ABSTRACT
The chapters that constitute the second section of Cultures of Energy share several orienting themes concerning technologies, meanings, and cosmologies of energy. Authors Stephanie Rupp, Chelsea Chapman, Sarah Strauss, Devon Reeser, and Arthur Mason address energy issues as they intersect with notions of power in the senses of both agency and control. Across the diverse contexts presented in these chapters, people’s perceptions of energy are entangled with views of their rights as individuals to electricity, to land and landscapes, to a way of life, and to expert knowledge. The value(s) and cost(s) of energy are not evenly distributed within communities or across a larger society or nation; the formal, economic value of energy resources themselves shift, and so too do cultural, substantive values of energy change over place and time. Energy seems to be perceived as an invisible substance that nevertheless exerts a powerful force. While energy seems to be the invisible, taken-for-granted lubricant of contemporary Euro-American society, energy is suddenly visible and valuable in its scarcity and impending—or actual—absence. In the following discussion, authors in this section offered wide-ranging responses to the following questions (and to each others’ discussions): What kind of rationality do people engage when they talk about energy? Is energy something that is absolute in its measure, quality, or quantity? Or is energy something relative—and if relative, then relative to what? How is energy valued? If there are multiple different groups of “energy users” or “energy actors” in your field of research, can you describe the different kinds of paradigms of energy that are in play across the spectrum of users? Devon Reeser
In my research it became apparent that people have an easier time forming a “rational” connection to physical, tangible energy resources. The ideas of oil and gas are more “rational” than wind, for example, because they are more visible. Burning oil and gas produces fire; we connect with that kind of energy. As proven energy sources, material energy resources seem more “rational” than alternative energy. Wyoming residents are wary of wind energy because they doubt that wind can be a tangible, reliable, “rational” source of power, and its development would break the tradition of energy use that is ingrained in the state’s culture. A grassroots political action group protesting wind energy development uses language such as “industrialization of the mountains,” indicating a cultural sentiment that using wind—something valued as clean and pure—for energy is irrational and even toxic. The inability to control the wind itself makes it a less “rational” energy source than the traditional physical sources of energy that are extracted and sold by the barrel for human consumption.
Perhaps the “rationality” of energy has deeper connections to a sense of security in cultural traditions of energy. For example, Paraguay shares the largest hydroelectric dam in the world with Brazil; nearly all electricity is generated at this plant and another dam shared with Argentina. In rural Paraguay, where I have also been conducting research, while most locales have access to electrical power the people have no control over its reliability. Frequent outages from infrastructural and political issues drive people to rely on alternative energy sources, mainly gas-powered stoves or forest resources. Most households in the town where I live and conduct my research rely on three different sources of fuel for cooking: gas, wood/charcoal, and electric. People cannot rely on a constant provision of electricity, and gas supply to the country is often cut in the winter months due to increased usage of gas for heating in richer neighboring countries. People rely on wood and charcoal because they can harvest those sources of energy locally. Hence, stoves that use wood and charcoal have a higher value because of their reliability. People need energy, and traditional, proven sources of energy that they can control and quantify, and resources that have an immediate connection to direct energy output (resources that they can burn) are more “rational” to people in rural Paraguay.
Sarah StraussPart of the problem, at least in terms of research on energy in my experiences in the U.S. and Switzerland, is that people don’t talk about energy just as they don’t talk about sewers or other parts of our domestic infrastructure. It is a given that when you turn on the light switch, the darkness evaporates. When there is an absence of energy flowing through the system, as in a blackout, then that is of course noted with annoyance. But otherwise, I have found that many of my conversations about energy—even with people who are otherwise quite environmentally aware—end up quite quickly with a sense of both puzzlement and intrigue, as people respond, “I never thought about it [energy] before.” The absence of the vocabulary of energy is striking. Even when speaking directly about energy production—wind versus coal, for example—the conversation is usually about the impact of the physical structures or substance (towers, blades, coal dust/particulate air pollution) and not about the output, the energy itself that is produced by the infrastructure. Even in my Swiss field site of Leukerbad, where a direct link is visible between the flipping of a light switch and the flow of a stream to generate hydropower, people did not seem to make note of or be concerned about their relationship to energy resources.
