coe119_petrocultures-dheader.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:23] Hey, there you are. Welcome to be back here at cultures of energy.

Speaker2: [00:00:32] I don't know that sounds like a computer algorithm than the dog is hitting the microphone

Speaker1: [00:00:38] Like a dog, but this is

Speaker2: [00:00:39] A list. This is our least professional opening, yet a garbled.

Speaker1: [00:00:43] That's because we're calling them semi-professional.

Speaker2: [00:00:46] We're only

Speaker1: [00:00:47] Semi-professional. I semi-professional.

Speaker2: [00:00:48] Welcome everyone back to the Culture of Energy podcast.

Speaker1: [00:00:51] We might have said that was so smooth. Yeah, that was pretty.

Speaker2: [00:00:54] We are on a tight timeline this morning because we are off to New York, the Big Apple, where this big city of dreams now. How has a has a presentation? She's the little apple of our eye.

Speaker1: [00:01:06] This is the apple of the energy. Little Apple in the Big Apple. A little bit smaller, sometimes a little as Apple's, but not a crab apple. That's a small apple, but a crabby one.

Speaker2: [00:01:16] No, you get angry sometimes and feisty and a little feisty from time to time, but never crabby, never crab. And we have for you today, though we're very happy to introduce a petro cultural double header. First of all, we have an interview with Caroline, who teaches at the Delft. And her work

Speaker1: [00:01:36] Was that even a word you just said

Speaker2: [00:01:38] Delft is actually a city in the Netherlands. Typekit Do I say I'm using

Speaker1: [00:01:44] The German oh to

Speaker2: [00:01:46] The Technical University of Delaware?

Speaker1: [00:01:47] That's how I got the Delft. The was lost on me because I wasn't.

Speaker2: [00:01:51] Everyone who listens to this podcast knows German. I'm pretty sure about it. Ok, so anyway, yes, Culhane, we'll be talking with me alone because Simone for some reason felt the teaching was more important.

Speaker1: [00:02:03] I had to go teach. I had to go teach the undergrads some stuff about the Anthropocene. Think I did? I did the Lord's. Yeah, you didn't learn the work of the Goddess. And during my time with the undergrads,

Speaker2: [00:02:16] She's talking about a project she's working on called the Global Petroleum Scape, which is a super cool investigation of how oil has transformed cityscapes over time. And it's really, really interesting conversation. I found it interesting anyway, and what she and her students are doing at Delft is super interesting in terms of also imagining post oil futures for cities. And what do you do with all that old petroleum infrastructure, right? We don't need it as much. And in places like Dunkirk, subject of recent Christopher Nolan movie fan, yeah, Dunkirk is a port city with a pretty massive oil infrastructure refinery infrastructure that is now seeing its way to a clearer future. So she talks a bit about that project. They did a design studio there, as well as a number of other cities that she's interested in. And then we are going to go back in time to our trip to Odessa, Texas, and talk to our good friends from the University of Texas Permian Basin, Rebecca Babcock and Jason Ladapo about their boom or bust.

Speaker1: [00:03:15] Yeah, that's a cool project. Oh, chit chat about that.

Speaker2: [00:03:17] Yeah, so that's it. It's going to be it's a fun. It's a it's an action packed episode of thinking about oil and its impact upon modern life.

Speaker1: [00:03:27] I like to think about oil quite a lot. Do you think it's just a coincidence that we got we got it around that looks a lot like a little greasy oil spot. Did you ever notice that she is like oil colored? That's right. She's all black and shiny. She doesn't even have any brown or white or gray or anything on it. She's pure black. She's like a little oil stain, a cute, really cute one.

Speaker2: [00:03:47] Let me point out something, though. Yeah, this dog has been genetically engineered to turn less black as the oil economy with her. Oh, is that true? As we shift to a renewable economy, she is going

Speaker1: [00:03:59] To turn green. She'll turn green. Oh, cool. Hey, I'm really looking forward to that. The hope is it's kind of a kelly green

Speaker2: [00:04:05] With a lifetime will have a bright green dog.

Speaker1: [00:04:07] Yeah, OK, that represents like that green future. And when she's midway between black and green and that could look kind of cool. Yeah, it's a little explainable. It could be kind of funky, but then people will really ask what kind of dog she is. It'll be like, Whoa, who never seen a green dog? Well, I'm looking forward to listen to the conversation that you were able to do and hearing the boom and bust. Are we at a time or

Speaker2: [00:04:32] Yeah, we need to. We need to move on. Are there any other observations, any thing else you'd like to share from this past week? Are you excited that Roseanne is back and and with its pro-Trump message, and that so many people are watching it? Is that something that's exciting you?

Speaker1: [00:04:50] Oh Lord, I just, you know, I just found out about that right now. Just right here in this very studio, I didn't even know that I should have been excited about Roseanne to be completely out of touch. I'm excited about the summer, which I see cresting. Ok, let's talk about the summer, because now that we're done with spring break and I, I'm a strong believer that when you're a student, the time between spring break and summer is kind of intense because there's a lot of work to be done. Often a lot of papers to be written or studied, exams to be studied for. But when you're on the other side of the podium, it's actually a pretty nice time after spring break because there's usually you have a couple lectures left and then it's like students doing their presentations. And so it's kind of coasting time right now. I'm sort of enjoying it. I've actually I think I've only got two actual teaching classes left, like real lecture classes left to do. It's just sort of beauteous.

Speaker2: [00:05:42] Slow your roll there, my little apricot, because little apple. We have the cultures of energy symposium.

Speaker1: [00:05:49] Well, that's going to be exciting. But two weeks from today, that's just going to be fun, though it's fun. Not that teaching isn't.

Speaker2: [00:05:54] People just get to show up and enjoy it. For those of us who have to organize the event, it's quite a lot of work and stress, but good stress. But anyway, if you happen to be in Houston April 12 to 14, we have our annual World's Only Energy Humanities Annual Symposium, Cultures of Energy seven. We're on our seventh edition and we have a wide range of very exciting guests who can find all the information and cultures of energy.

Speaker1: [00:06:17] It's going to be cool. We're going to have Jeff VanderMeer, Jeff VanderMeer and Gwen Sierra.

Speaker2: [00:06:22] George will be on our panel along with Simone.

Speaker1: [00:06:25] How and most famous of all, if you're really lucky, you might actually

Speaker2: [00:06:29] Get plum of the energy humanities.

Speaker1: [00:06:31] True, exactly. Lucky, if you're really lucky, you might get to meet the post-human interlocutor shadow herself. Maybe she'll get to come to cultures of energy. Sure, she can be our representative oily hound. That would be exciting.

Speaker2: [00:06:45] The oily hound will be the name

Speaker1: [00:06:47] Of the bar that we it's actually a pretty good name for a pub. I can say that as like a British pub, the oily hound,

Speaker2: [00:06:53] Especially in Houston, there should be a park. So that's that's our new concept. We're releasing it here

Speaker1: [00:06:58] Only if they have good fish.

Speaker2: [00:06:59] Beta testing? Yes, our Scottish offshore pub, The Oily Hound. So that's coming up. We've got the 4C II Chicago Climate Change and Culture Institute coming up in July. We have the movie screening August 17th, five way Reykjavik. We have our movie about Iceland's littlest glacier. Oh my god. And there's a lot coming up, so it's exciting.

Speaker1: [00:07:25] Yeah, there's a lot of stuff that's really a lot of stuff. That's very and

Speaker2: [00:07:29] We hope that those of you out there who can will join us for as much of it as you're able to.

Speaker1: [00:07:34] Yeah, that sounds excellent.

Speaker2: [00:07:35] But with that, I think we'll let it go. Get to our fossil fuel monster to head to New York. Yeah.

Speaker1: [00:07:41] Without further ado, oh, we should say happy birthday to Bruja, who turned nine yesterday,

Speaker2: [00:07:47] Turned nine yesterday and she was super cool about it. And she got a radio

Speaker1: [00:07:52] Because, yeah, old school radio,

Speaker2: [00:07:53] Old school radio, which they still

Speaker1: [00:07:55] Make. Not even an iRadio. It's just a radio, but the transistor it's clear from. She was overjoyed to get. It was very, very excited. I think more excited than getting an iPod.

Speaker2: [00:08:05] Honestly, it's digital, but

Speaker1: [00:08:07] It's well, it has a digital screen,

Speaker2: [00:08:09] It has a digital screen. But what I was going to say about it is it's clear that they're not putting a whole lot of thought into the design and functionalities of radios anymore. Because even though this is like a really simple device to use, it's almost impossible to pre-set stations.

Speaker1: [00:08:23] Oh, really? Oh God, that's sad. And so that's good to still learn the technique of scrolling through stations having start.

Speaker2: [00:08:30] Exactly, but it doesn't have like a nice little nice little.

Speaker1: [00:08:34] You can't just push the buttons and land at your station.

Speaker2: [00:08:36] So in the old days, you had like a little dial that you could twist that was really satisfying to turn it off.

Speaker1: [00:08:40] Fine tune it now. You just

Speaker2: [00:08:42] Have to press these little, these little up and down buttons,

Speaker1: [00:08:45] You know, an infinite number of times. Well, that's

Speaker2: [00:08:47] Okay. As they go up and down the spectrum,

Speaker1: [00:08:48] She's she's young. She's got a lot of life in front of her so she can spend her time pushing the

Speaker2: [00:08:53] Button to work her like fine motor coordination. Exactly right. Anyways, happy birthday.

Speaker1: [00:08:59] Happy birthday, Brigida and happy. Happy chatting cultures of energy.

Speaker2: [00:09:04] Yeah, go Petra.

