Welcome back to the cultures of energy podcast. I'm Dominic, where I'm similarly how as always, we are recording here in the basement of Rice University Fondren Library through the assistance and help and goodwill of the Digital Media Commons. And our sponsor, the Center for Energy and Environmental Research and the Human Sciences here at Rice sends cultures of energy.org. And thanks to you dear listeners because we hit a milestone. And on Valentine's day of all days, yeah, 1000 downloads. 1000. It's great. That's three zeros over because it's over a thousand. Now by now, by the time this, by the time this airs definitely, but, but anyway, so thank you for listening, which is great. And you know, just, it's really rewarding to know that folks are interested in what we're doing. So and we have, and we also, if you, if your listeners and I really appreciate your being inherent and listening along with us. And if you were so inclined, you could also go to iTunes, which is the portal for the podcast. And you could put in a review, even a short and sweet one would be really appreciate it. And I hear that you can put stars they're showing you just sell. If anyone wanted to bless us with some little gold stars, that could be very, very nice. Everyone likes a gold star, no pressure, just crave about it. Just, just know that we crave recognition. So we have a very wonderful, lively, important scholar that we had a fantastic conversation with. And her name is Stephanie, the manager. Now or something like that. Okay. Now, this is what we have to disclose that Stephanie is amazing, wonderful, the loveliest person you can imagine. And but her, her visit here was slightly, it's only slightly hard, marred. It's the overshadowed by profound anxiety about the potential mispronunciation of her name, your earrings. I I I told her that I'm just going to call her Stephanie. Right. And you're just a less anxious person to begin with? Well, I didn't have to LA, I didn't have to introduce or to people and that's true. So what I did was I wrote her an email and asked and she very kindly wrote back in blocked out syllables how to pronounce her name because the woman has gotten this question to flown guaranteed. Probably thousands of time. Yeah. And still I feel like I messed it up. I'm pretty sure I messed it up every single time a little bit. But I know for sure in the interview at the end, I messed it up because I just totally psych myself out. I practice it too much. I was thinking about it. And then before we tape, we were sort of joking around about the various terrible ways you could mispronounce her name. And she said, she said the one that she hates the most is lemon agar, labor, Labor Day enlightenment at her. And she said that a lot of people are, some people in Texas would pronounce it later. It shamelessly without even asking if that's correct. And actually if you break that down phonetically, it's like lame ******, right? Lame agar. Agar. It's terrible. It sounds terrible. It sounds horrible. And so I had that in the back of my head and it was just me not to do that, it didn't. But I said somehow that the neo-Gothic There's something. Got it. Yes, sir. She says it's okay to go. She says is okay to go French. So you go full French, she's got no problem with that. But if you say lame and egg are your debts or her, That's it. That's it. I thought Well, that's completely understandable and yeah, that's completely understandable. There are many ways to mispronounce that very beautiful name, which is actually quite exquisite when it's pronounced properly. But we don't really know how it's pronounced at this point because we both mispronounced it so many times. And, you know, it's kinda shameful because both of us have names that do not go without being mispronounced extraction. But you can like in my case, you could only mispronounced by name about two ways, but it is that it is. Dominique is the one that you got. Yes, it's a little bit feminine unless you're in frown for a French for Francophone country, which case it's okay, but my name gets mispronounced very regularly and no one knows. I mean, if you just see it printed because you see it on a screen, see why m, e and e. You would have no idea how to pronounce that. K-mean. K-mean, yes. K-means. K-means as incarnation one. I've already got one. And so people do ask. But I do remember a particularly tragic mispronunciation detail when well, when I was writing my dissertation, one of the ways in which I fed myself and paid my rent was by teaching, substitute teaching, and the public school system and the San Francisco Bay area. And so, you know, whenever I got called in to do substitute teaching, I would go in and be a new classroom of kids, right? So sometimes Elementary, sometimes high school. This happened to be junior high school, math class. I went in there and I decided for as a substitute teacher that I wasn't going to use my surname because I've never really liked my surname because it's. The question word as you know, how, there's a lot of, lot of cheap jokes, Alcott, so many. And so I was like, I don't really want to hear it, not from a bunch of junior high school kids. Right. So I was like, Okay, I'll just go buy my I'll be MS. To have a little status. I'll be MS. I wasn't a doctor yet. I'll be Ms. Sydney. Should I put that name up on the board, on the chalkboard? And I told the kids at the beginning of the class how to pronounce it. Some of them listed, listened, most of them didn't. Then this boy gets up because like a 13-year-old, right? He has to go to bathroom or something, so he wants to address me properly by using my name. So he looks over at the blackboard, kinda looks at it for a second. He's like, Oh, man, how do you pronounce that? Ms. MS. Ms. See many myths. See many. Can I go to the bathroom? Yes. Hello, dear. And he turned right read into shame. Add. The whole class was cracking up, especially the girls. Yeah. And but I learned my lesson TO because I was sort of mortified, although I did laugh. So from then