What is fossil civilization? In the book No More Fossils, Dominic Boyer tells the story of how we came to rationalize fossil fuel use through successive phases of sucropolitics (plantation sugar), carbopolitics (industrial coal), and petropolitics (oil and plastics), showing what tethers us to petroculture today and what it will take to overcome the forces that mire us in place. What can we do to make electroculture a more just and sustainable alternative? In this episode, Boyer is joined in conversation about modern energy politics with Cara Daggett.
Dominic Boyer is an anthropologist, media maker, and environmental researcher who teaches at Rice University. His books include No More Fossils, Energopolitics, and Hyposubjects.
Cara Daggett is associate professor of political science at Virginia Tech and author of The Birth of Energy.
Low Carbon Pleasure / a collaborative experimental art and performance project by Dominic Boyer, Cymene Howe, and others
Stacy Alaimo / ecophilia
No More Fossils is available from University of Minnesota Press. An open-access edition is available to read free online at manifold.umn.edu.
Chapters
What is fossil civilization? In the book No More Fossils, Dominic Boyer tells the story of how we came to rationalize fossil fuel use through successive phases of sucropolitics (plantation sugar), carbopolitics (industrial coal), and petropolitics (oil and plastics), showing what tethers us to petroculture today and what it will take to overcome the forces that mire us in place. What can we do to make electroculture a more just and sustainable alternative? In this episode, Boyer is joined in conversation about modern energy politics with Cara Daggett.
Dominic Boyer is an anthropologist, media maker, and environmental researcher who teaches at Rice University. His books include No More Fossils, Energopolitics, and Hyposubjects.
Cara Daggett is associate professor of political science at Virginia Tech and author of The Birth of Energy.
Low Carbon Pleasure / a collaborative experimental art and performance project by Dominic Boyer, Cymene Howe, and others
Stacy Alaimo / ecophilia
No More Fossils is available from University of Minnesota Press. An open-access edition is available to read free online at manifold.umn.edu.
What is University of Minnesota Press?
Authors join peers, scholars, and friends in conversation. Topics include environment, humanities, race, social justice, cultural studies, art, literature and literary criticism, media studies, sociology, anthropology, grief and loss, mental health, and more.
Dominic Boyer:
Petra's statehood is is a default condition rather than an exception.
Cara Daggett:
This book leaves students feeling that the future is open. Hi. This is Cara Daggett, and I am here by invitation to talk about the book No More Fossils by Dominic Boyer. And as soon as Dominic emailed me to see if I would have a conversation about it, I immediately said yes. I think that Dominic's work has been a beacon for me and many other people in energy studies.
Cara Daggett:
And, actually, when I started my own research in energy and felt very alone and at sea, it was, Dominic's role sort of bringing the field of critical energy studies together that gave me a sense of community first. So I'm always excited to hear what he has to say about energy, and this book was no different. And I'm gonna let Dominic introduce himself a little bit. But first, I should say I'm an associate professor of political science at Virginia Tech, and I wrote a book called The Birth of Energy and have been thinking a lot about, energy from a feminist perspective. And yeah.
Cara Daggett:
So I'm very excited to be here, and I'd like to just get started because I'm eager. I have probably more questions than we have time for. And I hope we can have a lovely meandering conversation. But my first question is actually one that I never have asked Dominic before, and that is how you got interested in energy in the first place. And in this book, and we're gonna get to this later, you make some references to previous work you've done in Eastern Europe and the fall of communist regimes.
Cara Daggett:
I wondered, how did you travel as a scholar from that work into energy? What got you interested in the first place in thinking about fuel?
Dominic Boyer:
Thank you, Kara. Before I answer that question, I'm just gonna say by way of preliminaries, I'm so thrilled to have this conversation with you of all people because whenever anybody asks me for a book recommendation in kind of energy studies or energy humanities, I always say the birth of energy first because, like, that's the great introduction. It shows how the promise of energy humanities can translate into, like, incredible scholarship that's paradigm shaping. It's kind of you and Tim Mitchell are the two people I always recommend. You know, you can't kinda see the world the same way after reading your works yet.
Dominic Boyer:
Don't be shy. It's true.
Cara Daggett:
I'm putting my head into my turtleneck.
Dominic Boyer:
This is facts. I'm just speaking facts right now, Cara. So, anyway, thank you. This is as we were saying before we started recording, there are so many different rabbit holes you and I can go down because of our particular nerdy energy interest that this is gonna be a lot of fun. But I think you're starting in the right place.
Dominic Boyer:
Like, how did somebody whose first book was focused on what happened to East German journalists after, German unification end up writing about energy is a really valid question. And it's a long story, but it's also a short story in the sense that it there was a serendipity to it. It was about moving to Houston. And when, my partner, Simony Howe, and I moved to Houston in 02/2009, and we wanted to do research together, and we wanted to do something that had a meaningful connection to Houston, And, like, most of the rest of the planet, didn't really know very much about Houston at the time and what it meant. Fourth largest city in the country, but absolutely like a tabula rasa for our imagination, which is, I think, you know, Houston's great trick on the world.
Dominic Boyer:
We could get back to that if you want to later. But the truth is, you know, what we learned pretty quickly is, yes, energy hub, especially fossil energy hub of the planet. And that got us interested in thinking about energy, and that led us to looking for what kinds of energy projects we could do as anthropologists. And what was happening at that time not too far away from Houston in Southern Mexico in the state of Oaxaca was what would become the densest concentration of wind parks anywhere on the planet, were being conceived and built there. So we spent sixteen months in the Isthmus Of Tehuantepec, in Mexico City, in Oaxaca City studying the politics of energy transition.
Dominic Boyer:
And that's it's sort of never have looked back. I know people in our line of work sort of wish we didn't have to think as much about energy as we do. Like, Imre Zeman, one of our colleagues, calls it a crisis discipline. In in other words, it's being called into being by a massive existential ecological crisis. I kinda wish I could still work on, like, you know, things like professional transitions of journalists, but I I, again, I feel magnetized to stay here for some reason.
Dominic Boyer:
That's the short answer to it.
Cara Daggett:
I have that feeling too sometimes, and I think I remember reading that Marx wanted to be a poet when he was really young, and then he was like, well, unfortunately, I have to write about capital.
Dominic Boyer:
I love it.
Cara Daggett:
Sometimes I feel that way about energy. I'd like to leave it too, but I can't. It's too important.
Dominic Boyer:
It keeps dragging us back in.
Cara Daggett:
So I learned to think about energy and politics through one of your very early pieces, I think in 2011, you coined the term energopolitics, which you define as power over and through energy. And you say the point here is not to promote naive materialism, but rather to argue that power over energy has been the companion and collaborator of modern power over life and population from the beginning. And I think in many ways, this book is an extension and encapsulation of that concept. But I wanna point out another concept, which is in the title, and that is the concept of the fossil, which I think will become perhaps just as resonant as this idea of an ergo power. I remember feeling really puzzled by all these different meanings of fossils, especially this idea that they're dead, but also now they're fossil fuels and they're bringing dead things that are bringing things to life.