Speaker1: [00:09:05] Cultures go petro cultures.

Speaker2: [00:09:26] Welcome everyone back to the Cultures of Energy podcast. We are so delighted to have with us on the line from Delft Caroline. Hello, Carla, how are you?

Speaker3: [00:09:35] Hi, thanks for having me.

Speaker2: [00:09:38] We're delighted to have you, in fact. We were able to have a kind of chance meeting at this very interesting energy transformations conference hosted by the Max Planck Gesellschaft in Berlin not so long ago. And that was a great kind of a great gathering of energy humanists. As it turns out, that was kind of fun.

Speaker3: [00:09:56] Yeah, and it was a lot of fun to finally meet you since I've been reading your works and embraced for a long time. And I had unfortunately missed the meeting in Alberta in 2014, just before I left the U.S. and after that, it's been more difficult to to come over.

Speaker2: [00:10:11] Of course, but you've moved on to, in some ways, bigger and better things, I think in Europe, and we're going to get into that project. I just wanted to ask you, maybe if you could give us a little background to your interests, your research interests. It seems to me that you've been interested in the juncture of cities and architecture for a very long time. And I was reading your bio statement. It said that you grew up in Hamburg, which of course, was a city that had to be rebuilt almost from the ground up after the Second World War. Did that in any way stimulate your interest in cities?

Speaker3: [00:10:40] Well, it's an interesting question, because somehow oil has been with me in all my projects for a long time, but it took me a couple of decades to actually realize that I should perhaps first say that my father worked for Esso. So the German Exxon. So I really grew up as a kid with collecting all kinds of gadgets from Exxon gas stations, and we would always gas up and gas Esso gas stations and so on and so forth. But when I studied architecture and went into architectural urban history, my very first project was about the new business district in Hamburg. And so I looked at architecture, competitions and the big buildings in there where the Esso building, the shell, building the BP building. And so I was looking at those competitions. And at the time, it was really not about oil, it was about the buildings. And I went on and I looked, for example, into the question of a capital city for Europe. And on first sight, there is no oil connection at all. But among the visionary plans for such a capital was won by a Columbia professor, Miller, who proposed the city of two million inhabitants on the borders of Germany, France and Luxembourg.

Speaker3: [00:11:53] And as the European community, or what's now European Union, was interesting to fund it. He actually wrote to Exxon, asking them if they would be interested. Wow. And so again, all of a sudden in a project, I had an oil connection and then I looked at a French planner called Mauricio Otisville, and he was active. He was trained in Paris and then went on via Algiers and Caracas to New Haven and back to France. And he met in Caracas. He met the Rockefellers and their home architect Harrison. And so that's how he got in his job in New Haven and was working with the Rockefellers throughout his career and using, I would argue, the oil streams to export his planning ideas around the world and so on and on. And with every project I took on, I sort of felt in oil of found and oil connection, right? And that's what actually got me into mapping this out as the spaces of oil.

Speaker2: [00:12:50] That's right. And it's, you know, what you discovered is, of course, I think what a lot of us in energy humanity is discover over time is that if you find one drop of oil, so to speak and you follow the trail, you suddenly realize that so much of modern culture and all of its forms are related to oil in some way. And that is, I think, the premise of this fascinating project that you're working on now, the global petroleum scape. Do you want to talk a little bit about that project specifically?

Speaker3: [00:13:15] Yeah, sure. Maybe just to preface this, I think it's really important to understand how the oil revolution transformed our physical spaces. Yes. And there's a lot of stuff going on in the energy humanities, looking at culture and writing and all of it. But what I'm interested in is the way in which is shaped architecture and our physical environment. And one reason for that is because this physical environment is very long lasting and long living, and investments that are made for in some of these infrastructures will last 50, 60, 100 years, and they will actually shape our behaviors over time. So that's what I'm calling this feedback loop. So when we look into the ways in which our buildings are made, in which our cities are made, we are already determining the ways in which we will live 100 years later. And I think that's a very different dimension from literature, film and so on and so forth. So what I'm interested in is is looking into both the spatial and the represent the spaces and the representations of oil. And when you start. Thinking about that, what are the spaces where the physical oil actually is? Those are storage tanks, the refineries, the pipelines, those are industrial spaces that look the same all around the world and usually at least in Europe or America. They usually not branded their most often even deep branded. So the big companies will not voluntarily tell that they these are their sites that might be different in China or or Iran or countries where the oil identity, the national identity is really an oil identity and build around it. But most of the time, these refineries are inaccessible.

Speaker3: [00:15:06] They are. The oil sites are inaccessible. We see them maybe from the air, from an airplane or from a highway, but we can't get to them. So they are usually not part of our daily imagination and few people actually ever get to visit a refinery. So but that's the heart of the oil industry where we get to touch sort of give a handshake to the oil industries and the gas station. And those are cute little buildings, at least in the beginning years. Now they're almost supermarkets. They are part of our daily life in Europe or in Germany. When you have a Sunday where shops are closed, where you get your milk, it's in the gas station and almost everybody will be able to draw a map and point out the gas stations because they are so visible that they shape your mental maps. So that's sort of the second layer. But if you then think about headquarters, that's a complete different architectural style and identity, and they're even in different locations. So while the dirty stuff the oil is in the ports, you will have the nice, clean, high end headquarters in the midst of financial centers. You have them in The Hague here or in New York and Paris and other leading capital cities, or at least the leading metropolises of the country. And then you go on and you start seeing that the whole infrastructure that is necessary to carry oil, the highways, the railways, the pipelines is often even co-sponsored and copeland by national planning agencies. So in Europe or in America, those will be different entities.

Speaker3: [00:16:44] So private oil companies working with national governments, but in other countries, Russia or China, the oil company is the state, so there's a real possibility for shaping those cities. Hand in hand with the needs of the oil industry. And by the way, that's not only those countries, but Norway is also a place where the state and the oil industry go hand in hand. But on the other hand, in the in the case of America in particular, a little bit in Europe, but not so much. You also have philanthropy so that spaces of philanthropists like Rockefeller shaping space and they always say Rockefeller in particular, Rockefeller is different from his company, from Standard Oil. But once you start looking more closely say at Williamsburg, which is also funded by the Rockefeller and I've been diving into the archives there, it's an interesting overlap. So once you see newspaper articles featuring members of the Rockefeller family and a horse cart with the Emperor of Japan or members of the royal family from Britain, well, it's it's no longer purely a private endeavor. It's no longer philanthropy. It's really nation building on behalf also of a private family. And so those kinds, that's yet another element for me of the spaces of oil. And then another one is the plastic. So when you think about our buildings today, plastic is a derivative of of oil and many of the building materials. You can think about your plastic chairs, your plastic in the carpets or in the painting or the insulation materials. So it has really written itself. Oil is part now of our physical environment, but once we start looking into the imaginaries around that you might find in some countries, Iran or Russia, you might find China stamps and postcards of refineries, but you usually don't find those in Europe or America.

Speaker3: [00:18:51] But then you have corporate publications, and their oil imaginaries are usually green imaginaries. Mm-hmm. So we will have no law. You will have oil gives you the freedom to discover the landscape, and that landscape is unspoiled in the Netherlands, full of tulips and windmills and cute little old houses and even architects. A few architects and artists have picked up on the oil industry and have embedded it. So you have different stories that are being told the reality of the oil. And the kind of even sometimes emancipatory stories that are being promoted by oil, and I'm just the letter, I'm just thinking of a little booklet, it's called something like Everlane's to drive, trying to get women to actually use cars and the I think it's from the sixties or so. And teaching them to navigate, to put up a tire so effectively encouraging them to use the oil. So those two and two parts of oil, its physical presence in a multitude of ways and its depiction is what I'm interested in and maybe to add one more thing, but architectural historians or urban historians usually look at these things. They will look at a specific place or a style or a typology. What's interesting here is to follow these commodity flow around the globe from all parts of the midstream, upstream, midstream, downstream, part of the oil and connect them. So that's what I'm interested in.

Speaker2: [00:20:24] It's fabulous. It's a fabulous project and you've just laid out very thoroughly, exquisitely even the elements of what you're terming the global palimpsest petroleum scape, which I think is a great term. And I think you make a really compelling case in this project that you really need to look at this in a global comparative lens. Just because there is this replication of forms, you can find some of the same kinds of refinery infrastructure all over the world, the same kinds of storage tanks and gas stations and so forth. There's a certain kind of architectural globalization that has that has occurred through the spread of the oil industry, but also, of course, through the increasing reliance of societies upon oil as a fuel for transportation, for heating and so forth. And then, of course, when you get into plastics, it's even more complicated. So I think it's a great, a great premise for the project. I wanted to ask because I know you're very interested in history as well, whether in the course of research for this project, you've noticed that there have been distinctive changes, whether locally or globally, as the technologies of petroleum have changed over time. I mean, in other words, what what do we see in terms of how the petroleum scape is shifting in terms of its distinctive forms over time?

Speaker3: [00:21:39] That's a very good question, because you when you so we have mapped the oil flows into the Rotterdam The Hague area and in the early period you have oil coming in, mostly crude from the United States. So the first part is the industrial oil. Right? But very quickly, you see already at the time of lamp oil, so before around until around nineteen. And then just at the beginning of the 20th century, you already see the headquarters popping up not in Rotterdam, but in The Hague. The Hague is the centre where the ministries are, where the decisions are made, and Shell specifically wanted a place right next to the ministry where they could influence politics. So in terms of this specialization, we go from this industrial global architecture to the decision making architecture. And then you see the outlets, the retail pieces starting to appear as the car takes over. And so each time oil hits kind of an endpoint, one could have said, OK, we don't need oil anymore for lamps. We've got other types of lighting, so that's the end of it. But chemists have always been able to redesign oil for new purposes. So as oil becomes a fuel for driving, you see retail stations emerge. And when you look at these maps, where are these retail stations? Well, the first ones actually appear within the cities and they appear in the rich cities. So we see in The Hague where the ministries are, where the richer people live. That's where the new gas stations appear much more than, say, in Rotterdam, which is more of a working class industrial city. And so then you already have it written into national policy, and then it will appear in planning documents.