on I just became ms. See, much much safer, much safer, better, much better. So I think on that note, we should talk a little bit about Stephanie. Yes. Yeah, definitely. That was sort of allude in our introduction to yes, a person who is not at all. Stephanie is a professor of literary studies and environmental studies at the University of Oregon. And the author of this wonderful book, Living oil, living with oil. Living oil, living oil. Um, I got that wrong. But anyway, that's great. That's a great, That's bungle number two. You know what else you mispronounce what? This what's not on air but you said Oregon? I thought I said Oregon. Her well, you had to get some coaching on that list. And I've told you three years that it's Oregon. And you had you asked her for pronunciation, huh? It's yeah. Okay. One thing she did say, and I'm going to embrace this right now is that amateurism is okay. True. And and if, if a pro like Stephanie, because when she got I mean, she's very lively, very fun, very smart. And then, you know that when the recording is rolling, she just snapped right in and gave these amazing paragraph like yeah, responses to arrive to our questions which are, which were great. And it's a really, really interesting interview. Yeah, but one thing that 70 is is a pro, but she said it's okay to be an amateur. So we can embrace that here and say, yes, that's it, we are. Great. So without any further ado, let us turn to the interview with Stephanie Lee, Manager. Stephanie, we have a super, super special, terrific guest to speak with today, and that is Stephanie Leben Azure, who is a distinguished professor of English and American literature and Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon, which is a state that I had been routinely mispronouncing until I can get in the Midwest. We call Oregon. Oregon. Yeah. Absolutely. Fundamentally, anathema. Apparently. Stephanie has been here, give a terrific talk on oil and water yesterday. We're going to talk a bit about her brilliant recent book, Living oil, petroleum culture and the American century that came to us from the University of Oxford Press. Is that right? Yeah. And also about her work on climate change pedagogy. So first of all, welcome. Stop me. So I'm very happy to have you here. Thank you. I'm really happy to be here. Great. Fine. We hope usually it is. So maybe as a first, first question to get us started. I mean, in the book you talk a little bit about your own possibly slightly vexed relationship to use them. And as one of the reasons maybe why you got interested in energy. But not to, not to lead you in one direction or another just to ask sort of how you got interested in doing work on energy in the first place. What brought you to this, this thematic? I dedicate the book in part to Texas and California. Both oil-producing regions, both regions that have a very personal resonance for me. Texas, the home of my father, who was a onetime use that magician, excuse me. One time oil Investor and somebody who still has shares in an oil property and conroy texas, California, the home of my mother, an environmentalist, a democrat, that he and also the home that I kept for about 18 years on and off in different respects. I lived in oil-producing region, Ventura, California that was being fracked in a particularly aggressive way as I began to write the book. So I was influenced by the life I lived and the life I was living in the everyday and in the ordinary, I realized that I was living. Profoundly in oil that I had been born into oil, that my educational opportunities, my progressive politics, my feminism, my gender might not have been possible without oil, which made my father middle-class in Texas. But I was also living in a region that was once beautiful, pristine, coastal and had become over the years really since the 19th century. Not so recently, but since the 19th century. A region pockmarked by pump jacks, riven with all kinds of drilling, slant drilling into the into the ocean, to the Monterey Shale out in the channel, the Santa Barbara Channel. And I was feeling as if there was no way to love this world without also acknowledging its invocation and my own invocation and oil. And that was a little bit like wearing a moral hair shirt. It was complicated and I wanted to get myself out of it. And I had to figure out as best I could how to write myself out of that paradox or write myself into a more comfortable relationship with it, with the skills that I had, which was really training and literary and cultural studies. So that was the beginning. So just to pick up on the, on the fracking, I mean, I think one of the things you talk about in the book, and it is really interesting and important to remember is how long fracking has been going on. We think of it as being this very recent transformation. But really in some parts of the country like Texas and California, It's been going on, I know 50 years, at least some experimental form or another. And it's all part of this. You have a great term for this about, about this transition that we've experienced, maybe in the past couple of decades from which you call easy oil or sort of an era of easy oil to an era of tough oil. And I just wanted to invite you to maybe expand on that a little bit. For folks who haven't read the book and talk a bit about what the characteristics are of the tough oil age that we live in now. I use the word tough oil from Michael T. Claire. His definition of that term is more or less mine. When I talk about tough oil, I talk about oil that's tough because it's hard to get at, presents unprecedented challenges to, to engineers, to geophysicists. But I also, I'm talking about tough oil. It's tough because of the devastating effects of its externalities, kinds of climate effects, for instance, that oil production in shale mining, in oil sands mining in ultra deep ocean drilling can potentially bring about and also the kinds of broad scale accident that can happen when you push technology to its limits and when you're kinda