|
Beautiful Destruction: The Tar Sands, the Post-Modern Sublime, and the Subsumption of the Earth
12:00 pm | 223 Philosophy Hall | RSVP
Artists, rather than scholars, were the first ones alive to the fact that something rather unusual was underway in the boreal landscape of northern Alberta. The photography of Louis Helbig and Edward Burtynsky captured the awesome destructive beauty wrought by the tar sands industry, a force capable of reshaping the Earth as if it were a canvas and the industry an abstract expressionist painter. Helbig and Burtynsky’s work evoke the sublime, but this aesthetic seems to bear little relation to the sublime described by Edmund Burke in the eighteenth century. It is not the vastness of nature that inspires the sublime, but rather its destruction.
The viewer of such artworks experienced an uncanny dread, without understanding why. Decades of research in ‘energy studies’ have done little to elucidate this problem. Scholars still seem to trail artists in grappling with the profound implications of the transition to non-conventional fossil fuels. This undesired Energiewende has proven much more significant than the shift to wind and solar, allowing the fossil fuel industry to tighten its grip on the planet. This talk will discuss the limits of previous approaches, such as ‘peak oil’ and ‘petro-states’, and instead will apply the Marxist categories of real and formal subsumption to understand the industry’s changing relationship to the Earth’s elementary systems.
About the Speaker
Dr. Troy Vettese is an environmental historian. He is a Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy & Management at UC Berkeley, as well as a John A. Sproul Fellow with the Canadian Studies Program. He researches the transition from conventional to non-conventional fossil fuels, with a focus on the tar sands industry.
Dr. Vettese holds a PhD from New York University, and master’s degrees from the University of St Andrews and the University of Oxford. He completed his undergraduate education at McGill University. Dr. Vettese has held fellowships at Harvard University; the European University Institute; Copenhagen University; and the New Institute, Hamburg. His first book, Half-Earth Socialism (Verso, 2022), was co-authored with climate scientist Drew Pendergrass and has been translated into half a dozen languages.
This event will have a remote attendance option via Zoom. Please select the “virtual attendance” in the RSVP form to receive the link. |
Royal Canadian Legion, US Branch #25 