Speaker3: [00:23:38] So as in the 1970s you plan, the country plans the highways they plan spots for the gas stations around along the way. So you really see like like an oil drop expanding, you see an expansion into the landscape, right? And what we haven't met yet. But what we actually ought to do is then you think about all the individuals heating with oil. And if you started to do that in the U.S., you would see all these little dots appearing already post-World War Two, as the houses are getting to be heated on oil. And now, I mean, the next step is then the in some ways it feels to me as of we're dealing with the energy problem and the consumption, the burning of oil. But perhaps since the 1970s, the. Problem of plastic has become the real target of the oil industry, and I think we need to pay way more attention as we design, as we try to design our oil out of our environment, that we include the whole plastic industry and the waste that oil is being used in those fields. So not just the burning of oil, but also its general insertion into our environment. And what I usually tell my students when we start classes is that if I ask you to drop your oil and you look down your own clothing, yes, think about which parts you would have already had to have been taking off or getting rid of. To actually truly drop your oil. And I think that process of becoming conscious of where oil is, it's a very important one.

Speaker2: [00:25:10] Absolutely. No, I couldn't agree more. In fact, I have a great slide I use in one of my introductory energy humanities presentations that includes all of the different things that are created from oil, and it's in very small font and it fills an entire slide. It's almost unimaginable because of that path dependency, which is a different path dependency from, of course, transportation fuel or heating fuel to imagine a rapid shift away from oil. And this is, of course, something that the oil companies constantly tell us is that we can't transition off oil tomorrow. And yet I think, Carola, we're at a time where it is beginning to become imaginable that there will be a post oil future. And as such, it seems to me that this imagination of what post-oil architecture and urbanism might look like becomes a very fascinating problem. And I know it's one that interests you, and it's one that you work on in your design studios. So I wanted to ask maybe if you'd reflect a little bit on the challenges of imagining cities beyond oil today and how energy humanities can play a positive role in that process?

Speaker3: [00:26:13] Yeah. And that sort of also speaks to your question what's the meaning of history? So what I'm trying to do in the our studio architecture and urbanism beyond oil is to use history already in a in a slightly different way. So it's no longer. It's not just about understanding some numbers or learning about some key buildings as architecture. Urban history as often been taught in architecture schools, at the least, but to help students understand the history in order to make design decisions. So already, by choosing the location where we place the studio, if we look at it from an oil perspective, we will choose a different location as if you look at it from a different approach. So we've identified we've done the studio a couple of times now, looking first at Rotterdam and now at the city of Dunkirk in northern France. Yes, Rotterdam is interesting and in some ways difficult. The Klingon Institute, which is a think tank here in The Hague, has made a study on northern European refineries and saying that about two thirds of them are probably going to disappear for various reasons. It's a report. It's online can be downloaded. But in this report, it also says that the refineries of Rotterdam and Antwerp are going to be the last man standing refineries. Ok, so as you start redesigning that area, you get it's difficult to convince the port that this is something they should be thinking about. They're probably thinking about it, but in a very in a long time span versus in in Dunkirk, the refinery has closed. It's now a training refinery.

Speaker3: [00:27:57] So all of these problems of transitioning beyond and the impact on local economies, on local ecologies and so on is already happening there. So what we've been doing in the in the studio and actually it has again started today for the next group. We have sent them out first to come up with narratives with their impressions of the city in terms of its oil history and the potential for futures. And so the students end up actually making a master plan of the city beyond oil. And then they hang up their own visions on it, and those visions can be quite diverse. So last time we had a student looking into. So there's quite a bit of plastic industry also involved. So he was proposing to have the docks, the basins, the water spaces used for algae growth so that they could actually be transformed into the production of bioplastics. Yes, and then other students might pick up on storage tanks. And somehow architects often have a fascinating fascination with these transforming storage tanks into all kinds of activity spaces, housing, adventure parks and you name it. But they also have been looking at at heritage issues, so one student came up with the idea of heritage markers. So heritage monument. Like the show, China and Germany are that commemorate Jewish history. But like steals, so she had to pillars inside the city that would commemorate oil and try to there was negotiate the future of it. But Dunkirk, the one project that they haven't done yet that I really want them to do and hope that someone will pick up this semester.

Speaker3: [00:29:47] There is a housing district from the thirties right back against the old refinery. Wow. And so at the time when that was built, people the engineers could just run over if something was wrong. Nobody worried about any environmental impact. There were tennis courts. There were really nice living quarters, a little park in the middle, a common center, a beautiful little garden city. And actually, it was rebuilt after the war by BP because they needed to fly over their employees before the entire city was rebuilt. And so BP has this habit also in Iran of building entire cities, including movie theaters and housing for high level employees and low level employees and you name it. So this little city is there, but it's in a so-called Zozo district, as the French call it, in a highly dangerous environmental area, and it's sitting between in the middle of an industrial district. Wow. So it's a little green pearl, and I always wanted to have some students pick up on this and maybe make the the Environmental Center of the Beyond Oil Future for Dunkirk out of this or a teaching ground for the future after refineries. But this is the these kinds of projects are really made difficult also by the difficulty of cleaning up. And that is, I think, a big difference with, say, oil, oil and coal. Coal, you get the stuff out of the ground, you burn it. And so there's lots of examples where old coal landscapes are being revamped. But this kind of revamping of an old oil site is much more complicated.

Speaker2: [00:31:26] I was going to ask about that because I think that that's, you know, on the one hand, and I say this from the perspective of somebody who lives in Houston, which has kilometre after kilometre of refinery and petrochemical infrastructure to offer. And when you think about a post oil Houston, it's almost unimaginable, in part because you you want to ask yourself what happens to all of that material? I mean, what do you do with it? Can you recycle it? Can you reuse it? Or do you have to kind of put a fence around it to say this will be like one of those toxic areas that is just going to be consigned, you know, Chernobyl style to some unknown future generation to deal with?

Speaker3: [00:32:05] Yeah. And it's a really interesting problem because in areas where the old refineries are so close to the urban center, for example, that they are worth redeveloping, I think oil companies, I don't have a specific example, but what I've heard is that they can even make money out of it out of the clean up. But in most cases, it's just not feasible. So when you think about the Philadelphia side, for example, those are on the Schuylkill. The refineries were built in the 1870s, and you have old maps that say Appleyard Refinery Appleyard. Yeah, and when you see the drawings, it's nice blue and green. Compared to today, it's a completely different landscape. But Sunoco try to sell these off in 2011, and it's quite surprising the city actually saved the refinery, kept it on going and went on mostly with fracking oil that was brought by rail through the entire country into the center of a large city with all the dangers that that entails. And I think one of the problems of, well, if you had closed it down rather than letting it run, it's a huge investment to actually clean it up and to just give you one example.

Speaker3: [00:33:19] So what I've heard in Dunkirk, and this is something I need to follow up on this, that they are now debating how many meters of soil have to be excavated as a refinery closes. And there you have the problem of how much should be paid by the company and how much should be paid by the national government. Given that this refinery was bombed in the war and thus all the oil seeped into the ground much deeper than you might have expected in other places. Right. And when you think about Philadelphia with over 100 150 years of oil seeping into the ground, you don't even quite know what to expect and how to clean it up. So the goal for our students in the studio is really to design a transition plan, which starts with having even biological means planting trees, et cetera, et cetera, of cleanup before you can actually redevelop it. So I'm very wary of people who say, Oh, let's just put housing in that space, right? That's just not realistic.

Speaker2: [00:34:17] Yeah, or safe, probably. And and I'm glad that you I'm glad that you brought up Philadelphia because. It's obviously a place you've been looking at quite carefully, and you have some really, I mean, the story you tell about Philadelphia as an energy capital, I think is one that probably very few people know. And it's also a place where we encounter, as you just said, this inertia. In other words, if we wanted to talk about the challenge and an opportunity to re-imagine a city beyond oil, we also have to take seriously that there are powerful inertial forces, too, that are working against that forms of friction. Perhaps that that say, Well, we, you know, in this case, quite fascinating. As you've just said, part of the reason why the refinery continues to operate is because no one wants to conceptualize the cleanup, right? It's too costly and and too much trouble. So why not just let this old thing run a bit longer?

Speaker3: [00:35:05] Exactly. Yeah. And what do you do with that? Philadelphia was discussing then more making it an energy hub, but Philadelphia's is fascinating in the sense that it really reflects the same elements that I've discussed for Rotterdam and The Hague. So the extraction site in western Pennsylvania, many of those cities we don't even know anymore and outside of the United States pital or Titusville really places that nobody knows. But the Titusville in particular had the first oil exchange. That's right, that was lost very quickly to New York as Rockefeller moved there. And so the oil was drained. The area itself lost its power. Philadelphia stayed because it was one of the export stations and actually a large part of the export to China already in the 1880s went through Philadelphia and so Pennsylvania. The being able to build a huge state capital is also the result of having the oil in town, the steel in the northern town, but the oil, the steel and the railway in the same in the same state. But then New York gets the biggest piece because they get the headquarters, because that's where the money flows are going to go. So in that sense, I think Philadelphia is a fascinating place to look at, and it's so close to Eupen and key installations in the city and the waterfront. So you could see a lot of redevelopment going on, but there's too much resistance, economic resistance and so on to give up this particular piece of land.

