A curation of articles, essays, book reviews and interviews on critical geographical concerns.
Examines the evolving social, ecological, cultural and geopolitical impacts of energy systems and resource extraction, with particular emphasis on the spatial relationships that structure the extraction, production, distribution and consumption of energy and other natural resources and raw materials
"Energy at the End of the World" is an exploration into how a place seemingly at the edge of the global economy, the remote and scarcely populated Orkney Islands in the North Atlantic, is making and imagining energy futures that are central to the international renewable marine energy industry and to creating a post-fossil fuel energy system.
Earthy particles make land. They make cities possible. Such tiny particles, rather than being residual matter, an accidental by-product of drilling and construction, are integral to the reproduction of the urban form. In the earth’s cracking and assembling into something greater than the sum of its particles, lies the story of how tiny and mobile objects govern global cities.
At a distance of 280km from the Norwegian mainland, stands what the Norwegian Directorate for Cultural Heritage calls one of the “largest and most complex cultural monuments of our time” (Kulturminne Ekofisk). Descending through 75m of the North Sea to subsea formations 2900- 3250m below the seafloor and rising around 100m above the 30m extreme wave threshold, Ekofisk City is a production hub and center of field operations for this extreme south-eastern corner of the Norwegian continental shelf (Kvendseth, 1988).
From wars fought over the shape of subterranean geological formations to new technologies for boosting the amount of recoverable oil and gas, and from the wildcatter’s fantasies of wealth from the depths to the petrostate’s modernizing megaprojects, few volumetric calculations have been as consequential for the modern imagination as the estimation of the earth’s oil and gas reserves.
This article uses the geological notion of discontinuity – a structural break in the rock – to imagine how discontinuity might be found within the borehole itself. It does this by identifying three access points: excavation through drilling and coring, collaboration through cross-border scientific work, and imagination through art and the weird.
This paper seeks to understand the mutually affecting intensities in family households that occur through the use of energy for parenting, care and making home in the societal context of energy capitalism.
Başak Saraç-Lesavre's paper offers an ethnographical account of activities undertaken by their Nuclear Task Force at a peculiar moment.
Development infrastructure is often discussed in terms of opposition by local and indigenous communities. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, we present the case of local indigenous Embera and Afro-descendant communities in Chocó, Colombia, that protested first to gain, and later to maintain access to electricity produced by the Mutatá hydroelectric dam in Utría National Park.
Examining the conduits of production and circulation that link the extraction of copper in Chile to its storage and use in China, this article explores the political dimensions of the logistical techniques and technologies that enable these processes.