In the last quarter century, and especially over the last decade, environmental and energy humanities scholars have critically engaged with fossil fuels, revealing how materials such as coal and oil shape culture, society, and the literary imagination. As fossil fuels must be burned to produce energy, fires are both a normalized feature and a cataclysmic effect of fossil fuel culture. From the blazes that struck industrial centers and rivers throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the “fire weather” of twenty-first century California and the Canadian province of Alberta, fire remains a critical harbinger for climate change. This session examines how the global reliance on fossil fuels has fueled climate change, social injustice, and the rise of “pyromodernity”—a condition in which fire and destruction are inextricably woven into the fabric of modern existence and literary imagination. The goal of this panel is to provide a forum in which to explore the evolving cultural and literary responses to energy production and its consequences, particularly fire, exploitation, and disparate human-nature relations. Drawing on speculative fiction and poetics, climate events, and the environmental humanities, this panel also attempts to imagine a world beyond oil—showcasing the enduring virtue of literary and cultural criticism for social change.

This panel has its conceptual roots in studies such as Stephanie LeMenager’s Living Oil (2014), Cara Daggett’s Birth of Energy (2019), Timothy Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy (2011), Stephen Pyne’s The Pyrocene (2021), and Dominic Boyer’s No More Fossils (2021), among others. These studies are unique in that they explore how fossil fuels and increased fire-activity not only catalyzed and perpetuate the climate crisis but also produce a cultural and literary crisis, beckoning new forms of storytelling which contextualize climate change within a larger historical framework. This panel locates the legacy of colonialism and imperialism within global fossil capitalism, and demonstrates how engaging with overlooked literatures, ecoliterary connections, and environmental phenomena can challenge petroculture.

To promote discussion, we have selected only three panelists who will be strictly limited to 18-minute papers. Harry Stecopoulos, the respondent, will pose questions to the panelists and the audience so that a lively discussion may ensue. We will begin with “Rivers of Fire” by Jeffrey Insko. He argues that the first harbingers of the Pyrocene, the epoch characterized by expansive fire-activity, were not burning forests but burning rivers. Examining the long history of and cultural responses to rivers on fire, Insko considers how river fires inspired modern environmentalism and continue to challenge the emphasis on land—and thus the human subject—throughout environmental politics and humanities scholarship. Shifting our attention from the terrestrial to the riverine can redirect our attention from the human to the planetary costs of petroleum combustion.

Equally concerned with the cultures shaped by global fossil capitalism, Stacey Balkan’s paper “Energy Democracy at the End of the World” argues for energy democracy over and against mere energy transition. For Balkan, contemporary climate catastrophes, such as the phenomenon of fire weather, illustrate the failure to heed the obvious ecological wisdom of economic degrowth. Considering Ivan Illich’s call to decolonize a global energy system that requires the maintenance of sacrifice zones and “energy slaves” in Energy and Equity (1973), Balkan claims that energy democracy requires public power. She explores contemporary struggles for energy democracy through Samuel Delaney’s novella “We, in Some Strange Powers Employ,” underscoring the role that fiction can play in shaping ideas about energy.

The formal part of this session concludes with a paper by Jennie Sekanics, who argues that fire emerges as an aesthetic and archival force in modern and postmodern poetics. Published almost a century apart, TS Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) and Alexis Pauline Gumb’s M Archive (2018) both engage combustion as a material condition and literary device, uncovering the lived and cultural impacts of industrialization and WWI, and the Atlantic slave trade and global fossil capitalism, respectively, through narrative explosions and linear disruptions. Locating the archive within fire, the texts demonstrate how fire fuels an urgency to remember and is memory, as blazes unearth repressed issues. Yet, while The Waste Land becomes an archive through fire—charting allusions by recounting the threat flames pose to the Western canon—M Archive reveals how the archive carries with it the remnants of fire: the consumption and erasure of subjected populations. Positioning fire as the inheritance of ongoing fossil fuel extraction and petroculture, Sekanics explores the dialectical relationship between fire and archive, revealing how the expanding desire to burn is linked to the compulsion to collect.

This panel features early career and established academics.