Cara Daggett:
Maybe I wrote one line about that weird symbolic thing, but I didn't I've never known what to do with it. It just has sat in the back of my head. And so I'm really grateful to you for this theorization of it. And you write in the book about these two meanings. One is the way a life form becomes a relic, and the other is now connected to fossil fuels, which relics of life have become a way of life.
Cara Daggett:
And then so you take that and you give us this third way of thinking, which I think is metaphorical. I and I love a good metaphor, but it's like it's a materialistic metaphor. And this is in using the idea of fossils to think about political and cultural change. And you emphasize two things about fossils. One, which I'd never thought of before is how rare they are, how rare it is that a fossil forms, and second, how fragile they are.
Cara Daggett:
Like, once you dig them up and they're exposed to light and air, they're bound to crumble. And so I just wanted to read this passage from page seven to eight because I think it really encapsulates what you're saying about fossils. You say, I find it encouraging to consider the fragility and precarity of fossils. If fossilization is the exception rather than the rule in questions of planetary life and death, then perhaps it's advisable to challenge the long philosophical and historical tradition of thinking about the progress of civilization as an evolution of stable forms from greater simplicity to greater complexity and even perfection. And then you say, a little later, in that spirit, two lessons from thinking about fossils and fossilization guide this book.
Cara Daggett:
The first is that fossilization happens for specific contingent reasons that can be reconstructed with care, and the second is that even the most imposing fossils are themselves susceptible to transformation, often becoming surprisingly brittle once they are removed from the environments that gave them shape. So it's these two movements, the formation of a fossil, which is rare, and then the way they're brittle. This is such a striking metaphor, and it's sparking so many ideas for me. But I wanted to ask how you came to this metaphor. And, again, I think we're gonna get back a little later to your earlier research on communist regimes, but you seem to draw many parallels there.
Cara Daggett:
And I wondered how much did this history influence or allow you to think about fossils in this way?
Dominic Boyer:
Such a great question. I mean, I think, yes. Definitely. I am part of that generation of people who, like, the defining moment of their young life was the fall of the Berlin Wall in '89. Right?
Dominic Boyer:
And I'm remembering the exuberance of the nineties, you know, which is now kind of being this there's a big nineties nostalgia industry now, which is servicing our feelings of exuberance from back then and the last good decade. Right? And, yeah. I mean, I was very attentive to these issues. So what happens when a political order, a society becomes over formalized, gets really high on its own supply of ideology, and just keeps doubling down on the same set of ideas again and again and again.
Dominic Boyer:
And I it didn't think about it really as much until I started writing this book, but how similar that is to when you think about petro culture today. How, again, we're being told the same things, the same phrases again and again, right up to and including, you know, COP twenty eight. We're gonna go back into the caves if we give up on fossil fuels. Right? Just most recently.
Dominic Boyer:
We've been hearing these talking points our whole lives. And in that way, it's very much similar to the experience of people who were born into state socialist regimes. And we're sort of hearing Stalinist and Leninist ideas, like, repetitively over and over again. And it's not that even to say that those ideas are bad in and of themselves, but the fact is when they become mantras, when they become sort of sacred texts unto themselves and lose that constituent of reciprocal relationship to a living world, they become something that's fossilized. Right?
Dominic Boyer:
They're relics, as you say. I love how you put that. That was so beautiful. So, yeah, I think that was part of my curiosity is definitely about fossils is related to that earlier period of my research. And maybe part of what this book was doing was trying to explain, you know, what you asked in your first question, how do you what you get?
Dominic Boyer:
I mean, there definitely is more of me in this book than in most of my books. I tried to put in some little nuggets from my own memory as a way of framing it because I think part of the difficult thing to do when you're trying to do conceptual work is how to not make it some kind of floating world of ideas that are completely untethered to reality, which is not what we need more of. We don't need more abstraction in this world. We don't need more removal and transcendence. You know, we need to move back into the world.
Dominic Boyer:
And this is what folks like Anna Singh and Donna Haraway and Cara Daggett have been telling us, you know, for some time now. So all of those, like, great, like, feminist eco critics and philosophers are my inspiration ethically, I would say. But you you you mentioned, just to go back to the beginning of your question, that this sort of all started back maybe ten years ago or a little more with this idea of inergo politics and ergo power. And I just wanted to say about that that I mean, I think that in some ways, I hope what this little book would do would be to both deliver on the promise of what I thought that concept could do. Actually, your book already did that, but let's say, like, I'm gonna add a little footnote to your work in that respect.
Dominic Boyer:
But then also to try to write this in a way where adenego politics is not just like a jargon term that we use and abuse, you know, to sort of maintain our academic authority, but rather a term that actually could help people to see things differently, like a lens. It's a visualist metaphor, but, you know, a lens, a way of feeling, a way of feeling the world that, helps things to sort of snap into place affectively in different ways. And I feel for me, the experience originally of reading Tim Mitchell's work on carbon democracy, I never could really see the relationship of energy and politics the same way again. But after some pretty deep conversations with Tim, I realized that he is a historian first and foremost, which I really respect. He wasn't trying to create a general theory or general conversation about energy and power.
Dominic Boyer:
He had a specific story about carbon democracy he wanted to tell. So I felt that there was still room to offer a nergopolitics kind of a I think as I said off handedly as a bit of a hashtag in the first instance. Like, let's have this conversation. It's not meant to be a a hardwired concept. It's not philosophical in that sense.
Dominic Boyer:
But it's maybe inspired by the work of somebody like Michel Foucault, who also had this concept of biopower, which I think in the English language rendering of it, I grew up thinking of that as a noun, like biopower is a thing. But if you think about it in the sort of French tradition, bile pouvoir, where pouvoir is also a modal verb, like a poder in Spanish. It's modal. It's a modal sense. It's how it's how things happen.
Dominic Boyer:
It enables something to happen. And I think that's what Foucault really meant as he meant the things that enable life, the sort of techniques, the relations of force and influence that allow things regarding life to happen. And I thought you could have the same conversation about energy because so much of what we consider to be are habits, institutions, practices of modern life involve energy. They're enabled by energy and in particularly by fossil energy. So my curiosity about fossils came from that.
Dominic Boyer:
Like you, I'd sort of hadn't really thought about the fossil and fossil fuels very much. I thought more maybe more about the fuel side of it. But when I got into thinking about fossils, I said, well, there really is something interesting here, as you say, both about their precarity and contingency, which we really need to, I think, again, ethically, to pursue the, unmaking of certain fossils today And also the sense that, you know, all fossils have something to do with certain conditions of origin, that once those conditions have passed, in some ways, in the great royal of a composing decomposing world, as as Haraway describes it, ought to be their elements ought to be disassembled and recombined in new projects. And I think that's kind of where we are today. We're at a moment where we have to disassemble one kind of civilization and recreate, hopefully, one that's more sustainable, ethical, just, which is, you know, quite a task.