Speaker2: [00:36:38] And I would imagine that with the coming of fracking to Pennsylvania, it's been one of the states that's pursued it relatively avidly, although of course it is. There's a contentious politics around fracking, too. You know, I think that it's even harder to imagine changing right now. While, you know, Pennsylvania as a whole, its economy continues to profit from unconventional, as they put it, oil extraction.

Speaker3: [00:37:02] Exactly. And I think another interesting point is there when you think about how can we go beyond oil? Where should we actually start? And I've been looking at the whole chain, the oil chain and the different parts. And the interesting part is, as I just said, so extraction points you can get all around the world as one is gone, then you pick up the other. As there's war in one region, they move from the oil companies move one one part of the world to the other. So in some sense, you need the extraction, but you can also do without the other sources. Same thing with with consumption. So sometimes consumption is better here. Sometimes it's better there. The shipping routes and lot of the oil is actually shipped are relatively flexible. Whether you go through the Suez Canal or whether you are around Africa, there's options. And what I'm arguing is that the refineries are probably the most stable part in this whole oil flow and that they will actually redirect oil flows as things shift. And the fracking is a really good example for that. So in 2011, Philadelphia, the sugar refinery was was ready to close. But then the oil came, and it attracted these flows right through the country.

Speaker2: [00:38:22] So we've talked a bit about the United States in Europe and what are the other kind of key nodes in your global petroleum scape that you're looking at? I imagine you're looking at other places in the world, too.

Speaker3: [00:38:32] So have several PhDs working here, also in other parts of the world. And one of the places that we've looked at is Iran. And Iran is particularly interesting because that's a place where the oil company actually built an entire city. So abadon across those are the places that have been really designed. So in those cases, well, the predecessors of what is today BP, Anglo, Iranian, Anglo Persian oil companies there was they had to build everything. They had to decide where the streets would go, where the pipelines would go, build the housing for the workers, built the entire leisure infrastructure. So that's a whole different auxiliary system that's being set up by and for oil, for oil extraction and refining. But that has that has two interesting components. So once and I just said refineries are usually the most stable piece, but it's also part of the whole colonial story. So Churchill decided that the military ships should run with oil instead of coal before World War One, and once a nation makes this choice that it will base its military on a product, in this case, oil, it has to make sure that it actually has access to it, right? So then it becomes a real colonial story. That's why a British explorer of exploration goes into the Middle East. That's why they're involved in the Anglo-Iranian oil company and so forth. So when Shell, BP and some of these European companies lose access to the colonial market because of nationalization and Mexico and Egypt and so on and the force, they also lose the refineries.

Speaker3: [00:40:16] And then you see a movement of rebuilding refineries in different areas. So Rotterdam, for example, builds the major refinery. Construction occurs really after after World War Two and also in the, I would argue, in the process of decolonization. So what's interesting there is if you look at Iran or at the abadon area and how it was built first through the British connection and then look at the country after the end of the colonial period. And you look then at the beginning influence of the United States, and that is a different type of investment and of engagement. So while the British were building abadon in its area, the United States interest focuses on Tehran. Yes, so the Shah was pulling the investment into its capital and showcasing the oil revenues there and also building a refinery that would actually draw the oil from the southern part of the country with the help of the Americans then and then introducing new products such as petroleum fueled refrigerators. So you can probably think of all kinds of things that you can use petroleum for, but petroleum fueled refrigerators would not be my my first. Sure. So petroleum becomes a part of global politics. Global economic flows, influence systems. Well, as we all know, but it really plays out also in the build environment, the types of forms you build, for example, right?

Speaker2: [00:41:50] And I imagine that, you know, that's true in principle, whether we're talking about West Africa or whether we're talking about Southeast Asia or, you know, the Middle East or the United States or Europe. And again, that just to come back to the framing of the project. I think that's why it's so brilliant to to frame this as a a global investigation comparatively of different petrol escapes. One of the things we can't do on a podcast because it's an audio medium is really give people a sense of these amazing photographs that you've assembled, but you have these amazing photographs and I'll, for example, suggest that people go check out your article. A recent article in the Journal of Urban History called Oil Spaces, which has a remarkable set of photographs in it of different architectural forms associated with the oil industry. Do you sense that now, as oil companies are kind of moving out of their domination of the 20th century into a more uncertain at least 21st century that their architectural forms are changing in any way, in any way that's distinctive or perhaps representative of architectural trends today?

Speaker3: [00:42:54] It's an interesting question. So when you look at the headquarters, for example, I think it's BP in Rotterdam now has a green roof. Ok, so there's definitely a green imaginary often associated with the new construction. The question for me is to what degree is this green branding greenwashing, you might say, right? Or really a change? I mean, for example, one image that I often show in my classes there's a LEED certified gas station. So LEED certification, as you might know, is a system privately set up system in the United States to evaluate the buildings in terms of their sustainability. So this gas station will have all kinds of green features, but still it's the container for petroleum.

Speaker2: [00:43:50] That's right.

Speaker3: [00:43:51] So how do you measure sustainability in that case? Or to give you a bigger example of the same case when you look at a green port, so a port like Rotterdam will strive to become a green port, and that's sort of a hype or a thing, an important thing for many ports around the world. But what does that actually mean if they don't take into account what the things are that they are shipping so that the flows through these ports are petroleum flows and that Rotterdam is? Throughput port and most of the stuff they put through goes to Germany and also to Belgium for production processes there, so even if the entire Netherlands turned green or the port could still be transporting petroleum? Yeah, so I think there's one part is yes, you can green a couple of buildings and your headquarters become more energy efficient. And that's also, well, a financial benefit for the people who are running them. But it doesn't change the system itself, which is still about transporting, transforming, reusing oil. And when you actually you were talking about your slide, which I would love to see, I have to say I've just got my students in my class on building green, making little films, so I send you those as their

Speaker2: [00:45:12] Oh please, yes.

Speaker3: [00:45:13] So they were stripping items that were oil out of these films to make people realize what these are actually are. And also looking both at the production processes and that transportation flows and all the elements where oil is actually often hiding. But I did want to come back to one other thing you said, though how much are they oil companies changing the future? And there's probably a couple of initiatives that you could think of, whether they're actually doing it. So they are putting windmills into the Port of Rotterdam and those places. But when you think in the past the world's fair of 1939 in New York, where you had a collaboration of Shell and they made beautiful advertisements of the modern city with skyscrapers and highways and really promoted a new style of living, and they did that together with General Motors and design. And then on the other hand, you have Monsanto and MIT and Disney World work together on the plastic house. So there have been moments in the past where the the oil industry has collaborated with design and a big other player car industry plastic industry to imagine the future. And you might say, well, the the the house at Disney World didn't really have a huge impact. Yes and no. We don't live all in plastic capsules now, but plastic is everywhere in our buildings, so it has been itemized and we're all buying it, building it, using it right? So if you imagined having that kind of a collaboration between a renewed oil industry that maybe focuses only on the things where we really need it, say health industry and then work with design, for example, to create new elements just one step back.

Speaker3: [00:47:09] But it's important to realize oil is a natural product. We've been using it for thousands years, thousands of years. Marco Polo carried it around the Silk Road. The Greeks have been using it for as weapon Greek fire. It has been embalmed mummies. We've used it for Vaseline. So all of these uses are there, but I think we need to make a careful choice. What we actually want to use this oil for. And so maybe health is the place where we want to use it, where we need it most and we should make a careful decision. Do we need to burn it? Do we need it in the in the building materials? Do we need to pour it on our streets, this asphalt? So where are the places that we really need this important product? And if you then imagine an event as strong as the world fair or as the Disney Pavilion, then the oil industry could help reimagine and reinvent and retool the world. In some ways, that's exciting.

Speaker2: [00:48:10] It may be utopian, at least from the point of view of American oil companies, but I really hope that that could be possible. But I do think in Europe you're seeing, you know, some moves. I mean, Statoil just rebranded itself. I think total, you know, there's a number of European oil companies that actually seem to be taking this idea of a proportional sized place of oil in the modern economy seriously. And honestly, it's in their own existential interest. If at the end of the 21st century we are in the same place we are now, it'll be an ecological disaster with untold consequences. So it's very likely that we are going to be in a slightly different or very different mix of energy forms. And in that case, if you want to be an energy company, you better do more than just oil. Or if you're an oil company, you may be, as you say, more specialized in what you do. You may be delivering more specialized products for very specific industries rather than, you know, trying to power every car. And I do think that with the advance in electric vehicles, this transition seems to be coming very quickly now again, especially in Europe, in ways that I think will maybe create for you some new interesting forms of infrastructure to look out for. I mean, we'll the gas station. Of the past, now be the kind of new charging stations of the future, I think that's quite a fascinating question.

Speaker3: [00:49:28] It's actually one of our students last year picked up exactly that idea, and she turned the gas stations into lifestyle stations. Oh, OK, where do you where you could develop? Well, so on the one hand, there was a heritage aspect and then you rebranded them as community centers with all kinds of activities, from marmalade making to knitting and you name it. So for the lifestyles of the after the fourth industrial revolution. But I think there's another aspect that I think is important because on the one hand, yes, there's a transition. But on the other hand, there's so many areas in the world. For example, I've been looking at China also, we've been looking at that as one of the cities really built for oil. And if you look at the Middle East, well, they're looking at places to go beyond oil. But much of the world is still driving living through oil and still imagining heroic oil. Astana, for example, is one of those places where oil is really built into the environment, so I'm not sure that we are already beyond it. And when I in my classes, when I've got students from those areas of the world, it is really evident that they won't give up on it. They don't even understand sometimes where we are going. But there's a second part to it. So on the one hand, I'm not sure that around the world we're done with oil. But then there's also the the urbanization of the seas. So we're just now preparing a conference that's called viscous space and on the North Sea. So looking into the ways in which energy has transformed the ocean spaces? Yeah.