putting the technology ahead of your ability to plan for remediation. Oil has always been a risky business. If you go to an oil museum that focuses on the 19th century, the early 20th century, you see primarily fishers, things that we're used to fish, stuff out of wells, including human beings who would fall in. You get a sense of just how many things could go wrong in this risky business that was so intent upon producing as rapidly as possible an incredibly concentrated and wildly useful form of energy. I can understand the rush for oil. And in a certain moment in the 20th century, it seemed to have a kind of logic and a kind of sense. But for me, looking at tough OIL world, the kinds of externalities involved and framing that deregulatory measures involving both environmental protection and labor protection. It seems to me like suddenly the, the proportionality of what it's worth to what, what's, what's hurting us was injuring us has changed in a profound way. And that's tough. So I wanted to think about also the way that you've been bringing this, this idea of tough oil into the classroom as well and into your pedagogy. And so thinking about tough oil as a, as a difficult material to extract and also an impossible material in the sense of it's externalities, which I think is the sort of ideal way of thinking about it in that paradoxical form. In March of 2014, there was a write-up in the New York Times about a class that you've been teaching or had just begun to teach at the University of Oregon, which is called cultures of climate change. And in that class you've been using speculative fiction and what's called clarify one of our climate fiction, which is kind of ego science fiction and also poetry and film, and photography and art and, and all of these wonderful things that the humanities to, to kind of bring that into the classroom. And in that article you're quoted as saying that the class is not about reflecting on the end of the world, but on thinking about how to meet it. And Think that that's a really profound way of thinking about it. So you're using fiction, you're using media, you're using film. You're using these kind of imaginative glosses on the potential of the real with a capital R or a kind of welcome to the desert of the real. If we're to bring in a canoe, Zizek lead on it and Uh-huh. But instead of the Twin Towers being the focus as it is for Zizek here you have environmental destruction. Is that the focus on the Lucas of the class? I'm sorry, I wanted to think a little bit about speculative fiction as a genre that, that thinks about what happens after catastrophe, whether it's human motivated or naturally in quotes occurring. This kind of imaginary of the apocalypse. If we want to put it into really sort of devastating terms. And I learned something in this, in this article to that I didn't know that JG Ballard was actually one of the first authors to, to do this kind of speculative fiction. And yes, dear listeners, he is the author of crash. It's that very same guy. Yeah. But one of the things that the journalists who's writing this piece for you or about, about the class is that he says that if authors, if the authors that we're looking at now in speculative fiction are aiming for a political consciousness. Consciousness raising the effort, he says is more veiled, pruned. And in novels of earlier times, as we saw in the jungle, for example, on Uncle Tom's Cabin. Mm-hmm. So then I started thinking about this kind of this particular glossy. And so you have a class where you're reading this wonderful speculative fiction and yet the kind of political message in this work, if we believe our journalist is actually a bit buried or it's, it, it's implicit rather than explicit. And so I wanted to, to ask you about speculative fiction, about ply phi. And you know, whether in fact that's accurate and also whether there isn't a more implicit mode that's necessary, a more Meta message for trading and thinking about these issues that these works are addressing and that you're addressing the class. Yeah, I think that, that the journalists actually did a great job of giving readers The New York Times a sense of what a humanities classroom can be and do. But I actually don't think that article does describe the class very accurately. That that being said, I mean, I thought that I was, I was happy with the article in the sense that I'm somebody who is interested in promoting the humanities. And I think the article did a really good job of doing that. But the class was really about what I'm going to call affirmative speculation. And I'm using that term from a manifesto by uncertain comments and anonymous collective called speculate this affirmative speculation, as I understand it, is about speculating in such a way that you're not trying to get to a kind of actuarial table where you can actually pin down the degree of accident or disaster that's going to occur and find ways of potentially insuring for it. It's not the kind of speculation that is financial either, which always involves, I think, a sense that you have some ability to predict outcomes. Affirmative speculation is about feeling comfortable or at least feeling that you can be communally supporting of one another in circumstances that you really cannot fully imagine. And what we were trying to do in the class. And I say we, because the class was very much a collaborative effort between myself and 15 graduate students and different fields. We were trying to think about how to call a climate change public into being and how the arts are already doing that, and how there are ready subcultures, which I'll call climate change publics, plural. People thinking through all kinds of possible worlds that they do not yet know. And figuring out how to live socially with other humans, with other forms of life in productive fashions. Some of the work apply phi climate fiction, which usually is, takes the form of novels that are more or less based on science fiction generic models, some of the work apply phi actually