Dominic Boyer:
But this little book is hopefully, at its best, I think, could offer some inspiration and maybe clarity about some of the tasks that had.
Cara Daggett:
Yeah. And I think what you're saying about wanting Inergo power not just to be another word, but to be a way to help us see. I see that with this idea of fossilization. It made me think, for example, in gender and sexuality, we, of course, have Butler's famous idea that gender has to be reproduced and it's performative, and you can't just perform anything you want. There's an inertia to the form, but there is also this vulnerability because the need to be constantly reproduced means there's always this openness to mutation and change.
Cara Daggett:
And gender studies as a field has gone in a million directions with that concept. But I think this idea of fossilization, for example, adds something new to thinking about how power is reproduced because we can then start to think about how dominant forms are not all the same in terms of their durability and their stability. And maybe try to identify which ones are being fossilized or are these relics. So I wondered, like I mean, I'm in Berlin right now, so this is very resonant, this idea of Eastern European shift. But I wondered in the book, you talk about how it's only in retrospect that everyone could see that these were fossils and they were so brittle.
Cara Daggett:
Are there ways to identify when something is a fossil or what are the, you know, the conditions that are making it more of a fossil that is brittle versus thinking about a state like China, which had a very different trajectory. Right? It doesn't fall apart. It adapts, and some would say very successfully into capitalism with Chinese characteristics. How do we know what petropower is?
Cara Daggett:
Is it a brittle fossil, or is it more durable? Or do we only do this in retrospect after it falls apart?
Dominic Boyer:
Yeah. And that's I mean, this gets to the part of the book that's about fossil gerontocracy as I call it.
Cara Daggett:
Yeah. I'm skipping ahead a bit.
Dominic Boyer:
No. No. It's fine because it's I think that's one of the things that I was trying to think about gerontocracy because it's something people have been talking about vis a vis, you know, so many octogenarians in the senate, that sort of stuff in The US. And, again, that was sort of what was happening at the end of the socialist era too, is that everyone was, like, in their eighties. And, like, all the young people are like, what are you guys doing?
Dominic Boyer:
This doesn't make any sense. And it feels very similar to kind of where we are today where the youth are like, you guys are crazy. We need to we need to turn away from fossil fuels now. Why are you rationalizing this? Why are you talking yourselves into continued use that's gonna be okay to keep expanding fossil fuel use through 2050?
Dominic Boyer:
Like, I mean, anybody who's in their twenties now who's not captured by that imagination is pretty skeptical and angry, and they should be, and just wants to start something new. And that's very much the spirit of the kind of the eighties in Eastern Europe. But you asked the most important question is how do we know, which I think is a great talk back to this project, which is kind of like, are you sure? Are you sure it's impossible? Are you sure there's not more life in it?
Dominic Boyer:
And what I try to talk about is a little bit my sense. It's like the Terminator. Right? It's it's like when the Terminator's flesh gets torn off. It doesn't look like a person anymore, and it doesn't look friendly anymore.
Dominic Boyer:
It can't manage the civility that it did back in the seventies when mobile masterpiece theater was something that I used to watch on TV because the oil companies were contributing to the greater thriving of the world. Right? Now it's claws and talons and steel and and tanks. And you see what I think of as being, at some level, a deeply petropolitical conflict in Russia and Ukraine right now and also in Israel, Palestine, Gaza as being, again, they're not totally explainable by there's an inergo political layer to what's happening in both those cases that actually isn't really being talked about very much. And I think that Petro Power understands at some level that its time is over, but it's not gonna go without a fight.
Dominic Boyer:
And because especially military industrial complexes are deeply petropolitical, in fact, they they be the strongest anchorage still in the petro state is the fact that tanks run on oil. Right? You know, planes run on oil or planes run on oil. The conjecture that one of the reasons why the petro state is as tenacious as it is I should clarify. I'm not talking about individual petro states like Saudi Arabia is a petro state, Russia.
Dominic Boyer:
I think every state is a petrostate. I mean, I wanna suggest a different way of thinking about pet that petrostatehood is is a default condition rather than an exception. And in that case, they were being bound to this petropolitical trajectory by the sort of the military and industrial needs of modern, obviously, imperial colonial crypto, at least, imperial colonial statecraft. So, yeah, I'm sorry. There's a lot.
Dominic Boyer:
But I mean, I I feel like that's a really important question. And for that reason, people who bet against fossil fuels have been wrong more times they've been right. Could I be wrong too that we actually are at the moment of a decisive transition towards something else? Yeah. I could definitely be wrong about that.
Dominic Boyer:
But perhaps I feel like my own sense of things is that we've reached tipping points, and we may not be totally over the hill, but I think that there is something new coming into view. Whether it'll be a better world or not is the real question. How we can make that a better world than the world that, as I put it, sort of sucral power, carbopower, and petropower have left us is the task of our era.
Cara Daggett:
Yeah. And those terms, which are really the heart of the book, I kind of started at the beginning and the the end, which are this concept of fossils and then the the petro state and petro habits and knowledge. But really the heart of the book is this genealogy of it's kind of my question. Maybe of an ergo power in the modern times going from sucral or sugar to carbo to petro. And before I I get there, I just wanna say to what you were just, answering, I really appreciate the focus on violence and the militarization, and I wonder if that is partly a sign of fossilization is authoritarian, violent, increasingly kind of rigid rigidity, which looks really hard, but then is actually very brittle.
Cara Daggett:
Like, these fossil bones are so, yeah, let's go to the heart of the book, which is which is the sucral carbo petrol. And I'll start by saying, readers who are listening to this and haven't seen this book may be surprised to know that it is only 80 pages, and it contains all of these ideas, like, several, I think, very new ideas and ways of thinking in 80 pages, and it's very readable. I really wanna just celebrate that, and I'm I'm sort of amazed by it and and really inspired as a writer by this book. And I've read your other work, and I always have enjoyed your writing and your clarity, but this book seemed like you were especially focused on maybe making it accessible. I mean, I could really think as a teacher about this book in an undergraduate classroom as a serve introductory survey of modern energy politics as much as I can also think about it working in a PhD seminar.
Cara Daggett:
Who was the audience for this book? Who needed to hear these messages?
Dominic Boyer:
Oh, Cara, thank you. That's it brings tears to my eyes. I did more so than in other books. It's not to say that I had I don't care about the craft of writing because I think I I've already always tried. But I've also think that I've made the mistake or the self indulgence of just, like, following the little rabbit holes that interested me and allowing myself to write really long sentences with all these qualifiers because I'm anxious like all of us are about the meaning, the singular meaning carrying, to the intended receiver of that meaning.
