The introduction of new energy carriers and of engines able to transform energy into mechanical work was a necessary, although not unique, condition of modern growth in Europe and subsequently in the rest of the world.
This article looks at the energy investment that goes into the provision of nutrients and into habitat improvement for the subterranean workforce of earthworms on which agriculture depends.
As agents of knowledge and appropriators of technology, exhibitions (and most notably museum exhibitions) have played an important role in the early twentieth century, when gas and electricity, the quintessential modern energy sources, aimed to oust wood, coal, and peat while simultaneously competing intensely with each other.
This essay explores connections between energy regime changes and nutrition, as well as the impact of such changes on nutritional knowledge and food policies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
This article argues for the hybridization of electric utility regimes by means of innovative adaptation of wind power. For a number of reasons, and with the mediation of many different actors, wind power in Denmark proved to be a viable addition to the power system. It did not radically transform the system but nor did it leave it unchanged.
This essay discusses the history and future of the AC electrical grid. The article argues that the DC power generation and distribution pioneered by Edison can make a comeback.
This essay contests the traditional narrative of the gas revolution in the Netherlands. To illustrate the domestic roots of revolutionary change, the essay focuses on gas use in households.
Of the many factors that shaped energy transitions in the twentieth century, the World Wars are rarely considered. Yet the dramatic effects of war mobilization on energy systems and the restructuring of supply lines through new geographies of military action and alliance suggest the importance of war as an external shock or crisis with the power to reshape the political economy of energy systems profoundly. Hydroelectricity in Canada during World War II provides one example of this process. The War consolidated and propelled a transition to hydroelectricity, yet the transition was not simple or linear.
Using the examples of matsutake mushrooms in Japan, the Meratus Dayaks of the rainforests of Kalimantan, and the “rubble ecologies” of post-war Berlin, the article argues that we must pay attention to the cultural and biological synergies through which diversity continues to emerge, even in ruins.
The article shows how the Sami of northern Norway are creating new openings and opportunities for more localized management systems based on local environmental knowledge.