Chelsea ChapmanI agree with you, and also want to add that energy might be more or less visible in its absence depending on one’s socioeconomic position. The energy poverty I encounter here in Alaska reminds me of teaching at public schools in Berkeley and Oakland and hearing about the hardships of unpaid electric bills that caused blackouts and shortages at the household level, alongside the regional rolling brownouts happening statewide at the same time. Not being able to make breakfast before school because “power’s out” for some kids, but not all, got me thinking about how absence and visibility are uneven, even in high-consumption societies like the United States.
I’ll share a few ways in which energy is valued in its presence or absence here in Alaska. Energy prices are among the highest in the country, and people consume the most hydrocarbon fuels per capita nationwide (three times more than residents of Wyoming, the next biggest consumer). So energy is made visible by its (socially and economically produced) scarcity. Also, many people in and near Fairbanks—where I am based—live in off-grid homes or quasi-off-grid cabins like mine. I haul water in five-gallon jugs once per week and receive a (very expensive) tank load of kerosene heating oil once every winter. I don’t experience energy poverty, but I guess, to state the obvious, things we consume are more visible because we have to carry them.
But the real energy poor tend to be rural indigenous residents living in villages of a few dozen to a few hundred mostly Alaska Native people, which are accessible by air or water but are off the road network. Here, cost is part but not all of energy’s visibility. Rural fuel prices are really, really high: eight dollars per gallon of heating oil, and up to ten dollars per gallon of gasoline in some communities in the wintertime. Fuel prices go up when it’s more expensive to transport; these seasons coincide with the coldest winter months, when the most fuel is consumed and it’s the hardest to move around. The weather renders energy movement more visible and more tenuous. Rural residents often bring up the additional costs of energy (burned elsewhere but sourced in Alaska) on their local environments; as the media and academic lens has focused so closely on Arctic climate change, a lot of people are acutely aware not only of local climate impacts (forest fires, eroding river-banks, melting permafrost) but also of global consumption arrangements in which energy comes from their land and resources but fuels lifestyles and communities in other parts of the nation. And they don’t hesitate to add the unquantified, “real” cost of energy as it directly impoverishes their lands and subsistence food sources.
I wonder too if, alongside the burden of energy poverty, the coinciding (moral and economic) obligations to conserve aren’t also unequally distributed. In some communities in rural Alaska, NGOs and state agencies have installed meters inside houses so that residents can watch their consumption go up or down, with the idea that this quantification will make energy more visible and promote conservation. This effort is certainly worthy, but is it unfair to impose this kind of energy self-surveillance on such a small fraction of energy consumers, while people in Fairbanks or Anchorage aren’t compelled to do the same? Here in town, a contingent of pro-development folks proudly leave their trucks idling for hours while they work or shop, as an act of defiance against “the eco-police” and the ongoing “theft” of Alaska’s oil resources by the EPA and the Obama administration. Their somewhat theatrical use of energy to display an unnecessarily running machine in political protest makes it visible, like the meters, but perhaps in a way that’s most resonant in a place where energy and its sources are constantly contested.
Arthur MasonI want to jump in with a quick reminder that the intersection of visibility and rationality that we keep returning to was also of specific interest to Bronislaw Malinowski. Recall, for example, his demonstration of how ritual lends a meaningful structure to the uncertainties of open-ocean fishing (where both fish and land are nonvisible) yet is absent altogether in spaces of high visibility, such as inner-lagoon fishing (where both fish and land are visible). Malinowski used this example to illustrate that magic functions to protect the rational productive enterprise in contexts of insecurity. I have found the same use of magical thinking and magical practices to offset insecurity in my work with energy consultants. Certain kinds of visibility serve as forms of technique for advancing thought on what is rational productive activity in capitalist energy production. By rational, I mean that productive activity must always strive for a greater intensity of separation between what is discretionary from what is routine activity. And here I refer perhaps simply to an efficiency of thought that extends to all facets of capitalist life, whether separating managers (whose “thoughts” are qualitative) from laborers (whose rewards are quantitative and based on rates of production), to separating facts (“known knowns”) from risk (“known unknowns”) and uncertainty itself (“unknown unknowns”).