does help spur those kinds of cultural imaginaries and call those publics into being. But what we really found were, I think was the fact that, that there is no single genre that is going to give us the patterns of expectation and the patterns of effect and feeling that meet the challenges they're going to face. And that most interesting conversations that we had were conversations that we had with, in one case, a game designer can Excellent Who created future cost? A wonderful transmedia storytelling game that was in part sponsored by Columbia University. Another conversation with Warren care you, a mighty Anglo Canadian writer and photographer at the University of Manitoba. And what we learned in those conversations and in our own work and research was that it's in fact a mix. Genres, a mix of conventional expectations and a mix of kind of effective patterning, if you will, that needs to be brought into being right now and kind of actualize to face what are, in some ways radically uncertain futures in every part of what we conceived of as modern life. It's not, you know, there's certain things that can be predicted by scientists, there's certain things that cannot. And what can't be predicted in particular, I think is the sort of social formations and reformations that climate change is going to affect. So the cultures of climate change was literally about how the humanities help shepherd with the arts, new cultural collaborations, new forms of community, and a comfort in being together against what is always I suppose for us, an unknown future, but would feel particularly unknown in the era of climate change. I don't think CLI phi is a silver bullet. I think a lot of it reflects on the limitations of the novel form. For instance, in dealing with macroscale and multi-sided phenomenon such as climate change. So in some ways, clarify as about the inadequacy of what art has been in a certain moment of modernity to face what we need as makers, as culture makers for this particular new challenge to humans and non-human life. Graeme, I went, Yeah, Fantastic. I wanted to kind of think to carry on does this idea of affirmative speculation or these anticipatory futures. Thinking about the new and the old and where we make those breakdowns. And there was an excellent review that Jennifer Wenzel did on your book where she talks about your work as a new kind of new materialism. And that invokes labor and capital and class. And these very familiar sort of material is formations that we know from marks at all, right? And so I think you've sort of reformulated that reading and describe your work as new, old Materialism, which I love because I think it's really bringing that, that, that, that old school materialist history into, into play here. And you've also just grabbed your work as appreciating object-oriented work like Jane Bennett has been doing, but also moving in and adjacent way to that. And so I wanted to ask you about these concepts of skill and scale and then also this concept that you, that you talk about called trans corporeal energies. What is that and what does it feel like? When I taught, I start first with skill, which is what I would describe as the meeting of the human and what we call craft. With other forms of matter. I think skill is where the embodied humanity gets intimate with other forms of matter and, and make something. And the matter has agency, as does the human in these situations. And in some cases we have non-human living beings, animals who are part of the process of skill of making a farm, of making a garden, of making a chair. Skill again, as we're different kinds of matter come together, form intimacies and generate artifacts, generate culture, generate forms of social life, generate sustenance. And I think skill has long been the topic of literature. And that's one of the reasons why focus on it as a term. Because I think literature has been fixated on these ways in which bodies come together, feel each other out, and make things happen. That's a fundamental element of plot. That's a fundamental elements of this kind of descriptive ambiance of thick descriptive social novels. So I move from skill and my training in literary studies to work by people like Bruno Latour, Stacey a Lima, who of course coined the concept of trans corporeality. And some of the work of, of people such as, as Bennett, whose work I see is a little bit more object oriented in ways that are not as appealing to me actually, but still admirable and exciting. I'm also influenced by the work of Catherine use off a cultural geographer who writes very compellingly about the ways in which coal in particular underwrites human subjectivity. So when I read people like US often aligned well, for instance, I can't help but think about, and I'll use Judith Butler's term here, the primary vulnerability that we are and have and live as human beings. And Butler talks about that in terms more related to ethical questions of human vulnerability to other humans and the kind of interrelationships or that kind of infer relationality that we experience in social formations. But with Ally Mel, Latour and others were thinking too about how what we are is always a kind of CO, constitution of different forms of matter. And this can be seen in the dark vein in terms of disease, toxicity, toxic poisonings. You can also see, be seen in a brighter way as really just we are what we are because we're in the thick of life. We're going to think of many lives. So I don't think it's possible to think humanity anymore without thinking in terms of these transport coil flows of different kinds of matter at micro scales. Sometimes, not always. And I don't think it's possible to think of skill without kind of going back, retro, fitting, retro understanding skill equally in terms of the micro-scale. For me, energies and energy politics always have to do with life at different scales. On the one hand, we have the energy infrastructures that create, let's say, the grade California water system that makes it possible