Speaker3: [00:51:03] And we've now been talking all the time about land spaces. But the ocean is the place of transport of oil for the ships, but it's also the place of of pipelines. It's about drilling towers in their future. All of this stuff in the ocean floor is going to be mostly abandoned and just grown over, so it will become of our future natural habitats apart. So there are many things that where the ocean is the new frontier. So while I was talking about, say, the abadon area and so on, as the companies explored and created new infrastructures into the land, they are now creating these new infrastructures into the ocean. And that is largely happening, I think, without real planning. So there are a couple of legal elements that they pick up that that are being done now. But there is no spatial planning in the sense where we put our energy generating windmills in connection to the shipping lanes in connection to the drilling towers. And who knows future cities that will be floating on the oceans because with sea level rise, the Netherlands will be underwater? Right. So we we have seen already how the oil revolution has transformed the world, the land spaces we are now at the moment where it's transforming the seas. And we should be much more forward looking in using our understanding to actually design this transition of the sea spaces. And I don't see that happening yet, but it's now that it would have to be taken up on.

Speaker2: [00:52:39] Yeah, I think that's incredibly important. I've heard of a couple of interesting projects. And again, they may just be futuristic and speculative, but about the appropriation of drilling platforms in the future and whether you could create new types of floating cities or or find other kinds of purposes for them. It's quite fascinating and important work, but something you just said reminded me to ask you as you're looking at places like Rotterdam and Antwerp, as you just said the Netherlands will be underwater or will have to live with its water in a different way, at least. Is that a critical feature of the planning and imagination process that that might be specific to a very low lying place like the Netherlands? In other words, that in some ways this infrastructure is something that even if it was a refinery, that for economic purposes would make sense to keep it open, that actually it'll become unfeasible to because of sea level rise in the future.

Speaker3: [00:53:28] Well, I mean, there was a little bit of a cheeky remark, I have to admit, because honestly, I think the Netherlands are much better prepared to deal with this than many other countries. Yes. The Netherlands has had democratically elected institutions for some 800 years to deal with water. And when you look at the whole water infrastructure here, both to deal with flood floods coming from the rivers of floods coming from the seaside, it's very well thought off. And you have in terms of flooding program here. For example, it's called Room for the River, which actually allows you to or allows the government to flood specific agricultural zones rather than having the floods run into cities. So it's an extremely well set up system with huge slices towards the sea. So even if there are places in the Netherlands that are eight metre under zero, that I'm honestly much less. Frightened for what is much more scary of places around the world when we have to realize that most port cities where a lot of oil infrastructures are our port cities, yes, and those cities will be hit by sea level rise and those are, I think, 70 percent of the Asian cities and so on. There's all kinds of numbers where this flooding will exactly or where the risk of flooding will occur. What's important there is that these very dirty sites, once they are swept over by water, will pollute close neighborhoods, parts of the city. And those are often places where the poorer population lives. But it can also be all kinds of people who will be impacted and who will have soiled water run into their homes. And I think you're in Houston. Yes, you know exactly what I'm talking.

Speaker2: [00:55:13] Yes, I do. I do. I do. And in fact, I was just thinking, I've been kind of making a mental checklist as we've been talking about all the things I want to show you in Houston that I think you'd be interested in. And so obviously, we're going to have to have you come to Houston and to rise to to talk about your work, but also to get a chance to really look at the city, hopefully with some of your students, too, because I think there are a lot of excellent research projects here. But I'll just say a couple of things. One. We've got a really interesting, lovely project to take an old gas station and convert it into a little coffee house. That's very popular, and I think it's rather charming. These older gas stations have a certain aesthetic, mid 20th century aesthetic flair to them, but also, you know, to look at the Houston ship channel, which, as you say, has tens of thousands of petroleum containers, most of which are just a couple of meters above sea level. And if we were to get a storm surge from a large hurricane, we could easily see an environmental disaster on the order of the Exxon Valdez spill, for example.

Speaker2: [00:56:12] But within a contained estuary of Galveston Bay, which would mean that it would be much harder to clean up and the environmental ecological effects would be all the more devastating. So we are a city that kind of sits, you know, with a grenade under us the whole time in terms of our petroleum infrastructure. At the same time that that same infrastructure makes the city run, so makes the city's economy run. So it's one of these dangerous and yet kind of telling paradoxes of the of the more global situation. And I think it would be also probably fascinating to look at some of these corporate headquarters here in Houston, too, and just to see whether there's anything architecturally interesting about them, they seem rather nondescript. That would be something that has been my experience anyway, is that they seem to kind of want to blend into the background more than they did back in back in their heyday. So they're just kind of just like any other anonymous corporate tower that could be any sort of corporation. It's almost as though they're trying to hide in plain sight.

Speaker3: [00:57:11] Yeah, no, I would love to. I would love to take the studio to Houston. And I think there's a lot of things that we could do together because I think what we are now facing really requires a multidisciplinary investigation. Yes. You asked earlier about the role of the energy humanities, and I think we need a responsible innovation, so we need to think about the values of what we do on a larger scale. So there's always a possibility to say, OK, we'll put a new Windmill Hill, we put a new solar panel there, but it needs to be in the service of something bigger. And solar panels are also made by oil. So we have to ask ourselves step by step who will benefit from it? How and is this only a short term solution? And I think that's why also, the historical part helps so that you can understand that if you make a specific decision, it might have direct things over a longer time period. So to to bring this long term thinking back into the into the equation and to understand that the decisions that we are making now might determine how things will look in a 50 or 100 years.

Speaker2: [00:58:23] I think that's a wonderful note on which to end. Looking forward, both in terms of our own potential collaborations and also in terms of the time scale which is appropriate to the task at hand, which is, you know, not not what will happen tomorrow, but how we have to think. Where do we want to be in 50 or 100 years? Caroline, thank you so much for joining the conversation today. It's been wonderful to have you on the podcast.

Speaker3: [00:58:44] Well, thanks to you, and I hope I hope that we will meet sometime soon in Houston to look at all the things that you just described and explained and talked about.

Speaker4: [00:59:01] Hey, there are clusters of energy listeners, here we are at UTP. That is University of Texas Permian Basin. We are here with Jason LargeCap and Rebecca Babcock, and we're very happy to be here with both of you.

Speaker5: [00:59:15] Yeah, thanks for having us.

Speaker6: [00:59:16] Thank you. Thanks for

Speaker2: [00:59:17] Coming. So you have been involved in a really fascinating project called Boom or Bust, and we just wanted to invite you to tell us a little bit about it. Maybe tell us a little bit about the backdrop. There must be a back story to this project and then and then some of what you've been up to.

Speaker6: [00:59:31] Well, we for for several years, we've been discussing different projects that we could do. And I think one day we were in a brainstorming session along with Jason and another person that was working on the grant and Kristen Figgins. And as we were brainstorming ideas, this idea just popped out of our brainstorming session. It was even one of those things I can't even remember whose idea it was, but we locked on it as, Wow, that's a good idea. Let's go with that. And then that was the birth of it.

Speaker4: [00:59:55] So what is boom or bust?

Speaker6: [00:59:57] Well, we're looking at the subtitle collection and investigation of energy narratives. So we are maybe Jason, you should talk about the writing workshop parts where we're collecting the narratives from the people in the area.

Speaker5: [01:00:10] Sure. And also just to backtrack a little bit. I think when we were brainstorming in that session, we were thinking about what kind of things go on here in West Texas, and it seems that energy is obviously a big part of the economy in this area. But we also noticed how diverse it was. There's a nuclear plant that's in Andrews' that was being developed wind energy, of course. And so it just sort of seemed like we could do a lot with what's going on here. And we especially like the idea of diversification and how that might sort of be a focus of our study. The writing workshops are a fun aspect of the project where we're trying to get as many people from the community to talk about their experiences, and it is focused on energy. But the boom or bust is something that kind of branches off in a different direction, but is related where it talks about issues of, or we're interested in issues of economic justice that dovetail dovetails nicely with environmental justice issues. And so we've heard from a lot of people in our community about what their experiences were like either in a boom period or a bus period. And that's been really fascinating so far. Do you have

Speaker4: [01:01:13] A favorite anecdote or a story that you would want to share that you can do so maybe anonymously

Speaker5: [01:01:20] Or? Yeah, I can share one. Actually, there's a few that I remember. One was actually submitted by my wife. She used to own a pizza place. It was right across the street from our campus. And it's a really funny story. The way that she tells it, where she had gas ovens in the pizza parlor. And one day she sort of smelled a strong odor of gas. And being from New Jersey, she was concerned, of course, with this and wasn't really familiar with this environment, and she talked to someone else who was not from the area, and they were both speculating that they had to call the energy company right away and sort of get the gas shut off. But then there was a local person working with her, and she heard the conversation, overheard it and and said, No, that's from coming from those men over there, their burgers, oilfield workers who the sort of the smell of oil was so strong on their sort of clothes that it sort of emanated from them. And so, yeah, for me, that's one of my favorite ones. That's incredible. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker2: [01:02:15] So Rebecca, tell us a little bit about how boom or bust figures into the study of literature, the work you're doing here in the department?

