fossil fuels

Reassessing and defamiliarizing historical narratives that sit at the core of white patriarchal societies, is a necessary feminist practice and one at which Cara New Daggett, writer and researcher in the field of energy politics, excels at. In this podcast, energy, work, utopian demands, and unions, become intertwined with oil cultures, petromasculinities and ecomodernism, to reflect on growth, dependency, debt and energy transitions beyond extractivism. Degrowth, desire, pleasure, feminist science and new story-telling strategies are revealed as key ingredients for the recipe to reimagine ecologically generous ways of life on Earth.

We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with writer and researcher Cara New Daggett. We talk about the Mayapple Energy Transition Collective, feminist citation practices, collective writing and the difficulties academia still has with such exercises. We share the traumatic experience of being trolled after writing her essay "Petro-masculinity: Fossil Fuels and Authoritarian Desire". Coping with the pandemic and parenting with the climate crisis on the horizon are also brought to the table.

In this podcast, Imani Jacqueline Brown tells us about her formative experience as an activist in New Orleans and in the crucible of Zuccotti Park during the Occupy Wall Street movement. We also talk about eugenics and about how Carl Linnaeus’s philosophy during the Enlightement divided existence into parcels of private property, about oil infrastructure networks and environmental racism in Death Alley, and about apocalypse as repeated events. Along the way, Imani imagines paths to ecological reparation, ways to steward and attend to the world. She finds that it is precisely the uncultivated land at the back of the plantation that is rich with life and possibility: the seed banks of new growth.

In this podcast we talk to curator and researcher José Luis Espejo about the unusual progression of his academic immersion, but above all we focus on the key role played by the blubber of toothed cetaceans at different points in recent human history. A descent into the hidden layers of early modernity that connects biology, chemistry, economics, military engineering, and lighting technology. We talk about sperm whales and dolphins, about boats, lamps, and trade treaties, and about the echoes of this history, which resonate in the midst of the current climate crisis. But mostly we talk about blubber, about our relationship with ecosystems, and about the unsustainable exploitation of marine, fossil, and human resources.