for LA against all odds and against my own political sensibility sometimes to be a well-watered city. On the other hand, we have micro level relationships with water, with oil, which of course started its life as micro-scale life in ancient oceans. And those micro-scale relationships are living on still in complex polymers that are petrochemical by-products that are in my teeth at this moment. So I live in oil, oil lives and me at the micro level, we're engaged his energies that kind of interpenetrate and live on together. But at the same time, we have the capacity to manipulate large-scale infrastructural forms that make, for instance, our energy grid, which Jane Bennett has written about, I think in an interesting way, as an assemblage of different kinds of actors. You can't, you can't really think energy without thinking it at multiple scales. And the challenge for any thinker and writer is to, I think, pick away inside, choose a point of view in which to get inside these micro and macro scalar realities and to try to bring them together coherently and narrative. And I felt like that was a big challenge for me with living oil because I didn't want to, I didn't want to sort of neglect one scale for the other. But I also wanted to be coherent and I wanted to write in a way that was relatively accessible. I went to one of the things that I found really profound and, and moving about the book. And I think maybe this is one of the linea means that connects those different scales together was your discussion of emotion and effect and the wear. On the one hand that and I think you're, it's like it's not exactly maybe on the sort of critical activist end of things entirely politically correct to say that we love oil, but you do it. I mean, there's, there's a love and a dependence on oil and all these sorts of ways. At the same time that you talk about Petra, melancholia and the grieving. That maybe is, is something that comes along with its age of tough oil. But increasingly we're coming to grieve our relationship to oil. At the same time that we can't let it go. And I just wanted to ask if you could say a little bit more about that and and in your own process perhaps and another people you've talked to, I mean, what are some of the strategies for letting go or for, for coming to a new emotional relationship to oil. I think for me, first of all, to the question of the honesty of loving oil for me. I think it was Zora Neale Hurston who said that it's a lie that's meant to be understood and that the truth essentially is almost never, never something we can communicate very, very comfortable way. I'm an environmentalist and I don't, I don't like tough OIL world. I particularly don't like what it's done to the prospects for democracy. And I don't like what it's done to labor. I don't like what it's doing to the public educational system in this country. There's so many ways in which what, what cheap energy actually helped to build in terms of progressive culture is now in tough OIL world, turned around through all kinds of means that facilitate dark money in jane Mayer's phrase, into something that I feel is a sort profoundly destructive of everything that democratic culture and progressive culture potentially could be. So my politics are pretty clear, but it's certainly isn't the case that it's possible to get outside of oil, least not for me. And I think for many people working in the academy and even for many activists, we are to one degree or another in the wealthier regions of the world in particular, indebted to and effectively attach to fossil fuel and its many byproducts, which sometimes are invisible to us, but nonetheless, all over us and inside our bodies. So to come back to the question of Petra melancholia, this is about grieving, a kind of resource. What used to be called easy or conventional oil that doesn't quite exist in the way that it wants did. And even when it can be found, has profound climate impacts which we now cannot not know. And so the moral obligation to move away from this particular 20th century ener, energy regime is undeniable. At the same time, the pleasure that can be taken in screen cultures and Digital Cultures, which we tend to think of as having no weight in terms of carbon, in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, etc. But which are in fact absolutely tied to grids as is everything else which are often tied to coal. You know, that the indebtedness of almost all cultural production that progressives and even activists engage to fossil fuels is profound. So how does one get out of this conundrum? That was one of the questions that I was certainly grappling with in the book. And I think there are ways to get out of it. I think there are alternatives. I think one of the first alternative is to do something that Jennifer Wenzel is called taking an oil inventory. Really looking at how our lives are intermingled with these substances, literally writing it down, leaving traces for ourselves and others to find. Then in the process of leaving these traces, letting them go, letting them the arrays like so many footprints on the beach. Just to follow up on that really briefly. Because there's a moment where you speak of the sort of the tipping point where you're from Petra melancholia into activism and how that might be different for different people. And he also say, and this really resonates to the era of an increasingly large number of documentary films that are, that are sort of calling us to action, but maybe not always being so specific about what has to be done. But sort of like I've documented this now I'm turning it over to you for action. And you talk about the circuit I think between media empathy and action. And you know, how, you're not, you're not entirely satisfied with that too. And I wanted to see if you could talk a bit more about that. Maybe also say something about the role of the arts here too, which beyond just film-making, but the many sort of artistic engagements I know that you are following and engaged