This interdisciplinary collection of eleven original essays focuses on the environmental impact of transportation, which is, as Tatiana Prorokova-Konrad and Brian C. Black note in their introduction, responsible for 26 percent of global energy use. Approaching mobility not solely as a material, logistical question but as a phenomenon mediated by culture, the book interrogates popular assumptions deeply entangled with energy choices. Rethinking transportation, the contributors argue, necessarily involves fundamental understandings of consumption, freedom, and self. The essays in Transportation and the Culture of Climate Change cover an eclectic range of subject matter, from the association of bicycles with childhood to the songs of Bruce Springsteen, but are united in a central conviction: "Transport is a considerable part of our culture that is as hard to transform as it is for us to stop using fossil fuels - but we do not have an alternative.
Tatiana Prorokova-Konrad is a postdoctoral researcher in the department of English and American studies at the University of Vienna. She is the author of Docu-Fictions of War: U.S. Interventionism in Film and Literature and coeditor of Cultures of War in Graphic Novels: Violence, Trauma, and Memory.
Introduction: Carbonization as a Choice: Environmental Ethics, Mobility, and Energy Options Tatiana Prorokova-Konrad and Brian C. Black Part I: Mobility and the Environment 1. Using Heritage and Ecological Systems Thinking to Inform Resilient Automobility Design Barry L. Stiefel 2. Bikes for Children, Cars for Adults: Postwar American Transportation Culture and the Legacy of Moving Images James Longhurst 3. E-Scooters and the Urban Micromobility Revolution Matthew C. Swanson Part II: Car Cultures 4. ""Carbolization"": Cars, Carbon Emissions, and the Global Discipline of Automobility Gordon M. Sayre 5. Hydrocarbon Enslavement and Fantasies of Freedom Patrick D. Murphy 6. Suicide Machines: Bruce Springsteen, Ballard, and Broken Heroes on a Last Chance Power Drive David LaRocca 7. Remainders of the Fossil Regime: Automobility Regression in Three Post-Apocalyptic Novels Brent Ryan Bellamy Part III: Film, Energy, and Climate Change 8. Intermodal Aesthetics and the Otherwise of Cargo Megan Hayes and Jeff Diamanti 9. Nature Guarding ""Her Treasures"" in Oil Comedies: The Case of Local Hero and Fubar: Balls to the Wall Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann 10. Boom/Bust: Tragic Logistics and Accelerationist Comedy in Petroleum Transport C. Parker Krieg 11. Trafficking in Petronormativities: At the Intersections of Petrofeminism Petrocolonialism, and Petrocapitalism Sheena Wilson Contributors Index
"A timely, accessible, and intriguingly interdisciplinary collection. Building upon the important work of energy humanities, which has focused on exposing the links between material systems of fueling and symbolic regimes of values and power, the collection compels the reader--in a performative act of slowing down--to contemplate the most dispersed yet most concrete site of the long twentieth century of accelerationism." Anindita Banerjee, Cornell University
