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Explores ecological impasses and opportunities of our fossil-fueled civilization.
It is more and more obvious that our fossilized civilization has no sustainable future. It is an ecological Ponzi scheme stealing away the lives of countless species and the well-being of future generations in exchange for contemporary conveniences and the luxuries of a small subset of the human population. Yet a civilization wholly beyond fossils still seems difficult to grasp.
In No More Fossils, Dominic Boyer tells the story of the rise of fossil civilization through successive phases of sucropolitics (plantation sugar), carbopolitics (industrial coal), and petropolitics (oily automobility and plasticity), showing what tethers us to the ecocidal trajectory of petroculture today and what it will take to overcome the forces that mire us in place. He also looks ahead toward the world that the rapid electrification of vehicles, buildings, and power is creating. What can we do to make electroculture more just and sustainable than the petroculture we are leaving behind?
Dominic Boyer is an anthropologist, media maker, and environmental researcher who teaches at Rice University, where he served as founding director of Rice's Center for Environmental Studies. His recent books include Energopolitics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene and Hyposubjects: On Becoming Human.
