Fargo Is Like Phoenix: Showtime’s “The Years of Living Dangerously”
“Imagine, Harrison, that Fargo, North Dakota is like Phoenix,” a climate scientist tells actor Harrison Ford in the first episode of Showtime’s nine-part TV docu-mini-series on climate change, The Years of Living Dangerously. This sentence epitomizes what the show has to offer: the most thorough exploration of climate change in American popular culture since Al […]
To the “Church of Crude”: CENHS Class Tours the Baytown Refinery
As part of the CENHS course “Culture, Energy and the Environment: An Introduction to Energy Humanities,” a group of Rice undergraduates visited ExxonMobil’s Baytown refinery. These are the reflections of four students. Ben Hoff, Class of 2017, Mechanical Engineering On Thursday, February 6th my classmates and I met at the student center in the middle […]
Fort McMoney, A Documentary Video Game on the Alberta Tar Sands
For a limited time, you have the opportunity to visit beautiful Fort McMurry (Alberta, CA) free of charge, and play a critical role in decision-making about the development of the Alberta tar sands. Just this morning I spoke with an oil lobbyist after watching his testimony at a municipal council meeting, visited the Black Sand […]
CENHS to Offer Spring Course on “Culture, Energy and the Environment”
This Spring, CENHS offers Rice undergraduates an introductory course in the energy and environmental humanities: “Culture, Energy and the Environment: An Introduction to Energy Humanities.” Taught by Cultures of Energy Postdoctoral Fellow Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, the course draws upon new research across the arts, humanities and social sciences to help students better understand the cultural and […]
Cli Fi Noir, From Finland with Foreboding
Antti Tuomainen’s The Healer is set in Helsinki in the near future, perhaps two or three decades from now, but it portrays a world that is hardly recognizable. Finland, like every other European nation, has become a failed state due to the influx of millions of climate migrants, with its own citizens abandoning urban centers […]
Post-Petroleum Energy Regimes in Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl
While the concept of apocalypse has long been a generative and motivating trope for environmental-minded authors, filmmakers, thinkers, and activists, it has also prevented a certain kind of future-oriented imagination. Unless one is predicting an extinction-level event, or a planet that is literally uninhabitable, the slippery conceptual slope between “catastrophe” and “apocalypse” prevents many authors […]