Dominic Boyer:
This is a time when we should all be trying to talk, like, honestly. And with I mean, sometimes you do need some kinds of specificity, and so I do invent a couple of new words. It's a bad habit of mine, but sucral politics, carbopolitics, these are not terms that are in as far as I can tell, anybody else is using, but that I think I hope do help to sort of specify, as you say, some key threshold stages in the evolution of modern energy regimes because really the the heart of the book was that chapter. It started as kind of a a research essay that got out of control, and I would say, okay. This is a little bit longer than an essay.
Dominic Boyer:
And plus, it invites some questions about broader context that I think, can only be answered with a little bit more thinking about some contemporary issues too. But it came out of teaching, honestly. So I think the first audience for these ideas were really my social life of energy course at Rice. And it was really a number of things that led me to think about revisiting the work on the colonial plantation as seen through the lens of energy and the way that scholars like David Hughes have done really inspired me to think about what are the distinctive energo politics of those colonial frontiers. And then and this is so random, but, Kara, I think you'll appreciate this for the kind of happenstance that can sometimes send you off in new directions.
Dominic Boyer:
So most of my adult life, I've been involved in various sort of hippie farm share projects. And sometimes they've been, like, well managed, and sometimes they've been poorly managed. And sometimes they've given you things you wanna eat, and sometimes they've given you really random stuff. In my farm share once a few years ago, I got an actual piece of sugarcane. They just gave me a piece of sugarcane, unprocessed, and I held it in my hand.
Dominic Boyer:
It's like holding a a a cudgel in your hand. It's a piece it's like bamboo would be the closest thing I could analogize it to. So you've got this thing, and out of this comes this miraculously delicious substance, right, that is now a part of almost everything we eat in a modern sort of northern diet. And then I was thinking, god, like, what would it take, especially without, like, contemporary technology to extract that from so I began to think about, oh my god, like, going back and reading Sid Mintz and reading Susan Buck Morris's Hegel in Haiti and trying to put those pieces together and say, oh, where did we need this concentration of power first? At least one aspect of it was to break apart because they had to be done quickly because sugarcane sours really quickly, to break up these woody stalks and extract and distill this incredibly desirable commodity from them.
Dominic Boyer:
The colonial plantation has seen had a lot of different dimensions to it. Right? And there's a lot of different extractive things happening, but it felt to me like at the peak of the extractivism was the sugarcane itself. And so I wanted to try to think about modern energy that begins with sugarcane, the story of modern energy that begins with sugarcane. And then as I began to read all this fascinating new literature that's come out in the past couple of decades that's sort of reconstructing with more care the dynamics, the social and political dynamics of those plantations and also the spread from Europe to the, quote, unquote, new world, The Caribbean, Brazil, and so forth.
Dominic Boyer:
You began to see that again, it's not the whole story. Europeans wanted a lot of things from the world land to conquest. They wanted gold and silver, all the things we always heard about. But if you watch the actual passage of colonial founding, it follows the sugar routes. Right?
Dominic Boyer:
We start in the Western Mediterranean. We go out to the Canaries. They work their way down the West Coast Of Africa. And in Sao Tome, the island off the the West Coast Of Africa, there is a fully, like, the prototype of what becomes the colonial plantation type, a sugarcane society that's based upon African slave labor. That's already in existence in, like, fifteen ten, fifteen fifteen at the latest, and then gets ported over to Brazil within fifty years.
Dominic Boyer:
They're sending commercial quantities of sugar back to Europe again. So you can sort of feel as though there's a lot going on. They're growing cotton. They're growing indigo, tobacco, eventually, all these things. But sugar is sort of what's driving the mission.
Dominic Boyer:
Right? And then this is bananas, Kara. The fact that Christopher Columbus himself is like the son-in-law of a very wealthy sugar grower, I never knew. And I'm beginning to feel like, you know, my one skill as a scholar is to see patterns and large amounts of data. Like, that's the thing that I do.
Dominic Boyer:
And reading all of this, I said, okay. There's a story here. Now, again, I'd be really interested to see historians pick it apart as I I hope they will do. Because as you say, it's only 80 pages and I'm sure there's a lot a lot of loose ends there. But I think it's an interesting story to tell.
Dominic Boyer:
I hope you enjoyed it too because we could talk more about what happens later if you want. But I felt as though this is it's like trying to do kinda what you did for the kind of the reformulation of the energy concept in nineteenth century Britain, where you begin to look at this through where it's like two parts thermodynamic science and two parts Presbyterianism and three parts early industrial labor discipline and blah blah blah. There's like a new conceptual order and order and institutional order emerges out of that. I was trying to do something kind of similar for that early sort of plantation period too.
Cara Daggett:
I think it's so important to have this genealogy now to discuss in energy studies because so often when we talk and think about modern energy systems and regimes, we start with the fossil fuel era. We start with the nineteenth century as I did, and then we take on or maybe reproduce the idea that there's this dramatic break even though we all know that colonialism has centuries already under its belt. And we know that there are these connections in terms of politics, in terms of theories about race that are shifting over time, but that we know that there's this continuity. But I think in the study of energy, until this book, we haven't really had an effort to understand this continuity in terms of energy. So I guess I have a first short question and then a kind of longer thinking about based on how you answer the question.
Cara Daggett:
And I think the answer is yes, but I wanna hear what you say. Is sucral politics a kind of inergo politics?
Dominic Boyer:
I think so. Although, it means we have to think about energy in a kind of more biopolitical way, right, as sort of chemical energy, you know, their chemical processes involved in combustion. We know that. I mean, we know all this is true. But I think people might say, well, is is sugar the same thing as coal and oil?
Dominic Boyer:
Is it this are you sort of creating a false equivalence to tell your story? And I I would definitely be open to having that conversation. But in my mind, you know, fossilized, though it may be, I'm thinking of it. Yeah. It's a yes question.
Dominic Boyer:
Sorry.
Cara Daggett:
No. I mean, I I agree with you. I think it's a really helpful line of continuity to draw. And one thing you emphasize that travels from sugar to coal and then to Petro has to do with demand, has to do with not just that sugar is food, but that it's a particular kind of density. There's a density to it.
Cara Daggett:
And then as you put it, there's almost a sense of the possibility of inexhaustible demand that you could have around it. In that way, it's kind of different than other food systems where, like, there's only so much bread that maybe people want, and there is a kind of expansion with land, of course, or wealth.
Dominic Boyer:
I I've I I don't think I've reached that barrier myself. Yeah. I've got a bread issue.
Cara Daggett:
Okay. Well, but you probably have a bread issue because of the sugar in it.
Dominic Boyer:
It is. It is. It's the sucral in the bread. You're right.
Cara Daggett:
Yes. If you were eating, like, German bread
Dominic Boyer:
Which I have. And I I feel for you. I feel for you, Kara. It's amazing. But it's
Cara Daggett:
dense. But it's very dense, and you cannot you don't wanna eat, you know, forever of dense rye bread. So, yeah, I wondered what you think of that. This idea, you you know, and this really comes from Sydney Mintz. And as you point out in the book, you talk about how you set up these systems for governing labor, for extracting and producing, but you also set up these systems for creating demand around this glut almost of supply.
