Throughout world history, energy use and income have been tightly correlated. In the last fifty years, however, high-income countries have gotten significantly more efficient at turning energy into economic output—and it remains unclear why. American energy history provides a unique test case to explore these questions, as it kept good records through multiple energy transitions. We use archival sources to construct a sectoral-level data set of energy consumption from 1800 to 2016. These data reveal that the principal drivers of increasing American efficiency and fuel transitions have both changed over time. Before 1900, households switching from wood hearths to coal stoves accounted for the bulk of these improvements; later, especially after 1970, industry’s relative decline was a major factor. Our data likewise show that most energy transitions take place sector-by-sector, rather than an economy-wide adoption of a new fuel. Other notable trends can be observed. The sole economy-wide transition (and thus, the closest possible analogue to proposed unilateral transitions) is that of wood to coal in the late nineteenth century. Across American history, while industry and transportation have ballooned in total energy use, agriculture has remained quite steady over time, using about as much energy per person in 2017 as it did in 1800. Overall, we show that the American case is highly idiosyncratic and historically specific, and that the insights we gain from it lie beyond simple extrapolation of trends into the future or to the economies of other countries.

A historical contingency – tied to colonial formations – made the production of sugar and tobacco relevant both in Brazil and in Cuba. The productive process of those breeds was registered in two of the most important works in both Brazilian and Cuban economic literature: Cultura e opulência do Brasil por suas drogas e minas (the work of one André João Antonil) and the Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar (written by Cuban Anthropologist Fernando Ortiz). While being the products of vastly different contexts, and referring to realities that, although resembling, also have a lot of dissimilarities, the minute attention these two books dedicate to the interaction between the vegetal species they are concerned with and the productive systems to which they are connected merit some comparative analysis. My argument centers on the role attributed by the texts to the sugarcane in the economic system. While in Antonil’s work the sugarcane appears as an allegorical subject that undergoes the “suffering” necessary to the sugar productive chain, therefore mystifying the suffering of slaves in that same process, in Ortiz’s oeuvre sugarcane – more specifically, the constraints of its large scale production – seems to be a conditioning factor for the constitution of the Plantation system itself. In spite of their differences, these analyses allow for us to consider the operation and instrumentalization of vegetal bodies in what Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing, among others, have called the “Plantationcene” – the social and environmental conditions emerging from sugar plantations in Early Modern times, which continue to impact industrial agriculture and global ecosystems to this day.

This article reimagines the energy crisis of the 1970s not as a fuel panic, but as a profound destabilization of energetic life. By offering a new narrative arc for an event historians have increasingly come to see as central in the transformation of US politics, I show how this crucial decade in American politics both exposed the often unspoken tenets of American energy politics–about who could access energy and for what purpose, under what conditions it should be produced, and who should bear the risks of a particular energy system–and spurred growing energetic inequalities which have persisted into the present. I trace this destabilization of energetic life across the realms of energy production, electricity generation, and energy consumption in order to tell a more holistic story about why an energy crisis had already begun before imminent threats of fuel shortages and that this crisis would have occurred even if the disruptions in international oil supply which have typically framed the narratives of this crisis had never taken place. The oil version of this story, privileging the automobile, the suburbs, and the military, is only half the crisis’s meaning, and it is a white, male, and elite story. Telling a wider story of the energy crisis, entangled with crises of urban finance, racist policing, the implementation of environmental regulation, labor politics, and the changing shape of public utilities, this article helps us place Black urban communities and activists, housewives and care workers, and rural Americans at the center of a story from which they have usually been excluded.

This article surveys Portuguese Jesuit Fernão Cardim’s Tratados da Terra e Gente do Brasil [Treatise on the Land and People of Brazil] (1583-1601) to highlight the role of indigenous informants in providing local medicinal knowledge for missionaries, who used this information to gain spiritual power and authority over native communities. Local medical knowledge became a necessary tool for conversion, proving indispensable to the missionary’s quest to “liberate” natives from Satan’s grip. Because of these pursuits, Cardim’s writings give us significant insight—though incomplete and through the lens of empire and religious dogma—into contact-era kinship systems, mythological structures, and local medicinal plants. A study of Cardim’s manuscript also has larger implications for early modern transatlantic studies—as it was stolen by English corsairs, sold on the London book market, and then translated and incorporated in Samuel Purchas’ encyclopedic volume of travel narratives Hakluytus Posthumous or Purchas His Pilgrimes (1625)—, evidence of the larger tensions between European inter-imperial rivalries, as major European powers raced to acquire the information necessary to commodify American nature for European consumption through trade-based expansion. The pirating of Cardim’s manuscripts also goes to show that this information regarding American medicinal plants was coveted in and across early modern European empires. This focus on New World plants evinces the way in which Jesuits Christianized American nature in order to make it more amenable to European consumption and commodification, though Europeans did not find all plants fit for “Christian” use. In several instances, for example, missionaries determined that certain plants could not be divorced from their satanic nature (i.e. Christianized) and, therefore, were condemned. In this fashion, Jesuits tried to regulate plant use based on the religious politics that arose at the juncture of ritual, healing power, and spiritual authority in colonial missions.

