No More Fossils

by Dominic Boyer

Explores ecological impasses and opportunities of our fossil-fueled civilization
 

It is more and more obvious that our fossilized civilization has no sustainable future. It is an ecological Ponzi scheme stealing away the lives of countless species and the wellbeing of future generations in exchange for contemporary conveniences and the luxuries of a small subset of the human population. Yet a civilization wholly beyond fossils still seems difficult to grasp. 

 

In No More Fossils, Dominic Boyer tells the story of the rise of fossil civilization through successive phases of sucropolitics (plantation sugar), carbopolitics (industrial coal), and petropolitics (oily automobility and plasticity), showing what tethers us to the ecocidal trajectory of petroculture today and what it will take to overcome the forces that mire us in place. He also looks ahead toward the world that the rapid electrification of vehicles, buildings, and power is creating. What can we do to make electroculture more just and sustainable than the petroculture we are leaving behind?

95 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 17, 2023

Reviews

[Nils · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful little book that is perhaps most original in its creative linking of the rise of plantation economics in the sugar production(“sucropolitics”) of the early modern period to the coeval rise of coal mining (“carbopolitics”); what draws them together are the intertwined exploitation of nature and the subjugation of some humans for others’ comfort. new world sugar plantations were thus at the root of modernity: Coal mining and sugar cane production are the most brutal forms of industrial production, indeed are together the fons et origo of industrial production — lthe homunculi of the industrial-capitalist order that would flourish in the 19th century” (19). Both of these would then be hypercharged later by the rise of oil production (“petropolitics”) which is crucial to the supercharging of agricultural output via petrochemical fertilizer.

Boyer covers all this ground in a short book of mellifluous prose that invites the reader to imagine new chapters and explorations that can follow from his analytic frame. And in the end he tries to imagine an alternative order to this simultaneous twin exploitation of man and nature for the benefit of the few via an “electropolitics” of inclusion.

[Dee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quick eco-historical palate cleanser that walks the reader through the three interconnected historical stages of imperialist-capitalist extraction: sucropolitics, carbopolitics, and petropolitics, with electropolitics on the horizon (I hope Boyer is aware that he's stretching folks' patience with his neologisms). Definitely would recommend this short book as an introduction to how ecological and anti-imperialist schools view global economics; for folks steeped in the matter, it's nice to get a 30k-foot view once in a while.

The most useful new concept for me is Boyer and Morton's "subscendence," the opposite of transcendence. It can do a lot of useful ideological work. Here's the passage in full for future reference: “Subscendence is the inverse of the transcendental attitudes and habits that both created the modern world and brought it to the brink of planetary ruin. Transcendence is essentially a hierarchical control freak relation to the world. It holds that some humans are better than other humans and that all humans are superior to the nonhuman. Maybe the worst thing transcendence does is to try to corset the total excessive marvelous abundance of nonhuman lifedeath into one six letter word: nature.”

[Brad Neuhauser · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some fascinating ideas in this short book, I'll try to very briefly point out a couple: An early chapter focuses on the entanglement of humans and different energy boosting materials: sugar, coal, and oil (sucro carbo and petro). A later chapter looks at the way petropolitics, petrohabits, and petroknowledge fossilize around certain assumptions that are unlikely to last very long. Seems like a great amalgamation of the author's direction of thinking, and it's available online from the publisher if you want to read it there.

[Asymptotality · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant, readable reflections about transitioning to a world that's not based on fossil fuels.