Cultures of Energy

Cymene goes shopping with Beyoncé in this episode's dream sequence and if that weren't dreamy enough your co-hosts also break down the new film, Backrooms. Then (17:01) we welcome Elizabeth Monoian and Robert Ferry to the podcast to talk about their amazing Land Art Generator Initiative (LAGI), a remarkable effort to surface the potential beauty of renewable energy. As a unique kind of public art enterprise, LAGI has been holding design competitions across the world since 2010. We talk about their mission to help inspire more ecologically and socially attuned modes of futurism and how land art can seed visions of better post-fossil worlds to come. We do deep dives into the projects they are currently developing in Fiji and Houston and then turn to some of LAGI's other projects including solar murals and art + energy camps. Hang in there, everyone, peace and love. Image notes = Arch of Time is a Land Art Generator artwork designed by Riccardo Mariano. Incorporating solar photovoltaic modules it will generate 400,000 kWh per year, offsetting the electricity demand of Mason Park. The artwork makes for an exceptional venue for events, learning, discovery, and play. As a time measuring device, the Arch keeps track of the sun as it moves across the sky, engaging visitors with a magical light display within a comfortably shaded outdoor space. The Arch was originally a submission to LAGI 2019 Abu Dhabi. The O by Alberto Roncelli incorporates solar photovoltaic and rainwater harvesting to produce 150,000 kWh of electricity and 1.2 million liters of filtered water each year. The winning submission to LAGI 2025 Fiji, a collaboration with the Village of Marou.

Cymene and Dominic talk about shrinky dinks, tiny sweaters, miniaturized submarines and elemental ethnography during this week's intro segment. Then (12:12) we welcome Fernando Ortiz-Moya to the conversation to talk about his excellent new book We're Still Here: Regenerating Shrinking Cities from the Ground Up (U California Press, 2026). Fernando explains his lifelong fascination with cities with dwindling populations and why urban shrinkage doesn't always mean decline. We move from there to talking about the hegemony of growth thinking in urbanism and why top-down planning for urban renewal so often fails to produce the effects intended. We wonder about how climate change will find new ways to shrink cities and, finally, we discuss different bottom up strategies for urban regeneration and how and why informal practices usually produce better results. Hang in there, everyone, peace and love.

Cymene and Dominic discuss what happened when ten art school kids were given a disney princess baking challenge on this week's episode of the podcast. Then (14:48) we welcome Casper Bruun Jensen to the pod to talk about a new collaboration and book project he organized called Southern Anthropocenes (Routledge, 2026). We begin with the Anthropocene concept and why Casper and his collaborators felt it was important to pluralize it. We turn from there to talking pluriversal politics, cosmopolitical openings, utopias, the need to take care of the possible and what tales of tomorrow we need to tell today. Check out Casper's Entangled Areas special issue here. And if you have time on May 11th beam into the Southern Anthropocenes conversation being hosted by the University of Tokyo. Hang in there, everyone, peace and love.

Dominic and Cymene celebrate the 250th episode of the podcast with tales of steamy avian encounter. And then (16:14) we welcome Nikki Luke to the podcast, author of the brand-new book Electric Life: Utility Regulation and the Fight for Energy Democracy (MIT Press, 2026). We start with what energy democracy means to Nikki in the context of her work on utility regulation and then move to her case study of the famously recalcitrant utility, Georgia Power, and how the history of electricity in the American South has long been entangled with white supremacist politics. We talk about the politics of setting electricity rates, how and why investor-owned utilities undermine energy transition, and the intensifying grid politics of data centers. We touch on the poverty of imagination that electrical utilities so often display and then close with a discussion of what Nikki's analytics of feminist urban political ecology reveal about the quotidian labors involved in keeping the lights on. Check out your co-hosts at SXSW on a panel with Fire of Love and Time and Water director Sara Dosa (Friday, March 13, 530p-630p, 304 E 3rd Texas House, Austin) and Cymene's presentation on elemental attentions to the History of Consciousness program at UC Santa Cruz (Monday, March 9, 1p). More details here! Hang in there, everyone, peace and love.