Cara Daggett:
And this happens again with fossil fuels, especially, I we're more familiar with the sort of mid twentieth century story of The US, the period of acceleration, this cementing of institutions and infrastructure for The US to just need unlimited oil and gas. I wondered if that is one important continuity that might help us understand why sugar is similar and maybe not like other kinds of material systems.
Dominic Boyer:
Yeah. No. I think that's amazing and and exactly the line of thinking that I had too because, I mean, sugar back in the day was a very risky business. Many people lost their lives and livelihoods even on the capitalist side of this pursuing the Sugar Frontier. And what made it worthwhile to them was the fact that it was enormously rewarding financially if it worked.
Dominic Boyer:
And, because you had slave labor, doing most of the work and animal labor doing a significant part of the work too. But at the same time, a growing and seemingly inexhaustible demand curve. Like, the more sugar they grew, the more they sold, and the prices kept going up. You know? And one of the things that's great about Sid Mintz's work too is he talks about how it changed the diets and consumption of the working and middle classes.
Dominic Boyer:
I mean, sugar had been around for the elites forever, but it was actually more kind of almost medicinal or something you sprinkled a little bit on the top of, like, salt. It wasn't seen to be like a major food group onto itself. It was like a spice. But it becomes a massive part of the diet once it's available, and people want more and more of it. Here's a story.
Dominic Boyer:
So when I first started going to Germany in the nineteen nineties, there used to be this place called Karstadt. I think there's still a couple of them left. It was sort of like a high end department store. In the Karstadt food court, because, you know, the German department stores have these lovely food courts. You would go in, and they had something called the taste America section.
Dominic Boyer:
And you could tell it was the taste America section because they had all these red, white, and blue streamers leading you from different parts of the store to it, like some kind of a weird black hole. And what that black hole was composed of was sugar, like lots and lots of sugar, marshmallow fluff. The pyramids are marshmallow fluff, like super sweet peanut butter, like white bread, which is you say, is just sugar in another form. It's just it's a slightly different way of conceptualizing and materializing sugar, etcetera, etcetera. So the taste that America brought to the world in the twentieth century as it globalized its model of prosperity were all about sugar.
Dominic Boyer:
And the other thing I guess I wanna say is, like, it's not that sucral politics is succeeded by carbopolitics, which is coal, and by petrol politics. But they kind of nest within each other. They layer on each other. So at some level, I see capitalism as still being sukropolitical, like contemporary capitalism, just craving more, just at a really deep sort of level of appetite. But then things get layered over it.
Dominic Boyer:
So these these successive energy systems absorb certain logics from their predecessors and also innovate new ones as they go along too. And so, again, in a concise way, tell, like, what some of the distinctive features are of succession as well as transformation that goes on through that process too.
Cara Daggett:
Yeah. That's what I was getting at is that there's something about because, you know, it's something we all love about Tim Mitchell's work is he really focuses on what is it about coal specifically that is so conducive to this particular form of democracy. And it's heavy. It's underground. The way it's mined.
Cara Daggett:
I mean, he really focuses on the material traits. And I think in drawing out this idea about the density like, we think about fossil fuels as a density of propulsive power. And in a way, your book made me think that sugar, at least the way sugar gets refined, as Sid Mens talks about, becomes this strangely dense form of sweetness, like the kind of sweetness that you don't, quote, unquote, naturally find. There is this way that that very much echoes how we think about fossil fuels. Like, it's much more than burning wood that you would just find in the forest.
Cara Daggett:
Same thing with refined sugar. It's so much sweeter and dense than, like, the sugarcane you were talking about. If you were to try to go out and gather enough sugar for a piece of wonder bread, that would be so much labor. So I guess in thinking over the long, like, even before we get to European empire five hundred years ago, there seems to be something about the material traits of sugar and coal and fossil fuels, this relationship to density and desire that is unique. I really hadn't thought about this before I read your book.
Dominic Boyer:
Yeah. And I think that I mean, I think as you say, Tim Mitchell has really told that story of coal. So I don't really tell any new stories about coal other than building upon the work of Tim and Andreas Malm and other people who've already done great work in this area. Where it gets to oil, though, one of the things I was really interested in, again, is just the things you'll learn in researching a book. You know, in the year 1900, the automobile is pretty much evenly split between sort of gas models, steam powered models.
Dominic Boyer:
So they are running cars on coal engines, you know, which I the Stanley steamer. I heard about this thing. I didn't really think about what it meant. And then electric. So elect you know, they had, like, viable there were the range issues back then too, but they were viable.
Dominic Boyer:
Henry Ford's wife owned an electric car. I didn't know that. You know, like, there are these aspects of these different models. And the reason why oil, you know, wins that battle and I do think auto mobility is the biggest accelerant of our dependence upon oil oil culture more broadly. You know, the reason is, again, because of its materiality.
Dominic Boyer:
It's lighter. You can go farther in it. It's easier to manage in a lot of ways than coal is or electricity is given the prevailing technologies at the moment. And then the other thing that happens that I think is incredibly important for oil, and I'm I'm trying to tie this in oil and petrochemicals together, is plastics, the proliferation of plastics as a whole new sort of pillar of the material world that, you know, is extraordinary in its reach now. So if we think that, like, we're dependent upon oil because of our just daily habits of transportation and our political institutions, including our military institutions, all that's true.
Dominic Boyer:
But the other thing that I think is usually reserved as a separate conversation, but I think really ought to be part of the general petroculture conversation, is the fact that it has this material plasticity where you could sort of shape and conjure things of all new kinds of commodities out of this material, out of the byproducts of creating fuel that are now, like, something like 60% of fibers on the planet are petrochemical now, which is, again, one of these crazy figures. You're like, wow. Okay. So everything in your room, everything in the room I'm talking to, the cable that's linking my headphones to my laptop, all of this is also part of the petro culture. And so to think about what that transition is, it's more than just electric vehicles.
Dominic Boyer:
It's like, what do we do with the plastics? Again, other people have done, you know, sort of some amazing works on plastics too. Heather Davis, for example. There definitely are other folks out there working in this area. And living in Houston, which has been a muse and a and a terror for me as you know, both generative and also just Living in Houston makes you really attentive to how the fossil fuel industry is thinking about the future.
Dominic Boyer:
And their backup plan, once they're sort of rear guard actions that that the cops finally fail, eventually, we say we're gonna get off of fossil fuels, so they're gonna go, fine. You know, we're gonna start moving into we're plastics companies now. We're gonna be continuing to sort of use our feedstocks for plastics, and that's where they're headed. They're that's where they're clearly hoping to go in the future.
Cara Daggett:
Yeah. And once again, we have this dynamic where, you know, maybe it's Plasto powers
Dominic Boyer:
Yeah.
