Carbon Nation

Fossil Fuels in the Making of American Culture

By: Bob Johnson

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Hardcover | 5 December 2014

At a Glance

Hardcover
264 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
22.86 x 15.24 x 1.91

Hardcover

$143.99

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Fossil fuels power our cars, our food supply, our climate-controlled homes, our work, and our play. That much we know. What we understand less, and what this book makes clear, is how fossil fuels also condition Americans' sensory lives, erotic experiences, and aesthetics; how they structure what we assume to be normal and healthy; and how they prop up a distinctly modern bargain with nature that allows populations and economies to grow wildly beyond the previously understood limits of the organic economy. Carbon Nation ranges across film and literary studies, journalism, politics, art history, and ecology, to chart the course by which prehistoric carbon calories influenced--in both conscious and unconscious ways--the modern American economy and body. This includes our ways of being, sensing, and knowing as different classes, races, sexes, and conditions learned to embrace, absorb, and navigate the material manifestations, cultural potentialities, and myriad costs of fossil fuels.

Combining historical ecology with cultural criticism, this book reveals the profound depths of our dependencies on carbon and the long repressed cultural history of our evasion and neglect of those dependencies. The ecological roots of modern America are introduced in the first half of the book with the revolution in material growth generated by the move from limited organic soil resources to subsoil energies. In the works of Eugene O'Neill, Upton Sinclair, Sherwood Anderson, and Stephen Crane, the author exposes how coal as a cultural object is used to suppress our dependencies, buried beneath modernist narratives of progress, consumption, and unbridled growth. In films like Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times and George Stevens's Giant we discover cinematic expressions of our deep-seated anxieties about living in a dizzying new world wrought by fossil fuels.

Any discussion of fossil fuels must go beyond energy policy and technology. As Bob Johnson reminds us, in provocative and powerful ways, what we take to be natural in the modern world is, in fact, historical, and our history and our culture have risen from this relatively recent embrace of the coal mine, the stoke hole, and the oil derrick.

Industry Reviews

"Johnson has crafted a unique and exciting interdisciplinary treatise on the concept of energy in American life that profoundly informs our understanding of the basic cultural patterns of twentieth-century living. His writing style is spry and intelligent, while his insights are provocative and terribly important and should inspire scholars in a number of fields."--Brian Black, author of Crude Reality: Petroleum in World History and Petrolia: The Landscape of America's First Oil Boom

"Bob Johnson examines the shift away from renewable energy to fossil fuels during the century before the energy crisis of the 1970s, and he explores the ambivalent cultural consequences of that transformation, as Americans sought to ignore its environmental costs as they embraced a narrative of technological empowerment"--David E. Nye, author of Technology Matters

"Armed with a dazzling array of facts and the insights of cultural criticism, Bob Johnson probes the subsoil ecology of the modern self, those psychic and material traumas that comprise the deepest collateral damage of our now international carbon economy."--Stephanie LeMenager, author of Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century

A welcome addition to the history of energy transitions, and one that will be particularly insightful for those seeking a broad and thoughtful introduction to energy history."--Canadian Journal of History

"Johnson productively employs both social and media theory to uncover a rich cultural history of America's energy use."--H-Net Reviews

"Johnson not only eloquently examines the integral role of fossil fuel in ushering profound changes in American culture, he also offers insightful analyses of cultural texts like plays and film that narrate these shifts."--Environmental History

"A field-shaping work of scholarship that will be useful to scholars and students in energy studies, the history of technology, literature, American studies and many other disciplines."--Technology and Culture

"Challenges historians to elevate energy to the level of race, class, and gender, or even the metahistorical category of capitalism."--Journal of American History

"At a time when climate change has focused much of our attention on the economic and environmental impacts of a carbon-based economy, Johnson examines instead its influence on American culture. the result is a thought-provoking journey through the past that makes useful contributions to cultural history and to the growing discipline of energy history."--American Historical Review

"A concise, compelling account of a paradox--how today's knowledge of ecology and energy bring positive environmental change well within the range of possibility, and how at the same time modern culture evinces and intractable resistance to letting go of fossil fuels. On these terms, Carbon Nation makes a remarkable contribution to the growing field of energy studies in history and elsewhere in the haumanities."--Journal of Interdisciplinary History

"Johnson calls on a vast array of sources to effectively demonstrate the primordial fear and loathing that festers within the orchestrated embrace of US society and fossil fuel's hard energy path. Mandatory for energy and society scholarship."--Choice

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