Stephanie RuppIn my research on energy in New York City, there seem to be very distinct groups of energy “actors,” and these roughly disaggregated clumps of people seem to have very distinct paradigms for what energy is and how it works in their lives. Here are some examples. The city is full of people who understand and use energy in technical ways: electricians, linesmen for utility companies, people who come to install electronic devices. The city is full of people who think about energy in metaphysical ways: people who go to have their chakras balanced, people who practice yoga. People very often think of the city itself as having energy, as if the people and their creative juices vibrate together to produce some kind of collective buzz that makes the city alive, vibrant, and endlessly charging ahead. Most people don’t really think about energy in the mundane, technical sense at all. New Yorkers are saturated in energy and seem to consider it right and normal that there should be lights and electronic gadgets all around them. But unless there has been a recent blackout or some other event that has suddenly made energy (and therefore individual agency) disappear, New Yorkers seem to disregard energy altogether. When there is a blackout, people seem to think of the institutions or corporations that control energy as somewhat sinister. ConEd, the primary utility company in New York City, seems to evoke a deep public suspicion of institutions that have too much power—the power to provide or curtail power itself, in the form of electricity, to individual, ordinary people. And then there are people who trade “energy futures” and other energy investment instruments on Wall Street: how much more abstract can you get?
But these various registers of power almost seem like nonintersecting circles on a Venn diagram. People don’t necessarily think that energy in the form of electricity is the same thing as energy in the form of a chakra, for example, but metaphorically both forms of energy accomplish similar ends: enabling individuals to realize their potential, to achieve their goals, either immediate or long-term. Although the conceptual circles of “energy actors” and their beliefs about energy seem to be quite disparate, one of the things that brings them together is the underlying idea that energy is power as a force, as an ability, and involving (promoting or preventing) dominion or control over something.
Chelsea ChapmanThere are a few kinds of “energy actors” that surface in energy conflict here in interior Alaska. Energy workers at the local refineries, power plants, and support industries for Prudhoe Bay and the Usibelli coal mine, whose livelihoods depend on production of power from fossil resources, tend to convey an idea of latent underground treasures alongside their technical energy expertise. Renewable energy developers tend to share this paradigm of latent energy, albeit in their vision energy is “stranded” in different substances. Policy makers depend on the production of (pipe)dreams about energy, including natural gas pipelines, expanded development, fracking proposals, socially/environmentally responsible development, energy access, energy inequality, and developing stranded renewable energy re-sources. Neo-Pentecostal Christians depend on a spiritual energy rising from Alaska to compel a nationwide revival movement resulting in theocratic takeover of government, civil society, and economics. This paradigm is often shared by the policy makers and often shows up in talk about “God-given” physical energy resources divinely placed in Alaska to support an emergent Christian dominion. People—usually but not always indigenous—who live near energy-producing landscapes depend simultaneously on fossil energy (and the accompanying environmental contradictions) to live, hunt, and travel. At the same time, they also depend on the energy they draw from eating wild meat and plants, which they see as being endangered by fossil production. Finally, Alaska Native elders and others speak of a personal and social energy (tyea in Lower Tanana Athabascan) that circulates via correct and balanced relationships among humans, animals, and land.
Thinking of Stephanie’s nonintersecting Venn diagram, perhaps the overlap for all these paradigms (beyond the nomenclature of energy) might be their relationship to place and identity. The various individuals involved in these groups have particular ways of imagining Alaska—or specific cultural landscapes within it, or even geological formations below ground—that are connected to ways of imagining themselves and that have political implications. Not only are many of Alaska’s energy regulators and legislators involved in neo-Pentecostal churches that proselytize energy resource development and consumption at any cost, but the broader rhetoric of stranded energy (and the obligation to liberate and harness it) continues to justify the corruption, social inequality, and environmental damage in the Alaskan fossil energy scene, as it has since the pipeline days in the 1970s. I’m interested in thinking more about metaphors of energy as a force or as a form of control—something to harness—versus energy as something that can’t be controlled or harnessed but for which people themselves are conduits and transmitters. Without overstating the relation of energy to capitalism, it seems relevant that Western societies tend to naturalize their control over ever-grander sources of energy (coal, oil, atomic) as an aspect of dominion over nature. But other paradigms exist that emphasize relationality and, while people who are concerned with tyea wouldn’t say that it is the same thing as coal energy or crude oil energy any more than a New Yorker might claim electricity and chakras to be the same, they do point out that both forms physically come from the land, just via different ways of relating to it.