with the different levels. And whether those also have the potential to or, or maybe it's a different circuit you're looking for. Maybe an empathy is not the route to action, but something else. I think the problem with empathy for me, partly sense from my training initially in a 19th-century literatures, american literature, but to some degree, British literature as well. I tend to associate empathy rightly or wrongly. This is a bit reductive with sentimentalism and sentimental culture. And I think a little bit about what James Baldwin had to say about the sentimental novel. Specifically Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, that there is actually a kind of violence that you can find in some of these novels that are supposedly redeeming the poor or the ethnic or racial minority or the slave. In the case of Uncle Tom's Cabin. These kinds of fictions that were meant to spur activism and the sun sync did spur activism, also gave people the luxury of feeling very justified in there and their sensibilities and sensitivity toward an issue and that could easily become an end in itself. Simply the recognition of your fellow feeling becomes the project, the end of the project. Now that said, I'm not entirely against empathy. I don't think anybody could be with who has any interest in, in the ethical turn. I think it is part of that. But how do we change who we are? How do we change our lives? Hot. Part of the problem is moving against governmental, corporate structures and partnerships that seem overwhelmingly powerful and ubiquitous. One of the things I'd like to do with my pedagogy is get my students into some of these systems and allow them to find a voice and a point of view that as a first step only. I'm not saying it's the answer, but it's a first step only. I have a short assignment that I give in fresh men writing classes, fresh person writing classes where I have my students look at a consumer item, pick your favorite consumer item. They all have one, We all have one. Starbucks coffee, whatever it is. And trace it out for me, do a narrative version of a life-cycle assessment, Get on the ground, do some ground-truth and go talk to people at Starbucks, talk to them about their work shifts. Talk about the kind of hours they're keeping. Ask them about their family life. Find out which you can about where that coffee comes from. Find out what it really means when we put a fair trade stamp on coffee. And if your favorite brand has done that, are not find out what those little plastic containers that your Nespresso machine do when they go out into the world after you've used them. Tell me what the world looks like from the point of view of the thing you most like to put into your body or, or adorn it with an wouldn't. When students do that, they perform an active understanding themselves within very complex networks of the materials economy. And they do it very well. They do it with passion and they also come out of it quite often with the sense that they are going to change something about the world. Now, that's the sort of consumer activism, a consumer-based subjectivity that is not the end all of any kind of activist movement. I've been very admirable, excuse me, admiring of activist movements recently. Many of them based on the northwest, that have to do with literally blocking oil and coal trains and attempting to make the necessity defense about those actions in which we say climate change is a more dangerous threat, then whatever threat or illegal transgression is posed by blocking the train. I'm also very interested in atmospheric trust litigation, which was a concept primarily invented by Mary see what at University of Oregon. And this basically has to do with holding governments at all levels responsible for protecting the natural environments in which we wish to live and thrive and when which we wish for our children to live and thrive. So I think there are structural actions that we can get to know and understand. I'm often through processes of law and new and innovative ways of thinking law. And then I think on the other hand, there are these kind of systems level ways of thinking and knowing that or frankly present in the social novel, but are also present in the modes of analysis like life-cycle assessment, which students can do as amateurs in ways that are productive of knowing where they are in the world, simply finding their place in it. We're all very beguiled by market culture and kind of changing the situation from bewilderment to a sense of truly understanding the politics of location to use our enriches term. That's one of my major goals as a teacher. Fantastic. I love this idea of the consumer product biography and night. Without sounding too much like an anthropological conceit. It's sort of like ethnography, commodity chain analysis through the social life of the objectivity. So what a, what a fantastic, What a fantastic kind of experience to have as a student and I'm sure as, as an instructor as well, There's no reason that we can't all go out and actually do that without even the, you know, the pressure of the class to do so. So that might be something to take up on a, on a larger scale. I wanted to ask you to because I know that you've been thinking more recently, I'm working in your writing with these concepts of oil and water. And so what we're struck with when we hear oil and water is the utter in compatibility of the two, right? We have these two liquids. One is more viscous than the other, but it is sort of paradigmatic of incompatibilities, resistance, the inhospitable, these two inhospitable materials coming together. It sort of stands for that. So I was thinking about what does the work, oppositional agents and oppositional materials in that way. And how do you sort of take up these, how do you, and why do you sort of take up the oppositional spaces of oil in water in your thinking and writing. And what's the kind of generative intellectual work that those, those two pieces of material do for you weren't, are doing