Cymene and Dominic share pirate tales from the Sundance Film Festival and reimagine Heated Rivalry with Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk as the lead lovers. Then (15:34) we welcome Jérôme Denis and David Pontille to the podcast to discuss not one but two new books, The Care of Things: Ethics and Politics of Maintenance (Wiley, 2025) and Fragilities: Essays on the Politics, Ethics and Aesthetics of Maintenance and Repair (MIT Press, 2025). We begin with how they became interested in the concept of fragility through their fieldwork with people responsible for maintaining and caring for infrastructure. From there, we turn toward the distinction between repair and maintenance and how their fieldwork led them to pay attention to attention as an aspect of the phenomenology of care work. We talk about how to think about the flux and power of matter and close by discussing maintenance as a subversive practice in the era of planned obsolescence and their interest in the right to repair movement.

Happy 2026! It's been quite a year so far and your co-hosts talk about their recent trip to Nicaragua and Shadow's reinvention as a fly assassin. Then (17:18) we welcome Maxime Polleri to the conversation to talk about his fascinating new book Radioactive Governance: The Politics of Revitalization in Post-Fukushima Japan (NYU Press, 2025). We begin with the 2011 Fukushima earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster and the role that luck played in preventing 14 core meltdowns instead of the 3 that actually happened. From there, Maxime takes us into the center of his argument about the politics of post-disaster recovery in Japan and the myriad state efforts to downplay the severity of nuclear aftermath in order to encourage its citizens to restart their lives (and reactors). We talk about the long history of efforts to improve the image of nuclear energy, the politics of measuring radiation, state performances of radiation knowledge (including efforts to produce nuclear cuteness), and why it is so hard for some to accept that the Fukushima disaster isn't in the past but rather our future. In closing, we turn to the place of nuclear energy and disasters in the Anthropocene. Can we still speak of disaster events in the heterogeneous toxicity of the Anthropcene?

In honor of cookie week, your co-hosts tackle an age-old question: are brownies cookies are not? Then we process the fact that next month will be the 10th anniversary of Cultures of Energy (wow!) Thereafter (11:51) we welcome the terrific Jean-Baptiste Fressoz to the podcast to discuss his provocative and fascinating new book More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy (Penguin, 2025) and its core argument that "energy transition" is a fiction. We begin with JB's unease with the dominant historiography of energy and its tendency to focus on change rather than accumulation and move from there to his idea to write a history of energy that forefronted the symbiosis of energy and materials. We turn from there to the idea of energy amputation, how to avoid stage-ist thinking, why escaping carbon will be harder than escaping capitalism, and how the technocratic movement of the early 20th century and atomic science paved the way toward dominant narratives of energy transition and energy futures today. JB explains why he doubts—even as someone who sides with the climate movement—that we're going to escape fossil fuels any time soon. PS If you would like to send in a memory or reflection for our 10th anniversary podcast next month, please email or Wetransfer a 3-5 minute audio file to dcb2@rice.edu. We'd love to hear from you!!

Dominic and Cymene begin with the war on Chicago and Kelly Hayes's amazing essay, "In Chicago, We Run Toward Danger Together" which everyone should read. Then (15:20) we welcome Javiera Barandiarán to the podcast to talk about her new book, Living Minerals: Nature, Trade, and Power in the Race for Lithium (MIT Press, 2025), and what Javiera loves about the element of lithium. We discuss lithium's futurity and multiplicity, why Javiera thinks it's wrong to think about lithium as a single thing. From there, we talk about lithium's role in nuclear fusion, what rights of nature minerals should enjoy, and why so many people believe minerals create wealth. Then we wrap up with Javiera's other new book this year, a study of the efforts to create a new constitution for Chile, Demanding a Radical Constitution: Environmentalism, Resilience, and Participation in Chile's 2022 Reform Efforts (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025). Please also check out Lithium Landscapes and this article on Chile's energy transition. Hang in there, everyone, peace and love.