This dissertation chapter addresses how the Mississippi River is figured as a connective force in different imaginaries of the future coast of Louisiana. The river is widely understood by engineers, geologists, and ecologists as a long-term source of nourishing sediment; many refer to “reconnecting the river to its delta” as the primary way to counteract land loss. Yet for many coastal communities, the river’s freshwater is more than a medium: its presence radically alters the salinity and livelihood of the estuarine ecosystems on which they depend. Further, there is public debate about the pollutants carried by the river, and whether they are sufficiently diluted to have negligible effects on life in the estuary. This chapter argues that advocates of wetland restoration often rhetorically figure the river as empty of particular material qualities that manifest in the near future—including, seemingly paradoxically, its fresh-waterness—in an effort to frame it as a nourishing, connective force in the far future.

This chapter examines divergent relationships with radioactive ecologies that have been emerging in the aftermath of the nuclear accident to ensure the health and well-being of the exposed public in Japan. By juxtaposing the responses to the nuclear accident by the Japanese government, health recuperation programs, and residents who returned to previous evacuation zones, it discusses the different “eco-logics” articulated by these actors on how to deal with the radioactive contamination of their living environment. While the government has emphasized “containment,” organizers and participants of health recuperation programs have practiced detachment from their radioactive ecologies. In the meantime, residents who have returned to previous evacuation zones have increasingly intensified their relationship with their radioactive ecologies. I argue that emerging health practices, and their eco-logics, shed light on how the unwanted consequences of nuclear and industrial modernity have been dealt with by different actors who have historically taken up unequal burden to care for the ruins of modernization projects.

This dissertation chapter develops an ontology of energy and an ethics of expenditure through a political ecology of bicycle infrastructure in Copenhagen, Denmark. Asking how the Danish transit model exploits embodied pleasures of commuting as a means to maximally efficient emissions, it offers a social theory of enjoyment as a renewable resource.

“If the tale of agricultural improvement could be told in any two syllables, it would be those which spell turnips,” wrote W. Wealands Robson in the opening of his 1890 article Turnip Husbandry.  By growing winter feed on land that would otherwise lay unproductive during years of regeneration, turnip agriculture increased herd size and manure inputs. This description highlights England’s movement towards convertible husbandry—a diverse design that is difficult to pin down, but can be well described by the more efficient relationship that Robson invokes between increased soil productivity and land use efficiency from the manure contributions of larger herds supported by fodder or feed innovation in place of fallows, self-sustaining meadows, marsh, or moor.  The turnip has often taken center stage as the root of modernity in the historiography of the British Agricultural Revolution, and historians have long used turnips as an indicator of the transition to convertible tillage and the privatized land tenure thought necessary for fodder innovation.   This chapter moves beyond the historiographic turnip-philia to present overlooked evidence that eighteenth and nineteenth century farmers developed sophisticated spatial and temporal design strategies to integrate the yellow flowering B. napus rapeseed plants often sown for oil crushing into field turnip agriculture for convertible husbandry.  It turns out that nearly every economic contribution made by the turnip was contingent upon its combinations with other species.  Researchers have paid less attention to alternative fodders, though historical sources are replete with references to B. napus in convertible husbandry.  When B. napus serves as an indicator species, the narrative shifts from yields per acre per worker to total gains in net primary product, from nitrogen fixation to soil pathogen suppression, from technology development to design innovation, and from depopulation to increased carrying capacity through enclosure.  Designs that incorporated B. napus increased total annual planted acres by harnessing the crop as one of the first winter feeds and green fallow species.  This extended seasonal plantings and introduced grazing to land traditionally rotated through bare fallow.  Finally, as B. napus was sometimes the only crop that flourished on moor and marsh, it drove increases in yields per acre by expanding the carrying capacity of waste grazing for livestock.

In her third novel, A cidade sitiada (1949; trans. The Besieged City, 2019), Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector offers a powerful reflection on urban growth in Brazil in the first decades of the twentieth century. Based on theories of nonhuman agency, the chapter shows how environmental change is conveyed in this novel through lengthy descriptions of the fictional suburb of São Geraldo, which enable Lispector to relativize human agency on the grammatical and narrative levels. In a novel heavily populated by objects, machines, streets, animals, and other nonhuman agents positioned as syntactical subjects, the narrative hierarchy between an environmental background and a foreground populated by human characters becomes blurred. By reading the novel against developmentalist theories of social and economic progress in mid-twentieth-century Brazil, this chapter treats A cidade sitiada as a locus for intense reflection on the potential and the limits of urbanization in Latin America.