right now, right? I think any kind of oppositional thinking is at its best heuristic that it kind of opens up. Rather. It opens more kinds of speculative thought and consideration. Of course, it's always also quite limited. I mean, oil and water are both material energies. And they both can be misused socially and they both can be part of a settler colonial or imperial processes. But I like the positionality that so elegantly articulated by David or in his reflections on water and oil where he talks about water is that which is not only in a very essential way and in a very real physical way, so much of what we as humans are, but it's also been a substance that has given birth to. Very interesting ways of thinking through the practice of a commons and how to share out resources in traditional cultures as well as in some modern cultures and some contemporary cultures. And then with oil, as I think or also says rather elegantly, if also reductively, we have a culture of entrepreneurial ism that in many respects, distances the average human being from the land, it gets capacities to work with us. We fly over it, we drive over it, it, it remarkable. Sometimes thrilling speeds. We manage to create beautiful machinery to get at even the toughest oil. But we often don't have the time or so we say to create technologies that are going to remediate the kinds of accident that these new technologies of extraction can bring into being. So oil has so much to do with a kind of human intelligence unchecked and aware of its deep relationship or relationality with other life. Water seems to be quite the opposite about being human as being in relation and being literally constituted by others. So that our positionality is very productive, has been productive in my work to, to think about river systems in particular, as ways of gaining points of view in a particularly beguiling landscape. The urban rivers of LA in Houston, for instance, tell us a lot about where we are. If we can get out on those rivers. They are narrative through lines. So this cycles back a little bit to the conversation we're having about Wi-Fi and sort of speculative fiction before. And not to put you on the spot. But I mean, as someone who's really focuses on this a lot and he's looking at what a film it was looking at a lot of text. I'm just curious if you would recommend, you know, a few pieces that you think are particularly generative, like any, anyone who's interested in energy should really read this work or should watch this movie. And maybe it's something that's a little bit flying under the radar screen, but I'm just curious if you have any sort of special favorites you'd want to share? That's a great question I think. And it could be a long list so you don't have to feel like you're playing favorites. Hard. I wish I had come in with the less I think, yeah. I really like them. Thomas King's the back of a turtle, which I wouldn't exactly call CLI five, but yes. But yes, I would I would because i'm I want I want the I want to clarify to be an unsettled genre. And I want us to think of that kind of anarchic Lee as something that's always in development and never settling in. I am very interested in what's happening in Canada as First Nations communities think about and politically make themselves very known as, as how to describe that the sort of generators of traditional knowledge around ecological management vis-a-vis the kinds of incursions that had been presented by pipelines and other sorts of infrastructure related to oil sands mining. And of course, the kinds of profound pollution that had been generated in great rivers like the Athabasca. That wonderful river flowing north to the Arctic that is now profoundly polluted because of tar sands mining. I think for me. And I don't want to sound like a sort of cooperative in our imperialists, Western or here, or global northerner. But I think it's, it is the moment for those of us who are interested in futures that are productive, generative, and profoundly socially rich futures. To look towards our indigenous political leadership, which is coming out of not just Canada but the United States. There are so many different climate actions, climate documents, and no presentations of traditional knowledge that are being offered to us by native communities. That, that really to me are the best kinds of us, if not speculation, perhaps strong intellectual content for a world that in, in the global Northern imagination has, has not really gone beyond clarify. I don't, I don't find CLI fight in and of itself. Very content rich. But I do find work like Warren carriers work on the oil sands. A wonderful piece called the tar sands, or excuse me, the tar hands on a messy manifesto. Based on the futurist manifesto. Coming out early 20th century, but turning it on its head. I mean, that's one of the most interesting pieces of cloth I have ever read. Most people aren't reading or in care use tar hands, a messy manifesto as clarify. But they ought to. Because I think what it's really saying is, we live in a world where a lot of the values that are associated with ecology and even with progress and even with a kind of super modernity had been profoundly misunderstood. And it's time to go back. And going back. We're actually going into a real future, not a future. That's just a rehash of dystopian fantasy. Another piece I had mentioned It's worth looking at, is a podcast called We are alive. The graduate student of mine has written about this and published on it. It's based in LA, it's about zombies. It extensively. He doesn't have a thing to do with climate. But the fanfiction community that's been generated by it has been all about, or at least profoundly and in very interesting and exciting and material ways about living in drought stricken mega cities in the 21st century. So it's, it's that kind of popular DIY version of clarify coming about through podcasts, coming about through can echo and future coast. Then I think this really interesting movement to think through with