Dominic Boyer, "No More Fossils" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)

New Books in Anthropology

Our hosts, Devin Griffiths and Deanna Kreisel, sat down with Dominic Boyer to talk about his new book, No More Fossils, which appeared just last year (2023) from the University of Minnesota's "Forerunners" series. We talked at length about his book, its gestation in basic questions about how to divest from fossil energy and fossil culture, and the grounds for optimism about our future. In a wide ranging discussion, we also talked about utopia, our investment in memoir and place-based writing, the importance of affect and anxiety in thinking about climate, and the fiction, scholarship, and activism that gives us inspiration.

Some show notes: we talked about other work by Dominic (including his books Hyposubjects and Energopolitics); other works on energy and ecocriticism (including Patricia Jaeger's column "Literature in the Ages of Wood, Tallow, Coal, Whale Oil, Gasoline, Atomic Power, and Other Energy Sources"; Cara New Dagget's The Birth of Energy; Allen MacDuffie's Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination; and Heidi Scott's Fuel: An Ecocritical History; and Barbara Leckie's Climate Change: Interrupted); talked about matriarchal collectives and the show Station Eleven; and fiction including Kim Stanley Robinson's Pacific Edge, and Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward; and William Morris's News from Nowhere; and finally, Osaka University's "Fragmentary Institute of Comparative Timelines," and Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergrass's book, Half-Earth Socialism: A Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change, and Pandemics. It was awesome.

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