ABSTRACT
In this final conversation, contributors bring into focus energy as “power”—who is and isn’t empowered as energy flows across human and natural boundaries. Yet, building from their case studies in the Gulf of Mexico and the Gulf of Guinea, they interrogate prevailing assumptions about the seemingly obvious “naturalness” of energy resources and their effects within existing political and other structures. Energy, they show, never just “is”; energy is always already connecting, integrating, and reinforcing people and nature while also dismantling, undermining, and reorganizing these relationships and boundaries. Why? Because the structured reality of the objective world is always affected by and reflected in the cultural filters people—particularly “local” people in resource-producing regions but also communities of engineers, managers, planners, oil workers, and wider publics—use to make sense of changes thrust upon them by processes emanating from the voracious appetite of the global growth system.