Cara Daggett:
Where it depends upon the adoption of not just a way of life, but I think a human body that feels this to be a necessary thing. I love what you said about plasticity because one thing I really learned or know or that struck me when I was looking at that same period you mentioned of '9 the 1900, you know, there was almost like a competition between electric and combustion. I didn't know about steam powered engines. Wow. But one thing that struck me was one of the ways that combustion engines were sold was as this adventure machine.
Cara Daggett:
The problem with electricity was it tied you down, and it also required centralized politics and network and electric vehicles. It's noteworthy that Henry Ford's wife owned one because they were marketed as appropriate for women who would be just running errands and close to home where, like, the adventurous men there was something about oil that was, like, free in a way. I feel like we saw that with the fifteen minute city. This idea that, oh, city planners had that we all want to live in a city where you can access everything within a fifteen minute walk as this wonderful idea. And a lot of people were shocked when people came out to protest that, and they protested it saying, oh, this is the government trying to, I don't know, quarantine us, like, with COVID or lock us into fifteen minutes.
Cara Daggett:
It's a similar dynamic with plasticity, with oil, this idea that you need this to have freedom. It worries me a lot.
Dominic Boyer:
Yeah. And if I can just riff off that for a second. And, again, your work has been so influential in terms of my thinking about the masculinism inherent in pastoral culture and the various sometimes unexpected ways, you know, that that manifests itself. And I think this is, like, such a perfect example of what you've written about that this liberalism, which I try to tell the story of political liberalism here too a little in the background because I think the liberalism always trails the energy politics kind of as an explanation for, well, of course, you know, that this is a political ontology. You know, we have to develop private property and we have to exploit resources.
Dominic Boyer:
And wait, those indigenous people aren't using their resources? Well, it'd be better for them if we were to come and take the resources and develop them for them. So, you know, John Locke is really like a suprilical thinker, but after, in some ways, that system has already been set up and is operational for a hundred fifty years. Somebody should have this discussion, and maybe this is a session we can have or, you know, the next book we should write together is just how this freedom, this conception of freedom, which is, as you say, so so masculinist and so linked to the idea that the greatest expression of self put is to escape from everything that might make your life meaningful at home. You know, all your relationships, all your, you know, relationships to place and to kid and all also your responsibilities, by the way.
Dominic Boyer:
I should be more clear about that. Right? Let's get on the open road. Like, let's power up our v 10 engine and just hit the road. Right?
Dominic Boyer:
That sort of concept of freedom, machinic freedom, is exactly the driver or the reinforcer, at least, of this whole trajectory that we're studying. I mean, modern energy has been, in all its phases, this masculinist effort, and that shouldn't be neglected to say. So the question is sort of what if we're talking about a future that is post Petro, and that's a future that I care about as I know you do and and what that looks like. How do we restore a new feminist ethics? How do we imagine a world that seems to be coming into being as, quote, unquote, electro?
Dominic Boyer:
As we're thinking about this future post Petro world, you know, how is that a world that's not just electrified masculinity of the type that an Elon Musk is obviously dreaming about, but something that actually addresses different kind of political roots of that, which is fantasies of masculinist escape and domination that seems to be over women, over nature, over children, over everything that seems to also have informed this whole story of the development of modern energy. So in your book, I'm just gonna shout your book out again, is to say, like, where you at the end are talking about the sort of feminist degrowth. I'm not sure whether you would sign off that term or not, but the sort of feminist ethics of energy and how we need to basically experiment with the different future forms of energy that do not reproduce that trajectory. That is a huge part of the sort of task at hand.
Cara Daggett:
That brings me to just wanting to hear what you have to say about electropolitics because I am thinking about it differently now after reading this book, both because of the idea of fossils and this genealogy that starts with sucral politics. Because on the one hand, you can look and say, we have this form that has shape shifted over the course of five hundred years and has managed to adapt new organs and systems with new kinds of power. And I think you're saying right now is a different kind of transition because the form of Petro power is being asked to do something that it doesn't want to do and maybe it cannot do. And yet you also say you don't know what's gonna happen with electro politics. I've seen a scholar named, Xander Dunlop's called wind and solar fossil fuel plus because it's so dependent upon fossil fuels, wind, and solar power.
Cara Daggett:
It has its own kind of extractive problems as you've pointed out in your work on wind. One option is it goes sucrocarbo, petrol, electro, and we have this kind of continuity of domination. Here, you're suggesting that, actually, this 500 year old form might have become brittle. There's sort of a gesture of hope. I don't know if you would say it's hope, but it's one reason I think this book would be good to teach because it leaves students feeling that the future is open.
Cara Daggett:
I just wanna hear your thoughts about electropolitics, electropower. I guess I will confess that I myself sometimes feel a little despair that I hadn't felt that petrol power was as brittle as as you suggest it could be. And now I think you maybe are convincing me a little bit with this idea of the fossil, but, yeah, I wanna hear what you think.
Dominic Boyer:
Yeah. I mean, I'll say one thing. I mean, you mentioned just to circle back to Eastern Europe for one second, and I'll shout out another book. My my dear friend, Aleksei Yurchak's book, Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More, which is his cultural analysis of the last generation to grow up in the Soviet Union. And how up until the very moment of the collapse of that regime, no one believed it would ever they just it's gonna go on forever.
Dominic Boyer:
Everyone was sure of it. The moment it collapsed, everyone was like, yeah. Yeah. Of course, it had to collapse. It was like this amazingly fast shift.
Dominic Boyer:
That gives me hope. My sense is as much as we feel paralyzed in the eternity of fossil fuels right now, we know that I think once they're behind us or once we sort of really are decisively past those tipping points, and I they don't have a future or not a future of domination the way they've dominated us up until now, that we're gonna look back and say, yeah, obviously, we writing this history a couple hundred years from now, they're gonna be saying, yo, people are crazy and stupid and clung to old ways just like they did with the plantation economies. Right? Because the other thing to really emphasize there is who emancipated, the Caribbean from the violence of the plantation regime? It was the slaves themselves.
Dominic Boyer:
It was the uprisings that became more and more frequent, but perhaps peaked with the Haitian revolution, which is the one great modern revolution that doesn't get taught in high schools, unfortunately, and would, I guess, belong to the sort of specter of critical race theory that is now being, you know, maligned in parts of the country like where I live. But that revolution changed everything. That revolution, more than anything else, spurred the more rapid institutionalization of machinic systems to replace human labor and animal labor in plantations because at some point, although it took decades to really achieve the full transition, at some point, there was a realization that, yes, we can no longer control these unruly humans anymore. They're not gonna put up with the system anymore of increasing exploitation. It's sort of analogous to where we are today in the sense that this is a fight worth having.
Dominic Boyer:
It's worth fighting for the overthrow and transformation and and mutation of the current energy regime we're in. I actually think, and this will sound really utopian to some people, but I actually think Petro is already lost. But it's in its sort of, like, hallucinatory palliative care now where we just have to sort of, like, ride out its death rattles. The real fight is over what kind of electric future we have. And is it gonna be a future that's defined by the authoritarian impulses of, you know, green capitalism and, like, let's, you know, keep this wonderful show of sort of growing private property and wealth concentration?