Speaker6: [01:02:24] Well, part of what we're doing with the grant is we're holding these book clubs because the idea was to branch out into the community and not just kind of keep it inside the university. We really wanted this to be a community project, so we're going out into the various different towns and cities in the area, and we're holding these book clubs for the general public to enjoy some literature that has to do with energy with oil. We read a number of oil novels over the summer that was fun and we read solar that's sitting here on Jason's desk, and I think I showed you the flyer for the world without us. We read that most recently we read Tulip Fever, so it's just been really fun to get out of the classroom and talk to people about literature in more of a fun way than, Oh, there's going to be a quiz or you have to write a paper after, but just, you know, just to talk and be able to share reactions to the literature.

Speaker2: [01:03:16] That's great. What a great project, and especially the kind of the public engagement outreach component of it. What kind of reception have you had? Have you found that people are enthusiastic in discussing literature?

Speaker6: [01:03:26] I have in my book club that's in big spring. They were so excited about it. They didn't want to stop for the summer because we had planned to take the summer off. So they insisted that we continue to meet over the summer, and they chose other books that were along the same themes. And actually, we read one book, we read the Iron Orchard that was so difficult to get. No one could get a copy if you try to buy a copy on eBay or something cost one hundred and fifty dollars. And so it was a challenge just to get the copies. I bought my copy. I think I found for forty dollars in a in a used bookstore in San Angelo and we would pass the copies around and it was quite exciting. Because at the time they were filming a movie in Big Spring about the Iron Orchard, which is right now in post-production. Ok, so that was a really neat tie in.

Speaker2: [01:04:11] That's fascinating. What's the theme of that book? Because I haven't read it.

Speaker6: [01:04:13] It's one of those, you know, guy strikes it. Rich Guy is looking for oil and you know, he it's a fiction, but it's the person who wrote it wrote under a pseudonym because all the characters are just very thinly fictionalized real people. And I think some people actually got very angry about that book because they didn't like the way that they were portrayed.

Speaker5: [01:04:34] Oh, really?

Speaker2: [01:04:35] Well, I mean, there's a kind of there is a kind of fascination. I mean, I'm thinking of movies like There will be blood. I mean, there's a fascination with the wildcatter or the the person who strikes it rich. And is this? Are you able to just in terms of how the discussion goes? Or are you able to tie that experience of oil back to themes of of life on the frontier or the American West? Or, you know, other other things that kind of resonate in the cultural imagination?

Speaker5: [01:05:02] Yeah, I think so. The striking thing for the book club that I run and this one is in Odessa is that there are people who have whose whole families have been involved in the oil industry. And so when we read oil by Sinclair on which you know, there will be blood is based, it sort of brought up to them a whole family history and the family's involvement in the oil industry. For myself, that book was really interesting because the first 20 pages or so are about driving cars in California. And I grew up in California, and it sort of seemed like Sinclair had a way to sort of grab people into the book by talking about the American sort of fascination with the car. And so for me, that was a really nice way to sort of think about how we could sort of transition from something that people are dependent on on an everyday basis car, as most people are into sort of questions about how we consume oil.

Speaker4: [01:05:55] Mm hmm. Well, since you brought up Sinclair, is there also a way in which labor and the question of work comes into these discussions, too? Because you're saying that, you know, families generations have been involved in the industry as laborers of different kinds. So is that a topic that comes up naturally in the conversation?

Speaker5: [01:06:13] It does. I think that might come up a little bit more in the workshops than in the book clubs. But for me, the nice thing about it is that there's been a few participants in both the book clubs and also in the workshops that talk about working in the oil field. And then the part that I'm particularly interested in the boom or bust side of it is how precarious jobs are. And for me, I think or perhaps like the how much employment is precarious and dependent on the industry itself. And so for me, I like hearing those perspectives of how people cope with either a downturn or what it's like for them to experience an uptick in the economy as well.

Speaker4: [01:06:48] When you're collecting the narratives for the workshops, do you do people write them because I think you said they were writing workshops or do you record them and have conversations because they're pretty different mediums, right? People just sort of talking about their stories versus, you know, formally writing them up?

Speaker6: [01:07:02] Yeah, they are are actually writing their stories. So that was one of the things we wanted to do purposefully is not do an oral history project because that seems kind of that's been done a lot, especially in here in the history department. And some scholars like Diana Hinton, who works here, has done a lot with interviewing people and gathering their oral histories. We wanted people to write because that was part of what we wanted to do to tie it in with English and especially with nonfiction, because I know Jason is very interested in creative nonfiction, so we wanted to tie that in. Yeah.

Speaker5: [01:07:31] Going back to the question about labor too, we've done the workshops in two ways. We have them right in class and in person, and then also to bring some writing in and then workshop it that way. And there are a few stories about, you know, there's there's there seems to be a few trends about like what people write about. One of them is sort of getting passed and through a bust period, people sort of talk about their inner resolve. Some people speak to a sort of spiritual sort of faith that helped bring them through. But one of my favorite stories was a young man. He was a student of mine. His family worked in the oil fields and during the summer or actually in the oil industry. And during the summer, he would sort of work with his father on this job. And there was a nice sense of community that he wrote about where he was. He's obviously an intelligent young man, so that comes across pretty quickly. But the working class people that he was working with would tease him and sort of try to goad him into sort of doing something more with his existence or what they sort of said was more. And for me, I really like that and he's grown up and he's really grounded young man who seems to have a good sense of what a work ethic and what it means to sort of work hard. He appreciates his father's efforts and in the oil industry and saw his father actually cope with being injured on a few jobs. And so for me again, there's that economic justice issue that comes in where labor, as you talked about before, is a key part of how we sort of understand energy in this project. Mm hmm.

Speaker6: [01:08:59] I would also add. That in my book club, at least, maybe some of yours. There's also the people whose family sort of owns the oil and owns the land that kind of ownership right group that I think a lot of them are represented at my book club, more so than the workers. And that's also interesting to see

Speaker4: [01:09:17] The kind of hierarchy

Speaker6: [01:09:18] Right? Or that, yeah, because I think the locals are more like the people who own the the land or, I don't know, own the mineral rights or whatever the proper term is. And it seems like the transients are more like the workers, and we get a lot of that in the stories, too.

Speaker4: [01:09:33] What do you give? What's the prompt that you give to people to begin the writing?

Speaker5: [01:09:37] It's a sort of basic one, which is I give them to. Usually there's one sort of general one which ask them to sort of think about how a boom or bust period has impacted them, what experiences they've had. And then I usually try to vary depending on the audience or change it up so that it's not the same thing over and over again sometimes. Sometimes we have repeat participants, and so I want to make it new for them. I think one time I sort of tied into the books we read too. And so I might also have been part of my teaching where I asked one question where you know what sort of surreal thing happened in the oil field? Because I try to teach him, you know, the poets that I teach, which often use surrealism in their work. And so what I asked was like, Well, you know, sometimes people think Odessa and Midland are strange places, and so it was good to ask them. I thought, you know what kind of weird, dreamlike things happen? And that also happens to where there sort of seems like people's imaginations sort of wander towards what seems somewhat unreal about this place, too.

Speaker4: [01:10:30] Uh-huh. Is there anything unreal about this place?

Speaker5: [01:10:33] I think the landscape is really interesting. I remember 60 Minutes did a story on the bust when it happened a couple of years ago. And you see sort of like the mechanics of the sort of the derricks and stuff like that. And there's this one place off of the highway where you can sort of see the apparatus for the oil industry. And there's these sort of like crane like structures and they're sort of lined up and it looks almost like a sci fi movie. And I think that seems a little bit strange. It's also sort of like this external symbol of work and not being done and sort of is a very I think 60 Minutes used it as a visual to sort of describe how all the machines weren't being used towards the industry right now. And I think, of course, we're probably in a different time period where some of those cranes and some of those machineries are sort of being put to use. But yeah, that sort of seems like a a haunting sort of reminder of what the bust was going on for, like four people.

Speaker2: [01:11:27] So I have a question. I'm trying to think about the right way to phrase it in a landscape like this, in a city like this that is so rich with energy. As you were saying, Jason, that there and so many different types of energy where I imagine that so many families in one way or another are, you know, at most one degree separated from one energy industry or another. And so it's really very mundane in a way. On the one hand, you might think it'd be easy to get people talking about energy because everyone knows it. But is it hard to to find to kind of elevate it or to find the way to bring it into the sphere of the arts and imagination in a way just because it's kind of saturating everyday life in a way?

Speaker5: [01:12:06] Do you wanna speak to that?

Speaker6: [01:12:07] I don't know if I have an answer for that, but I do want to talk about a book project that we're putting together, where we're going to gather these narratives and also scholarly articles. And also we're going to add photography because I think the stuff that Jason was talking about, if you look at some of the artworks that even students do around the campus, you'll see some of these images and maybe some photography, and maybe we could bring the art in that way. But I had to think to do something with painting or visual arts. Yeah, that would be cool.

Speaker4: [01:12:33] That would be neat. Then it could be a kind of more multimodal book to not just textual about having all those different things,

Speaker6: [01:12:39] But you can see that the landscape is it has its own beauty, and I really would like to see that captured in a way that other people could share. Yeah, you don't see it, too.

Speaker5: [01:12:48] I think I think this might speak to the question to you, not only. One thing that I wish we could do a little bit more successfully was to get actual oil field workers into the writing workshops, and that's been hard. I've thought about it a bit and seems to be understandable. They're probably busy working. And so they don't have as many sort of opportunities maybe to write. And I've actually handed out my card to people that are dressed in overalls, coveralls to see if they would sort of join. I think there's maybe a little bit of shyness too. We even though we sort of promote the workshops as being, you know, something where they don't need to have any writing experience that can be sort of any type of writing, very informal. There's a sort of shyness about writing. And so we've tried to brainstorm ways to sort of get past that and sort of work through that. But yeah, it's also a funny way to think about labor, too, that yeah, maybe they're out there working and it's it's hard to get them into the workshop then.

