coal

Historian Timothy LeCain is interested in the bridge between humans and materiality. Last year, while driving his SUV home through the mountains of Montana, a large truck pulled in front of him and released a cloud of dense, noxious smoke. Like many cyclists, hybrid car drivers, and “No Kings” protestors, LeCain had been “coal rolled.” His tongue-in-cheek essay, “Thank God for the Coal Rollers,” explores the practice’s culture, intended victims, and even the unintended good it might enact.

Franz-Josef Brüggemeier outlines the history one of the most crucial energy source of twentieth-century Europe in this article. “Coal returned to center stage again and again. In both world wars, coal provided the material basis for the atrocities committed and was of decisive importance in the subsequent search for lasting peace.”

This book is an exploration of the environmental makings and contested historical trajectories of environmental change in Turkey.

Alok Amatya studies the depiction of indigenous struggles against the grab of minerals, crude oil, and other natural resources by private and government corporations in works such as Arundhati Roy’s travel essay Walking with the Comrades (2010). He suggests that narratives of conflict over the extraction of natural resources can be studied as the corpus of “resource conflict literature,” thus generating a global comparative framework for the study of contemporary indigenous struggles.

Susie Hatmaker investigates the largest flood of coal ash in United States history in 2008 as an event at once monumental and insignificant.