Dominic Boyer:
Let's just keep that going, but let's green that energy. And that is, I think, the wind solar is fossil fuel plus idea. Or is it possible to imagine not just one alternative future, but a plurality, which I think is more encouraging, a plurality of alternative trajectories that I think are already beginning to take shape? So maybe people aren't waiting for somebody to tell them this is okay. People are doing the political work that I think in her book, Staying with the Trouble, Haraway calls, you know, creating refuges or for finding refuges.
Dominic Boyer:
You know, they're rewilding, in the broadest sense of that metaphor, their lives of reengaging themselves with ecosystems, whether that's, you know, various experiments in sort of urban farming or in direct democracy or in, you know, taking back cities, taking them away from automobiles, you know, like in Barcelona and recreating sort of pedestrian models of the city, which are neither the ancient city, nor are they the petropolitical city, but there's some kind of a hybrid and emergent form that's coming into being. And what I try to do, not just as a writer, but really as a teacher, because that's where I guess I encounter my readers firsthand, is to just encourage people by the sense of the possibility of this moment. I mean, it's a tragic moment. We live in tragic times to be sure. But we also live in this is, I think, the last paragraph of the book.
Dominic Boyer:
We live in epic times too. I mean, this is kind of an amazing moment we're living through where we actually get to build not just, you know, one new civilization, but, you know, we get to experiment different possibilities, including recalling paths not taken in the past and trying them out again. I mean, I think from the point of view of sort of politics and possibility, this is an amazing time to be alive. Much more encouraging than that the nineteen seventies were, which was also a weirdly disrupted chaotic decade, but defined by this idea of, oh my god. How are we gonna keep this petropolitical order going for another five decades?
Dominic Boyer:
And, well, congratulations. We did that, but now we're finally reaching the time where there's no future to that anymore. And it's gonna be a fight, and there are highly militarized forces that are willing to sacrifice any number of humans to keep this order going. I've never felt such a strong sentiment of the need for change before in my life, and that encourages me.
Cara Daggett:
Yeah. So at the end of the book, you also talk about infrastructure as a a mode of change and revolutionary infrastructure, which you describe as making new relations, connecting new things together, often not from scratch, but like you said, recombining things that already exist. And that section on infrastructure, which I'm very partial to and sympathetic to, comes after this beautiful section where you talk about Petro habits. So the everyday habits that many of us living, especially in the global North have in our relationship with energy and Petro knowledge, which is very much about media institutions, advertising, this common sense feeling about energy, which I think we both agree has to change in an electoral political system that we wanna live in. As an example of revolutionary infrastructure, you give this example of a rain garden.
Cara Daggett:
It's a beautiful example in Houston. And you say it's this simple thing that could work, and yet it's not popular. Like, it's not being considered by policymakers. I feel in my own work, I'm always grappling with this tension between the tools at hand and these habits and knowledges and desires. And there are a lot of desires to stay in the fossil because it's scary to decompose and recombine.
Cara Daggett:
And, I mean, another analogy we're living through right now is the fossil of the civil war south. Right? The confederacy. And there's a lot of people who want to stay inside that fossil. I think a lot of scholars are taking this turn toward infrastructure, and I would include myself in that.
Cara Daggett:
How do we think about infrastructure vis a vis desire?
Dominic Boyer:
Not so great. Yeah. You know, I know you're really, like, well attuned to these issues of kind of the the desires that are baked into kind of petrocultures persistence and, again, how they feed. Again, they're particularly gratifying, I think, to men, but also to, like, a lot of women who have been talked or cajoled into sort of accepting that order. So I think it is about a transformation of an economy of desire.
Dominic Boyer:
Absolutely. I think that's absolutely at the center of this. And if we don't take desire seriously in our political work and our political theory, we're never gonna get anywhere. You know, it's like trying to address the end of oil through just, like, reasonable rational thinking is itself kind of hallucinatory because it's obviously people know better than to keep doing what they're doing. You know, just one more ride on the freeway.
Dominic Boyer:
Just one more, like, bunch of, like, plastic future landfill presents for Christmas. You know that? It's like it's all wrapped up together. And I think we can acknowledge there's something humbling about desire too that makes us realize, you know, we're not able to sort of rationally find ourselves from point a to point b where we wanna get a %. I think what's nice about infrastructure is a concept for me and why it attract I I was first very skeptical and didn't really understand why people were talking so much about infrastructure, but I was I came around to it by understanding, okay.
Dominic Boyer:
What's interesting about infrastructure is its multiplicity of relatedness. You know, one thing can infrastructure all sorts of different events, happenings. And, you know, the example I use in the book appear at a on the edge of the water allows a human to walk over water, but it it enables a barnacle to have a home. That multiplicity is, I think, part of the power. But also to get back to the sort of part of the conversation, Foucault and and the model and all of that, I mean, we need to think about what enables things to happen and those relationships of enabling.
Dominic Boyer:
And so for me, you know, we need a revolution, but, you know, what does revolutionary infrastructure look like? I've been influenced by political theorist like Ariela Azule, who's written some amazing essay about revolution, where she says, you know, most revolutions are basically like swapping out the elites at the top of the pyramid. You know, just you get one group leaves, another group comes in, they say it was a revolution, but the structures of domination don't tend to change all that much as you go farther down the pyramid. And she has this wonderful idea of civil revolution as, like, an expression of civil power that is not sort of just elite power shifts, but it's sort of, again, what we might think of as democracy, like, more people and more beings because we're not just talking about human interests here, but but more than human interests, getting involved in the process of creating a better world. Another point of inspiration for me I mentioned in the book is the Anishinaabe philosopher, Kyle Powis White, who teaches in Michigan, who, you know, said some amazing things about, you know, settler apocalypticism and this idea that, you know, well, if things have to change, the world's gonna collapse.
Dominic Boyer:
And, you know, that's often how we narrate it. It's like, oh my god. If we have to really change, like, that's it. We can't do it. I think that's where we have to get over ourselves to speaking on behalf of settlers.
Dominic Boyer:
You know, we have to sort of get over that idea, or if the change is gonna kill us, then it's gonna kill us, but the future is doesn't have time for us. Beth Povinelli has this wonderful thing she says in her book geontologies where she talks about the world is turning away from certain kinds of life, and it's turning towards others. And if we wanna be not just a relic, not just a fossil of the past, but part of creating that future, I think we have to embrace that transformation. But, you know, I'm not so worried about in the book about the sort of the neoliberal audit culture of, like, how much carbon are you using? And are you know, is are are you sure you're living a healthy carbon lifestyle?
