interest within local government. Finally, in “Fracking's Future in a Coal Mining Past: Subjectivity Undermined,” Anastasia Hudgins describes how the locally rooted, multigenerational social organization of labor in coal-mining country contrasts with the transient, extra-local, and minimal (once established) labor requirements of fracking, and how these and other contrasts affect local residents’ framing of both the risks and benefits of fracking in unexpected ways. How to develop a “critical anthropological pedagogy of energy” within educational and professional cultures that still privilege “hard” science and technical perspectives is the topic of Dana Powell's commentary, “Reflections on Teaching an ‘Anthropology of Energy.’ ” Describing her recent classes at Appalachian State in North Carolina, she reflects on how she has successfully used anthropology to intervene in the classroom, one of our primary fields of practice. Other new and important contributions to an anthropology of energy are spotlighted in our book and film reviews. Cymene Howe reviews Laura Nader's The Energy Reader, which responds to the need for a transdisciplinary treatment of energy, by incorporating “academic and professional perspectives, from physicists, economists, engineers and social scientists to historians, philosophers, journalists and business entrepreneurs.” Strauss et al.'s The Cultures of Energy, reviewed by Anna Willow, is a just-published, benchmark collection by anthropologists that richly demonstrates what an anthropology of energy looks like and signals what it could accomplish. James Blair reviews McNeish and Logan's Flammable Societies: Studies on the Socio-economics of Oil and Gas, a multi-sited examination of the association of energy extraction cultures with political conflict and human strife. Paul Durrenberger tackles two films, Crude and The Last Mountain, which portray similarly structured cultures and politics of corporate unaccountability, state collusion, and local organizing in response to the risks of oil production in Ecuador and coal production in Appalachia, respectively. Finally, Brandon Costelloe-Kuehn reflects on the film Switch, and on how easy it is for his students to buy into its self-proclaimed, objective review of current energy options, despite its obvious lack of key stakeholder perspectives. From extreme incidents like the Deepwater Horizon spill, to localized crises affecting sustainability and health, anthropologists are involved in gathering and analyzing data, teasing theory out of practice, and writing about our findings for both conventional academic and emerging online formats, in hopes of creating energy policy based on “evidence.” The need to maintain rigorous, systematic methodology, obtain testable and replicable results, and submit to comprehensive critique and review is both the strength and weakness of the process of scientific investigation. As a result, in an era of climate change, worldwide drought, unconventional energy extraction, and complex disasters, critical information and insight sometimes gets caught between urgency and science, even as policy makers on all levels claim that they will base life-changing decisions on “the science.” As anthropologists, our research often takes a back seat to that emerging from the hard sciences. In the face of a virtual avalanche of uncritical electronic information, with its twin threads of fetishization of science, on the one hand, and misunderstanding and mistrust of it on the other, social science is especially vulnerable from both directions. We hope that this issue of CAFE provides readers with thoughtful contributions, so that “every citizen should have a voice in deciding whether this is the road to energy independence we—or anyone—should take
Geography · Sociology · Anthropology · History · Indigenous Studies and Ecology · Recycling and Waste Management Techniques
| Unique citing works | 5 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,42 |
| Citation span | 2014 - 2019 (6) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 5 |