Join HUM 382 The Climate Project on Wednesday Oct. 18 at 4 p.m. in HLC room 3108 for “The Energy Humanities” featuring a presentation by CCS Assistant Teaching Professor Dr. Kent Linthicum. Our lives are suffused with fossils fuels—from the gasoline in our cars, to the asphalt we drive on, to the plastics that shape everything from our clothing to our computers, and even (in many cases) the electricity we use to charge our phones or light our rooms. Fossil fuels structure our lives such that “we are citizens and subjects of fossil fuels through and through, whether we know it or not” (Szeman and Boyer 2017). Any move towards reducing our fossil fuel reliance, and therefore slowing climate change, will need to grapple with not only technical issues but also the ways that fossil fuels determine who we are. In this lecture on “Understanding Modern Petrocultures,” Dr. Linthicum will describe the ways that, in the 21st century, American culture is intertwined with fossil fuels, how our social norms and identities are built on them, and a few things we might do to start separating the two.
The Climate Project is free and open to the public, with a new expert from a different discipline leading the discussion about a different element of the climate crisis each Wednesday night during the fall semester.