Dominic Boyer:
And I think that's, again, just the way fossil fuel industry has always tried to sort of individualize responsibility for things that are institutional and infrastructural and political. So the hope is that we can infrastructure a different kind of desire in the future. And and Simone and I have been working on this project. I don't know if we talked to you about it, Kara, but we might have about low carbon pleasure. You can indulge in certain kinds of pleasure even to excess without ruining the world.
Dominic Boyer:
And there are lots of the things that are best about life are not ruinous ecologically. So maybe one of the things we can do in our overheated sort of petroculture is to think about rewiring those pleasure circuits towards things that are not what I see as being ultimately very empty thrills, like driving at a hundred miles an hour down the freeway. Yeah. It's a thrill, like being on a roller coaster, but that's really all it is in some ways, as opposed to what are the kinds of pleasure we can seek and maintain more sustainably. Trying to take that desire question you're raising and make it a sort of center of politics and not just about austerity, which is, you know, deny yourself and, you know, we should all live with less.
Dominic Boyer:
I mean, I think austerity works to a certain point for some people, but I also feel like we've sort of reached the people, at least in the North. We're gonna reach with the austerity messaging. We have to figure out a way to swap out their ecocidal pleasures for more ecophilic pleasures, perhaps. That's a Stacey Alaimo term, eucophilia, which I love.
Cara Daggett:
Yeah. And I think in terms of how you change your own desires or public desires, I feel that that's what's so powerful about infrastructure is so many of what feel like barriers to shifting ways of life are infrastructural barriers. Yeah. I guess my only worry sometimes about infrastructure is how it is so vulnerable to be translated as a kind of big green build new things, which you're also suspicious and wary of. But I think this broader notion of infrastructure that you have, even our own bodies as composed of parts in relation to all the things around us and not like a fixed human nature, but things that feel very, quote, unquote, natural are very changeable.
Cara Daggett:
I find some hope in that.
Dominic Boyer:
Yeah. And we have a lot of allies. Like, right now in our bodies, we have literally trillions of bacteria helping us to decompose our food to make it available for us as recompositional elements of keeping these bodies going a little longer. I really find something encouraging and the openness to the more than human that at least our area of the academic woods is is showing. I do think that that's so some of an important shift is, one towards diminishing anthropocentrism, which, again, I think has been mostly a masculinist anthropocentrism, but still probably an openness to the porosity of our bodies and their projects in terms of the world at large.
Dominic Boyer:
I think that's something that this work in environmental humanities and and environmental political theory could could be helpful with, I hope. If we could reach more people, which is why I tried to write this book readably. I'm trying right now to write in a lot of different genres, like screenplays, plays, podcasting, obviously, some other things to try to figure out ways to sort of convey certain insights that might be interesting to people that don't have all the baggage of academic writing associate and all the barriers that get set up.
Cara Daggett:
Yeah. And we're not, as academics, encouraged or trained to do it. So this book is a model for that. I'm trying to do it myself, and it's hard to feel like you can advance really careful nuanced original arguments, but at the same time, a, be clear, but, b, be something that people would enjoy reading. Really, this book is that.
Cara Daggett:
It does both of those things. Maybe you're right. Maybe serious historians are going to come in and have something to say, but you know what? I worried about that with my book too. And a couple of my friends who are historians said, no.
Cara Daggett:
Carrot's great. Keep doing it. It's fine. Like, I think there's more tolerance now. There's more appetite, not just among academics, but in the public for big thinking, clear, accessible.
Cara Daggett:
People want to know and think about these things. So, yeah, I'll conclude that with just another encouragement for people to check this book out because it is easy to read. It is fast to read. I think it's very teachable, and I also think it gives us new ideas. And maybe for me, even this feeling of hope.
Cara Daggett:
And, again, I don't know if it's hope or something more cautious, but the idea of fossils and that regimes can become brittle and change very quickly Even though there's so much violence associated often with those changes, I think is an important reminder for us all.
Dominic Boyer:
Yeah. Like, when the change comes, sometimes it comes or often comes much faster than you would think. It takes way too long to happen. But then when the change happens, it happens quickly.
Cara Daggett:
And almost anticlimactic. Like, a friend of mine here who lived in East Berlin growing up, he told me the day the wall came down, it was the strangest thing. He said the news media just came on and very much like you would forecast the weather, just said, oh, you can now cross the wall. And then moving on to our next story. And then, of course, we had this parties in the streets, and it was a spectacle, but the narrative of it from the regime was like, oh, yeah.
Cara Daggett:
This is just happening now. So I do think about that too. Like, the fossil fuel companies might not want to recognize even after the deeds have been done that spell the end for them.
Dominic Boyer:
I mean, it's become such a perverse theater, especially this year, you know, in Dubai. It's just I mean, come on. I mean, but that's that's sort of what it was. It was became at the end of socialism. It became grotesque and weird, and just everyone felt creeped out by it.
Dominic Boyer:
And I hope that's kinda what we're getting to with this phase where people are gonna finally, oh, no. If this is what it's become. You know? We grew up with Mobile Masterpiece Theater and and seeing Quiro and, you know, whatever, Angela Lansbury. And now it's, like, a bunch of clearly corrupt, delusional people trying to, like, justify not stranding their fossil fuel assets.
Dominic Boyer:
No. We it's time for change, people. It's time for change. I hope I hope we're there. And I'm totally okay if there's no great victory celebration, if it just happens quietly.
Dominic Boyer:
Just goes poof in the night. I think it might end up being that way. You know, one day we wake up and the last gas station closes, and we're like, oh, cool. Whatever. Yeah.
Dominic Boyer:
Had to happen. But, anyway, Kara, I wanna thank you again for taking the time with this book, for the careful reading, for saying things, like, way better than I could have said them, and just for being a generally positive presence in the world. In the future that I'm hoping for, there's gonna be more carrot daggots out there, so I gotta say.
Cara Daggett:
Well, there's only one of me. What what can I say? Fair enough.
Dominic Boyer:
True truth be told. Again, more facts.
Cara Daggett:
Well, I'll end by thanking you for being the kind of scholar who builds communities because there's a lot of temptation towards egotism in our work, and I think your mode of being has always been opposite of that. In terms of infrastructure, you have always been at the lead of building infrastructure to make community, and it has made this work easier to do. So, really, I wanna thank you and also encourage everyone working in the academic world to think about more community infrastructure starting with myself. I'm not sure I'm always do that. Great.
Dominic Boyer:
Hey. You know, you buried the lead, Kara. Congratulations on tenure and promotion. Why are we only talking about that an hour plus in? That's amazing news.
Dominic Boyer:
I'm so thrilled that it's happened.
Cara Daggett:
Thanks. It's a little it's kind of like the Berlin Wall falls. It's a little anticlimactic. But
Dominic Boyer:
It really is. But you know now what? Now you can be really vocal. You thought Cara Danket was vocal before? Oh, wait, world.
Dominic Boyer:
She's coming at you.
Cara Daggett:
Yeah. Maybe.
Narrator:
This has been a University of Minnesota Press production. The book No More Fossils is available in the Forerunners series from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.