by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow
The Daily Sentinel
A friend named Stephen Heins is an energy and environment consultant who for a long time called himself “The Practical Environmentalist.” We’ve been kindred spirits for years because we never bought the conventional wisdom that a healthy environment is incompatible with a prosperous economy. We think the two concepts should not only be compatible, but complimentary.
Stephen now calls himself an “energy humanist,” referring to a growing academic discipline that seeks to reconcile humanity’s need for energy with its desire to protect the natural world. It differs from much of today’s environmental scholarship and activism because it focuses on improving the lives of people, especially the estimated four billion without access to affordable energy. It is a philosophy that does not view the environment as more important than people, nor people as an inevitable threat to nature.
The idea is consistent with everything I have always believed, and I like everything about this direction. Yet the association nevertheless makes me nervous. That’s because even in such a limited core group of new thinkers, there are very different understandings of what it means.
A handful of academics claim to have invented the concept of “Energy Humanities,” and consider themselves the original energy humanists. Primarily that’s based on publication of a book by that name, an anthology of essays complied and edited by Imre Szeman, a “cultural studies” researcher at the University of Alberta who coauthored “After Oil,” a full-throated damnation of “petroculture” calling for an end to fossil fuels; and by Dominic Boyer, a cultural anthropologist who sits on the board of Rice University’s Sustainability Institute and designed a memorial to the dying glaciers. Publicity for the book says, “The authors offer compelling possibilities for finding our way beyond our current energy dependencies toward a sustainable future.”