traditional knowledge communities, how to do science in the age of climate change that I see is as most productive of, of real-world that I myself might want to live in with others. We love zombies. And I think the zombies is a great metaphor for something that you were talking about yesterday in terms of us all the petroleum, something like dance the way you put it. What's definitely this has been a really fantastic, very thoughtful, deep meditation on a lot of different issues and contingencies that we're dealing with in terms of living with oil literally. But we have one final question for you. And that is that I know that you spent many years living and working in Santa Barbara, living near Santa Barbara and working at UC, Santa Barbara. And I think one of the things that's very striking for people who visit Santa Barbara expecting to see this really pristine and beautiful beach and the Pacific sort of rolling over your toes is that you look out on, on the horizon. You scan in Santa Barbara and for many decades you have seen oil platforms on the horizon and it's kind of disturbing a dissonant and doesn't quite work in that context. And of course, the Santa Barbara Channel has also been the site of at least two major oil spills and contamination and all the after effects of that. But I think one of the other interesting things about the Santa Barbara Channel in this environmental space is that it is also a place where there's natural seepage of oil emerging out of the rock formations underneath to see bad. That sort of ooze out and in and percolate up through the earth and end up on the shore and news globs, oil. And I, I've learned that it's actually the largest naturally occurring oil seepage anywhere in the world. And I didn't, I didn't know that. But I do know that in pre-colonial times, an indigenous population that lives very near to Santa Barbara called the Chumash, used to make use of this natural oil seepage for their boats and canoes. And they would use it as a kind of dark and going to be water sealer and water protected. And also use that as a kind of cocking Ajanta issue to plug holes. And so there's a way in which they're using oil in, in a way that's very compatible with good human life to be able to go fishing and live your life. And so, when I think about this contrast between what I sense is the kinda good way of using oil that the Chumash did historically. And the way we're using oil now that is madly burning it and combusting it and then living in all its After Effects. We want it to end this, this interview with the question of what should we do with oil? Just a gloss on your comment about the naturally occurring oil. When I was riding living oil, I interviewed a woman. Well, I probably shouldn't name who creates paintings? Well, textural, sculptural paintings from that natural seepage. And she was talking to me about that process and started to tear up and she said I every time I I touched the substance, I think of all the children in the neighborhood that used to run in when they were little children with this on their feet and I would help them help clean off their feet in. And she said this to me as a substance of family and love. Well, which again just shows us how complicated living oil as what it, what it is even in a modern context, and how it can be good. Hi. I don't have any I'm not an engineer. I'm not pol, political scientist, I'm a literary scholar. What I can say is that I think clearly this is a system that made a certain sense at a certain time. And it brought some really beautiful things into being as well as some horrors. It's time to transition off. It's time to really think hard about regulatory measures with these tough oil procedures in particular. Who's paying for the damage roads and fracking regions, for instance, who's paying for it the lives, often indigenous Americans that are being taken because truckers and these frack regions in the backend, for instance, are actually encouraged to drive faster than they should with the heavy loads that they carry. And there are so many car accidents and these regions having to do with these transport trucks from the frack sites that people are dying. Who's paying for the rape culture is that surround these boom towns and always have since the history of boom towns, surrounded boom towns. Who was, who was, who was actually thinking about these social costs, let alone paying for them. I think it's time to really come together as a social community, not one simply based on market citizenship. One based on a strong desire to make the pest social surround for both humans and non-humans in this, in this nation and frankly worldwide. And, and that involves partly regulation, which has become the absolute word or the devil for many of our politicians. It also just involves a much more profound sense of what it means to be a part of any kind of political community, whether we want to use the word citizenship or not. Civic values, civic practice, have to come back to the four civics classes have to be sexy again. And part of everyday education, I think are we making oil culture has to do with remaking the social first. And you know, as, as that happens, it's going to be easier to push for technological knowledge and skill which already exists to be implemented politically. It'll be a transition. The transition is going to involve its own political messiness and its own social costs. No energy system lacks. Political complication, fails to attract aggressive entrepreneurial behavior. So to me, it's, it's not so much that or hilus killing us is that we're killing ourselves. And I think that's why humanists and social scientists have to be part of this conversation. And we have to invest in education. Well, we couldn't agree with you more. Stephanie, learn Asia. We are so happy to talk with you and I'm so glad to post. Did you hear it rise to join our little energy humanities conversation and we hope you'll come back many times, maybe even. I hope so too. Thank you so much. Okay. Take care.