Speaker4: [01:13:40] And I think there's there's something intimidating about writing or there can be right if you don't feel like you have facility with the language or you're not confident and your educational background. And so there's some anxiety maybe tied up with the act of writing. Yes.

Speaker6: [01:13:55] Yeah, but that's what we hope that we're here

Speaker4: [01:13:56] For it to overcome it. Yeah, get

Speaker6: [01:13:58] It, get it going and help people. You don't want people to think they're writers to come to the writing. Yeah. We want people who have stories to come and will help them get those stories out on paper. Also, I hold my book club at the train car cigar bar. And I think holding it at a neutral location like that or a place that's kind of fun, maybe is less intimidating than holding it at the university. Maybe if we held them in a more neutral sort of location, people would feel more comfortable. That's what I

Speaker4: [01:14:24] Do. Like a cafe or a bar or something.

Speaker5: [01:14:26] Yeah. One of the strategies we had was to actually go to a corporation. I won't name them. I guess I shouldn't be out of propriety, but I thought that I had to set up. I knew contact in their sort of press department. And we've got the initial OK. And then I think once the project seemed to start going a little bit further, the legal team probably got a little bit nervous about it and said that, you know, they'd rather not have their employees participate. And so I think there's still ways that we can sort of do it and it'll continue in the fall. And there's a few places where we might actually sort of go out and find people. There's a petroleum club in Midland that we might sort of find, if not actual workers than retired workers. Perhaps that might be interested in sort of participating on some level. Hmm.

Speaker4: [01:15:09] Can you go ahead?

Speaker2: [01:15:11] No, I was just going to just as a follow up. I think that one of the things that's so exciting and important about this type of initiative is that it is both of the people who are working in energy and just the people who who inhabit this energy world that the humanities and encouraging people to engage the humanities and storytelling, especially both draws attention to something we take for granted, but also may, even for people who do do pay attention to it, can inspire new thoughts and a kind of a deeper, multi textured, multilayered perspective on things that I think that's part of the hope that we have to. And the reason we engage so much in the arts is it's a different way to connect with people where you don't have the high barrier of, say, a specialized academic jargon to learn. You can engage people more easily, and that's what's exciting and important about. I think this project. So that wasn't a question just to know.

Speaker4: [01:16:00] It's also, I mean, what you're doing has some parallels with anthropological work to write, eliciting stories from people about their their ordinary lives, right? The quotidian and getting that getting that on paper on the screen, that's the case might be. I wanted to think too, because I know, Jason, that you're in. You have expertise and are interested in poetry. So is there a way that poetry comes into this project as well?

Speaker5: [01:16:23] Not so much in verse, but I think of creative nonfiction as being real stories informed by sort of lyricism, by perhaps techniques of fiction. And so for me, as Rebecca mentioned, I like creative nonfiction, and I think it's a nice way to sort of tell stories, but not in a dry, perhaps journalistic manner, but ways that sort of like our inventive and that's what I try to promote in the workshops as much as I can. And I feel like it's been a good opportunity to sort of like maybe expose people to different types of writing. And the prompt is so open ended that and I think I guess the guidelines that I give, I try to sort of cultivate that sense of sort of poetry of perhaps lyricism. And it's a nice way to sort of get to people to feel, feel free, to talk about what they want to. One of the things that was interesting, too, is that we with one of the workshops we included a high school and honors class, and they were fantastic. It was just amazing. And the sort of hopefulness that you were talking about, Dominique, that it seems as if not only there's other new ways to talk about energy stuff. If we if we use fiction or if we use nonfiction, or if we use sort of like some more lyrical quality, but it seems like a generational thing as well. It's nice to hear the perspectives of young people, and so perhaps they are the people that might sort of make some changes. And so that might be another worthwhile aspect of this project and sort of see how young people view the issues going on around them.

Speaker4: [01:17:41] Well, it's interesting because high school students have been narrative raising their quotidian lives since they could speak right because they've been on social media and Facebook and Twitter and whatever. So they know how to how to emote that, that world, right? Yeah, they were really interesting.

Speaker5: [01:17:55] They would talk about their parents' struggles, and I was just struck by how much compassion they have for their parents, how much they sort of wanted to rely on their own sense of strength and resolve. And it was just really heartwarming to see them talk about things. And again, there's a sort of maybe an inclination to sort of put a positive spin on things. And I think that might be human nature to do so. But they really did sort of seem to want the best for their families, want the best for their parents. And again, it was really nice to see that.

Speaker6: [01:18:24] I wanted to talk a little bit about the parameters of the grant that we got. Yeah, we got a National Endowment for the Humanities Humanities initiatives at Hispanic Serving Institutions Grant, and one of the rules of the grant was no creative writing. So we couldn't do poetry or short fiction. So that's why we chose the nonfiction. So it would fit in the parameters of the grant. But I think it's great. I think it's almost more wonderful to have them writing non nonfiction than fiction because these are their people's real stories, so they can also document what's happening and maybe things wouldn't get documented. Maybe on Facebook or or what have you, but this way we can sort of document this moment in time and collect it, and I like that.

Speaker2: [01:19:07] Are you far enough along in the process that you're beginning to think about editing and curating this collection and which stories to tell and which stories are? I mean, are you finding that there's going to be such a diversity of stories that it may be hard to capture them all or certain themes coming up again and again?

Speaker6: [01:19:23] Well, we we did have so far, I think three times our writers have read their work aloud on the West Texas Public Radio West Texas talk show the show that you hold on so that I think about three times that's happened. So that sort of documented and saved somewhere. Their recordings are out there, people want to listen to them, and we are putting this edited collection together. But I think we're just limited on the people sending us their stories. I think it's one thing to get them into a workshop and write their stories, but then maybe now send it in and have your story appear in a book. Maybe that's intimidating for people. I know for me, I would love to have my story in a book, but that's been the issue is getting the people to actually submit the stories to us. So we're going to be limited by what stories people actually do submit. We've gathered maybe, maybe like eight stories so far that are going to be in the book right along with the scholarly articles. Sure.

Speaker2: [01:20:17] Absolutely. So do you find that people? I mean, this is a bigger question, but do you find that people here are able to connect the kind of local circumstances of energy to the broader national and even international situation of energy, especially in the context of climate change and so forth? I mean, is this something people talk about they think about? Or are people more really just focused on the kind of local stories?

Speaker5: [01:20:42] And I think they're focused on the local stories, but then it's within the context of what this area can provide. A few narratives that have been written have been an assessment of what it's like to live in this area and that maybe there's a sort of sense that there could be somewhere else where they would live that would offer different sort of circumstances, different opportunities. And so no, there hasn't been a whole bunch of sort of like understanding or contextualizing within climate change other than, you know, this is a sort of remote area relatively and that the prospects for, you know, a change in their own lives or maybe even a change in the world would happen. You know, sadly, elsewhere, perhaps that it sort of seems like if this area might not facilitate change as much as they would want.

Speaker2: [01:21:24] Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, we see the same thing in Houston, obviously, although, you know, we may have different effects. You know, we have the big storms and the sea level rise, and you might have the drought out here that you're worried about. Still, see, like Houston's very deeply invested in the 20th century model, and it's it's it change comes slowly, right? So but it's interesting to hear how people narrate that to and what's possible and what isn't possible and how fast or how slow. One imagines that there will be more boom bust cycles to come in the Permian, right? This is not shifting anytime soon, but still, I guess, before oil was struck here, this was mostly a ranching area.

Speaker6: [01:22:04] And so, yes. Yeah. And what about the wind? Have you gotten any stories about wind in your writing groups?

Speaker5: [01:22:09] No, but I actually listening to your podcast and I'm not sure like what the rules are with your own podcast. If you if I can ask a question of you and I guess you're violating a podcast. I didn't think so, but I guess it's good to ask, I guess. But there's a couple of things I was struck by in your podcast, and the first one was if you could sort of put together a syllabus about fiction and wind, what might go into it? I have one idea for the possible text, but if you have any, I'd love to hear. But the one that came to mind was Michael Indo-Chinese, the English Patient, where he has this one section where he talks about in the Middle East. There's these different types of wind, and he has these characters who he says that the sort of folklore around the wind is that there is these tribes who actually sort of go out and attack the wind with knives. Or they try to sort of part the wind with their hands and sort of doing a sort of gesture like that. And so for me, I was thinking about how wind gets described in literature, and that seemed it was a very fascinating thought that I had about how many books are out there. And the other thought that I had would be the one could begin the course and the syllabus with Don Quixote. Yeah. And it sort of seems to also raise issues of utopian thought that you guys are seemingly both are interested in.

Speaker4: [01:23:23] Yeah, well, of course, I was thinking of Don Quixote as soon as you ask the question. There's also I'm trying to remember the exact name of it, but it's like the boy who held the wind. And it's it's a fictional story and it takes place in the Sudan, and it's kind of contemporary. And that's an interesting story. That's a fictional book that I think students would like to read. Of course, you could read our own ethnography, but that's not fiction.

Speaker5: [01:23:47] Yeah, that would be good to have on the syllabus as well. Like a mixture of things.

