Senior Research Seminar with Professor Myles Lennon (Brown University)

Senior Research Seminar with Professor Myles Lennon (Brown University)Combustion Beyond Reason 

 

We have plenty of reasonable data mapping out how we can transition from fossil fuels to solve the climate crisis. While this reasonable data informs important policy frameworks, it also hasn’t catalyzed the utopic horizons it choreographs. As a corrective to such climate solutionism, I draw from five years of ethnographic research on Black land fire ecology in California and my previous fieldwork on residential solar in New York City to argue that the so-called “energy transition,” as it’s actually enacted in our everyday lives, is less a reasonable teleology stymied by the myths of petro industries and instead an uneven process that’s always emergent from the dialectical interplay of reason and myth. More specifically, I argue that fire ecology offers a lens for moving beyond a teleological imaginary of a decarbonized future. As prescribed burns use fossil fuels to both adapt to and mitigate the worst impacts of fossil fuels, they encourage a reckoning with the utopic sense that we can solve climate change through the propositional logic of emissions reductions scenarios. Reflecting on the embodied experience of conducting prescribed burns, I contend that sweating in the face of flames demands a dialecticism that doesn’t repudiate but destabilizes our most reasonable propositions for climate action. 

 

Bio:

Myles Lennon is an environmental anthropologist, Dean’s Assistant Professor of Environment & Society and Anthropology at Brown University, and a former sustainable energy policy practitioner.