Historians have gained much traction on the intersection of biopolitical control, colonial medicine, and empire in examinations of the plague in India, and particularly in Bombay. David Arnold labeled the measures enacted in India against plague – most of which were modelled after the original measures in Bombay – “A new interventionism,” marking the increasing invasion of imperial order into the homes and bodies of Bombay’s Indian residents. These unprecedented laws reorganized the geography of biopolitics in the city. Before the outbreak of plague, interfaces of the municipal government and the colonial body occurred at an impersonal scale – through the regulation of municipal sanitary practice, workplace conditions, and urban space; after, the individual body became the focus of imperial attention and action. Bombay’s lower classes found themselves prodded, examined, detained and inoculated by representatives of sanitary structures. Their skin, flesh, and immune systems became sites of imperial regulation. Geographic changes also occurred across ecological scales, affecting both humans and nonhumans. The reorganization of people on the Island promoted distinct changes in population geography, inciting sanitary challenges; meanwhile, at the local level, cleansing and disinfecting practices coupled with slum clearances destroyed the habitats of both human and nonhuman residents.
As an etiology of plague that included rats gained popularity among the British medical community, rats also fell under the biopolitical gaze of the colonial government. Across India, experiments arose that subsumed rats into the colonial medical infrastructure and transformed them from commensal nuisances to vectors of disease. Plague measures transformed the position of rats in the city, both symbolically and literally. Sanitary measures resulted in the displacement and destruction of habitat for rats, placing fleas and their resident microbe, Yersinia pestis, into closer contact with uninfected humans, and created new habitats that suited rat populations in the form of internment camps. Drawing on Gregg Mitman’s framework, “ecologies of injustice,” along with niche construction theory, this chapter explores how human and rat demography changed as a result of the plague epidemic, and how the emergence of the rat-flea theory as the dominant epistemology in the early 20th century changed the position of humans, rats, fleas, and Yersinia pestis in the city and across India.

Mexico in the sixteenth century was a rapidly changing world, marred as much by drought and deforestation as by violence and rampant disease. In the 1560s and 1570s, vast tracts of Indigenous territory in Central Mexico were doled out to Spanish settlers. This posed a problem for friars and Indigenous communities whose identities and claims to legitimacy were bound up in highly specific conceptions of territory and place. But it also posed a problem for monastic mural painting, not least because the materials for preparing plaster were in short supply. This chapter of my dissertation argues that the landscape murals painted in the Franciscan monastery at Huaquechula (modern Puebla state) register structural changes around land and labor in the Atlixco Valley. By visualizing the potent—but now rapidly disappearing—Central Mexican countryside, Indigenous artists used pictorial landscape to contend with environmental crisis and its impact on the entangled yet shifting domains of human and non-human life in early colonial Mexico. In so doing, the paintings draw attention to how Indigenous artists addressed social and environmental instability through monastic mural painting.

In the early-twentieth century localities along the Gulf of Mexico incorporated a new system of industrial beekeeping called modern apiculture. This method aimed to maximize the production of honey and wax with the breeding of the honeybee Apis Mellifera. Although this method was developed in the mid-nineteenth century in northern regions of the hemisphere, for some modern apiculturists it became unexpectedly successful in tropical regions. The Yucatan Peninsula, in Mexico, and Cuba acted as locations for experimenting with industrial honey production and the breeding of the honeybee. This paper illustrates how in the early-twentieth century a community of apiculturists and amateurs flourished in these locations. They experimented, shared and published knowledge about modern apiculture in the tropic, and their innovations contributed and were crucial for the expansion of industrial apiculture and the honeybee around the world. While they were creating a new regional habitat for Apis Mellifera, they were also reshaping the role of native bees, such as the stingless bee Melipona Beecheii, and the knowledge and technologies of other honey economies.

What comes after the end of the world? This paper discusses late-Victorian fiction that speculated about what human life might look like in the wake of radical change–apocalyptic, technological, or revolutionary. Novels such as Erewhon (1871), The Coming Race (1871), News from Nowhere (1890), and The Purple Cloud (1901) adopted vertiginously long time scales in order to tell stories about the end of human society, and what might come next. These wild imaginings are often understood to arise from collisions between scientific discoveries and economic unrest in late-Victorian Britain, when neither society nor the human form itself could any longer be seen as stable and permanent. But the gambit of this paper is to ask whether these fictions of transformed futures might in retrospect become an uncanny mirror of our present worries–and whether they are perhaps not so wild after all.

This is a personal essay, envisioned as part of a coda to my dissertation, about a visit to the room of extinct and endangered species at the museum of natural history in Paris. It offers an extended reflection from a public visitor’s perspective on the kind of attention natural history museums might make possible, and the kinds of attention they foreclose. I ask what it does to my awareness of other living things to be in that solemn elegiac space of recognition for life forms that have passed or are passing out of existence. Touching upon recent scholarship on extinction narratives by Ursula Heise and recent studies of natural history museums, I reflect on the experience of death to which the natural history museum exposes the visitor, and consider what specific role elegy might still have to play in how we attend to the natural world.  My dissertation is about the intelligence of attention to the natural world within the disciplines of lyric poetry and natural history, explored through a series of historically and geographically heterogeneous comparative case studies. The coda will add my own experience of a claim the natural world makes upon attention, and the problem of expressing it, to those I have studied textually in the main body of the dissertation. Ultimately this coda will also include at least a second part in which I describe the very different—sustained, quotidian, close-to-home—experience of observation on the Wooded Isle.