We begin this episode with a shoutout to our friends at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) and try to settle once and for all the Montreal vs New York bagel question. Then (13:58) we welcome to the pod old friends and new co-authors Gustav Peebles and Ben Luzzatto to talk about their new book, The First and Last Bank - Climate Change, Currency, and a New Carbon Commons (MIT Press, 2025). We start with their bold idea that the history of the monetary gold standard could be reconceived as a beta test for a new carbon banking paradigm to draw down atmospheric carbon, convert it into biochar and sequester it in a Fort Knox of sorts. But what about carbon's earthly abundance and lack of charismatic features such as gold possesses? Ben and Gustav have answers for us and we move from there to talking about how to make carbon sacred, the project of converting waste into wealth, and how digital money and even crypto could help widen public participation in carbon banking. We examine the growing movement around biochar, and what we can learn from the 19th century activists that created the deposit banking system. Finally, we talk about the practicalities of how to get a carbon bank off the ground. Please listen and share! Happy Indigenous Peoples' Day! Hang in there, everyone, peace and love.

Cymene and Dominic talk about screamo music and the band Phish and how you can't fake the feels on this week's intro to the podcast. Then (13:07) expert in all things Mancunian, the great and wondrous Hannah Knox joins the conversation to discuss her recent book Thinking Like a Climate: Governing a City in Times of Environmental Change (Duke UP). Hannah explains to us how climate change has challenged both the concepts and methods of urban governance and how governmental and non-governmental experts in Manchester have sought to come to terms with the scope of the problem. We talk carbon footprints, emissions tracking, vernacular engineers and much more, concluding with a discussion of how climate change challenges conventional anthropological concepts and methods too. Please listen and share! Hang in there, everyone, peace and love.

Dominic reports from a delayed birthday trip to Los Angeles and we learn about how Mike Brady (of Brady Brunch fame) nearly perished in a helicopter crash. Then (5:55) Roy Scranton returns to the podcast after nearly eight years away. We're talking about his provocative and important new book, Impasse: Climate Change and the Limits of Progress (Stanford UP, 2025). We begin with the philosophical origins of the concepts of optimism and pessimism in debates over Leibniz and Voltaire and from there explore what Roy means by "ethical pessimism." Roy explains how pessimism might do more for us than the too-often empty rhetoric of hope and optimism because optimism verges toward narcissism and often defers relieving the suffering of the world into an imaginary future. From there we talk about signs of civilizational collapse (or "simplification"), the psychology of optimism, the virtues of depressive realism, pacifism and pessimism, religion and the apophatic tradition, and what comes after collapse. Listening to Roy may make you feel weirdly better about feeling hopeless these days. Finally (55:32) Cymene, Dominic and a nervous Brijzha take their first-ever trip in an automated Waymo vehicle and share a new song about Shadow (which can be found on Spotify here). Please listen and share! Hang in there, everyone, peace and love.

Dominic reports briefly on how your co-hosts returned home to their own personal Hurricane Harvey. Then (4:20) Imre Szeman returns to the podcast to talk about his new book Futures of the Sun: The Struggle Over Renewable Life (University of Minnesota Press, 2024), a marvelous analysis of the narratives that shape how we conceive of, and experience, energy futures. Imre explains how the book is as much about failed states as it is about renewable energy and highlights the struggle over who gets to define "common sense" as a central feature of politics today. Imre talks about the tech barons who have wriggled out of the cracks of state failure to promote technofeudalist politics. And then we turn to about the generational character of climate politics and the seemingly increasingly insane quality of populist politics. We close with what Imre is up to these days, including his work with the Canadian Green Party and his new position as Director of the Director of the Institute for Environment, Conservation, and Sustainability at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Hang in there, everyone, peace and love.