Speaker4: [01:23:52] Yeah, right. There's also I have this. This is not exactly a book, but Aldous Huxley wrote to his brother A. About wind turbines back in the kind of I think, like the mid forties or something, and so he was sort of speculating on this, so maybe you could do something interesting what he is thinking about wind turbines as being the future of energy and how that fits into his sort of surrealistic paradigm of and experimental lifestyle and narrative style.

Speaker2: [01:24:19] There's a there's a Zapotec poet, victor of his poetry we used in our project. He writes about the north wind in this part of Mexico, which has got the such intense, you know, intense wind tunnel.

Speaker4: [01:24:31] Yeah. And he writes in his native language, which is Zapotec. And then he he has it translated or translates it himself into Spanish. But it's also been translated into English, so you could use it in a classroom.

Speaker6: [01:24:44] Yeah, I think that's great. I heard you talking about humor in your interview. Yeah. And then I was thinking when we when we first got the windmills and we'll start Starling Cities, the Windmill City where I live, that's its nickname. There were these jokes with like Santa Claus and his reindeer and there on the ground because they, you know, ran into a windmill or something. These little funny little jokes and stuff in Mexico, is there anything like that that goes around?

Speaker4: [01:25:07] Yeah, that's a good question. Do you want to respond to that?

Speaker2: [01:25:09] Well, there's a lot of again, a lot of the graffiti. The iconography of wind in southern Mexico is kind of critical. It's actually Don Quixote holding a wind turbine. Yeah, there's a lot of discourse down there about how this is a second conquest by the Spanish because a lot of the wind companies are Spanish companies who are down there. And there's a widespread perception that most of the money is leaving to go home to Spain and not staying in Mexico. But there's it's actually a really rich graphic tradition and beautiful street art and really kind of clever slogans and things like that.

Speaker4: [01:25:45] There's one on one wall that it's the three Spanish galleons come into the new world, and on their sales are the names of these turbine. These wind companies, right, with the three prong turbine blades sitting there. And then you do you have a soldier on the side who's dressed in armor and he's holding a turbine. So there's a lot of what people call La Nueva Reconquista, the new conquest, or the conquest of Mexico, by Spain and by North America. Because another term for the turbines for some people is the white giants, which of course, has this very neo colonial imposition, right? These giant white towers that are coming in and literally occupying indigenous people's lands and campesinos lands. And so it's very loaded with politics. I think one of the interesting things that we found is that unlike here in the United States and unlike Europe, at no point in Mexico did anyone ever talk about how unsightly the turbines were. This is not really a concern, and we asked about it. We did a survey of this community and we said, Is there contamination visual? Is there some kind of ugliness across the landscape that you perceive, right? Because this is such a controversy here in the global north. And people were just like, No, you know, I mean, I care about land being taken. I care about health potential health impacts of these turbines. I I care about social and economic inequality. But the sight of these turbines is not something that disturbs my sleep, right? It's not like this the kind of aesthetic questions that I think are so preeminent in in Europe and in North America. Like, if you think about that Cape Wind project off the coast of Cape Cod, where they're putting out the the turbines way, way out into the Atlantic, and they were going to be these little tiny toothpicks on the horizon. But these multimillion dollar homeowners did not want that visual contamination.

Speaker2: [01:27:39] But actually, I would turn that around, maybe and ask y'all who have more experience with this up close and personal here in West Texas. Do people care about how wind turbines look? Is that something that people seem concerned?

Speaker6: [01:27:49] Not so much. Yes, they care. People think they're beautiful. Like when they started going up by my house, I thought that they're ugly, they're beautiful. And people were talking about the noise to, Oh, well, there's going to be this noise. There's not noise you. I think you have to be right up next to them to hear any kind of noise, but from your house, you don't see any from out my back window, I can see them.

Speaker5: [01:28:08] Yeah, I actually heard more positive statements about aesthetics than negatives. So but the Cape Cod, as soon as you mentioned that sort of that rang a bell that people do have sort of objections to that. So.

Speaker4: [01:28:19] Mm hmm. And I think that's something you see in California a lot like to it's like, you know, people want to have renewable energy and they want to support that form of production. But it's that NIMBY not in my backyard orientation and but there seems to be a strong opinions either way, either they're beautiful and aesthetically pleasing and good or the opposite.

Speaker6: [01:28:38] They also bring income. So where where I live there, many of the landowners get a good income from these things, so they're quite pleased to have them put on their land, right? And I see the cows and the sheep just go right up to it. They don't really seem to disturb the livestock at all. I mean, maybe there's other unseen dangers. Like you said, there were health dangers, but that's like this.

Speaker4: [01:28:59] There's. In Denmark, there's this little island called SENSO, and they've become completely energy independent, in fact, they're producing more renewable energy than they're using it, and so they're porting it back to the mainland and it's all community owned wind. So they own the turbines and they own the land on which they're placed. And so this one Danish guy says, you know, every time that blade turns around, every time I see it turn, that's more money in the bank. And that's a really good that's a good site.

Speaker6: [01:29:26] So we've got a lovely school in Starling City, a lovely school. They're always building new, a pool for the kids tennis courts, a new gym and all this. And it's because of the wind off the wind. So it's lovely. Yeah, yeah. The children.

Speaker2: [01:29:39] Yeah, it's I mean, it's it's it depends on where you are. But I mean, one of the fascinating things about living in Texas is that it it both has, you know, this one foot in the fossil fuel world and then it has a foot in the future, too, with the wind, with the wind parks and being the biggest wind power producer in the country. It's pretty fascinating place, but what it is is an energy frontier one way or another. And solar is going to be coming fast to be here. So then it will even be more complex, this kind of energy system we have. So thus energy humanity's needs. It has a lot to work with here. You know,

Speaker4: [01:30:15] I was thinking to because we were talking about environmental justice and economic justice, and we talk about social justice. I wonder if there's a kind of place for something called energy justice or what that would look like.

Speaker5: [01:30:25] Yeah, I think that makes sense. It seems to be an interdisciplinary field, and one thing that I admired about the centre at Rice was that you framed the matter much in terms of problem solving, and I was actually going to ask you about that and might be a question. I'd ask you later, but it seems as if you could have pitched the idea of humanities and energy in multiple ways, perhaps framing it as like a moral question. But it seemed instead like there was maybe a strategic effort on the part of the centre to frame it as critical problem solving. And so that sort of seems maybe it allows the humanities to be as interdisciplinary as it is and it also might be. I'm speculated to hear your thoughts, but like it sort of seemed like to have a way and and a common language to speak with the sciences into framing in terms of problem solving.

Speaker4: [01:31:19] I think that's part of the impetus.

Speaker2: [01:31:21] Yeah, I think again, part of the moment that this centre was formed at Rice several years ago as part of this Cross Campus initiative meant that we were looking forward to working with our colleagues in sciences and engineering and policy analysis and so forth to to try to develop the humanities as part of a broader ensemble of different responses. And our feeling has always been that, you know, there are certain parts of our present energy and environmental, let's say, dilemmas and opportunities, right? Energy is changing. Maybe it has to change. We don't know exactly what's going to happen in the future and how to get there. And we know that technology and policy can bring us part of the way along. But a lot of the impasse, if you will, has to do with things that are more social and political and cultural nature, like habits and understandings and ethics and ways of life and what we're used to and what we think is being happy and how we get there. And those are things that, you know, the humanities have been studying for centuries. So we have the expertise we need to be involved.

Speaker2: [01:32:27] And the interesting thing is, our colleagues in the sciences were like, Yes, you do, because we understand that it's not a technological problem anymore. We have the technology is more or less we need to decarbonise the economy if that's what we want to do. But to get there is going to require a massive campaign of shifting people's understandings. And one of the basic things is just to pay more attention to energy and just think more about it and understand that where your energy comes from and how much you use matters both locally and globally. So, yeah, I think that's part of that rhetoric. Which isn't to say we're not also interested in philosophy for philosophy, sake and literature for literature sake. We love to nerd out about those things, too, but we think that the the impetus, the urgency of the situation we find ourselves, that means that we we all have to kind of put our oars in the water and help out, very literally in Houston with it. But the flooding we've seen in the past few years.

Speaker4: [01:33:21] Yeah. Well, it is also those speaking in the register of Sciences to some degree, right? That critical problem solving and to be able to kind of reach across the aisle, if you will, or reach across the campus and to to speak somewhat in the language of the sciences to make those bridges. I think cross cross-disciplinary too is important because I know that when we were beginning the project, we were speaking with engineers and they would talk about context and context. I came to learn was just a gloss for social interaction and culture. So this was for for some engineers, this is the social world is its context. It's a it's a place to put infrastructures, it's a place to put engineering devices and mechanisms. And that's fascinating on one level, and it's also kind of an undoing of one's philosophy of what the social is. So making those bridges is important as well. Those infrastructural bridges that engineers built. But it's more than context that that social life is composed of and and the importance that it has for for these processes to so.

Speaker2: [01:34:29] So speaking of which, we have to go talk to some people, I think, and I know we have to wrap up here. Did we miss anything about boom or bust in that you'd like to put out there? And where can people find out more information about the project?

Speaker4: [01:34:42] Probably have a website.

Speaker6: [01:34:43] We do. It's I believe it's UTP Dot Edu slash boom or bust. We will put that link in our. Yeah, we can put the link. I think Facebook is boom or bust you, TPB. And I think Twitter is bust underscore boom because the other one was taken and we do have Instagram, but I'm not sure what that is.

Speaker1: [01:35:07] Cool. Thank you both

Speaker2: [01:35:10] For the invitation and thank you for the work you're doing out here. I think when I heard about this project is like, Wow, this is great. Yeah. To find

Speaker5: [01:35:16] Out more. Yeah. Thank you so much for coming. And. It's great to have you as part of the project.