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The Entropy Law and the Economic Process

Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen was a Romanian-born economist who pioneered the introduction of the laws of thermodynamics, and particularly entropy, into the field of economics. As a foundational figure of bioeconomics, his contribution to the analysis and relevance of natural limits to economic growth has been essential for the development of ecological economics. We invite here to…

Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen
On Petrocultures: Globalization, Culture, and Energy

On Petrocultures: Globalization, Culture, and Energy is a work by cultural theorist Imre Szeman. The book collects a series of articles about our current relationship with oil. These are grouped chronologically in twelve chapters, from 2001 to 2018, and feature some of Szeman’s most important writings as well as other recent analyses. Throughout all his…

Imre Szeman
Ecofeminism: Critique, Influence, Change

Vandana Shiva is a leading philosopher, physicist and ecofeminist activist, prominent in placing life at the center of economic, political and social organization, and whose work has addressed issues ranging from food sovereignty to care, justice and sustainability. Maria Mies is a renowned German sociologist, whose contribution within ecofeminism has excelled in the exploration of…

Maria MiesVandana Shiva
Petrocultures: Oil, Politics, Culture

Petrocultures: Oil, Politics, Culture is a book edited by Sheena Wilson, Adam Carlson and Imre Szeman that increases the scope of the Energy Humanities and, throught its multidisciplinary effort and a broad array of historical, geographical, and literary study, serves to consolidate the significance of this field of research. This extensive book examines a barrel…

Adam CarlsonImre SzemanSheena Wilson
Energy and Experience: An Essay in Nafthology

Energy and Experience: An Essay in Nafthology by Antti Salminen and Tere Vadén is a philosophical manifesto confronting the conceptual structures of our fossil modernity, which they see as a historical exceptional period that cannot be perpetuated, as it is closer linked to a state of non-renewable surplus energy than to any myth of intellectual…

Antti SalminenTere Vadén
The Concept of Nature in Marx / Response

Alfred Schmidt was a German philosopher belonging to the second generation of the Frankfurt School whose doctoral thesis, The Concept of Nature in Marx, supervised by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, would appear as a book in 1962, becoming possibly the most influential text on the subject until the end of the twentieth century. Schmidt’s…

Alfred Schmidt
Materialism and the Critique of Energy

Materialism and the Critique of Energy, edited by Jeff Diamanti and Brent Ryan Bellamy, gathers twenty-one multidisciplinary theorists to rethink and elaborate a materialism critical of the impact that large-scale energy has on the economy, politics, culture, and environment of our social life. From Marxist-feminism to “electroculture, from energy-critique analysis to the historical role of…

Brent Ryan BellamyJeff Diamanti
After Oil

After Oil is a joint piece of writing from the University of Alberta’s Petrocultures Research Group. It is based on the thoughts and insigts of 35 international humanities researchers and artists who met in Edmonton in 2015 to discuss how oil has affected postindustrial society. After Oil is held together by three premises that support…

Petrocultures Research Group