About the Book
This edited collection of scholars and activists employs immersive first-person narrative descriptions and rich imagery to tell the oft-revealing stories of contestation, exploitation, and complication within the landscapes upon which the world’s green energy transition depends: the unsanctioned cobalt mines of the Congo, the solar farms clearing vast tracts of the Mojave Desert, the scattered e-waste operations of Zimbabwe, among others.
Utilizing the global supply chain as an organizing structure—working backwards from consumption to extraction, and back again—each chapter is framed around an abiotic protagonist crucial for the widespread adoption of renewable energy technologies. Cast as our saviors in the face of climate change, cobalt, aluminum, and the many critical minerals needed for solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicles are explored through the biophysical environments and cultural contexts in which they are extracted, refined, or deployed. In challenge to these descriptive chapters are counternarratives that offer alternatives beyond silver bullet ecomodernism toward complicated futures built on just practices and reciprocity. In grounding all chapters amid host landscapes, the collection cultivates a heightened awareness of land relations and global interconnection. The project thus not only engages the green energy transition, a topic of accelerating importance and topical prevalence, but uniquely exhibits the skills of landscape architectural practice to communicate environmental challenges of global proportions, identify points of interdisciplinary intervention, and craft compelling futures to catalyze change.
The book targets an audience of students and practitioners of the built environment while seeking to inspire the inner designer in all readers.
Table of Contents:
Introduction: The Dark Side of Green 1. Sun: Solar Farms and a Mojave Desert Under Threat 2. Wind: Wind Power and Deepening Conflicts in Biobío, Chile 3. Aluminum: Smelting with Iceland's Melting Glaciers 4. Photovoltaics: Unpacking the Waste Chalenges of a Global Industry 5. E-Waste: Reclaiming the Digital Detritus, Forging a Sustainable Dawn in Zimbabwe 6. Hydrogen: Landscape and Literacy along Canada's Peace River 7. Rare Earths: Extractive Frontiers of Green Capitalism in South Greenland 8. Lithium: White Gold and Black Geographies of Resistance in Brazil 9. Cobalt: Eating Congo Caviar at the End of the World Conclusion: Where Histories are Held and Futures Rehearsed Center the Periphery: or, How to Invert a Mine Circularize the Economy: Designing for Disassembly Overlap Systems: Searching for Symbiosis Reduce Energy, Build Community: The Cultural Project of a True Transition
About the Author :
Matthew Seibert’s work aspires to encourage one to rethink their position and relation to the world as the first, fundamental step in a theory of change toward a just, more promising future.
As an Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Virginia, his research and teaching challenge dominant modes of knowledge production with specific attention to land relations. This practice and pedagogy in support of a world where many worlds and worldviews are not only welcome, but desired, is built first by creatively interrogating conventional ways of knowing through strategic disorientation. In the design of novel tools and methods, presuppositions can be disassembled, cultural constructions confronted, and power structures dismanteld, enabling a radical rebuilding of self, community, and environment in new and powerful ways. One must look backward and inward to orient the march forward.
Review :
"This is important work. Atlas of Green Energy Transitions will leave you with a deep grasp of the hidden costs behind the promises of tech solutionism. In the face of humanity’s all-life-threatening problems, what was supposed to be a 'green' transition ends up perpetuating 500 years of colonial extractivism. It’s a powerful and beautifully illustrated book full of tools you can use to counter the narratives driving forward what was supposed to be progress."
Céline Keller, artist activist
"The growing 'green economy' of solar panels, windmills, and lithium batteries implies new supplies of copper, nickel, cobalt, rare earths, and other materials. It also implies new forms of land grabbing and water grabbing. This empirical book goes fearlessly around the world looking at grassroots complaints against the abuses of the energy transition. The industrial economy is not circular, it is entropic. There is an enormous 'circularity gap' or 'metabolic rift', an 'entropy hole' because less than ten percent of the materials entering the economy are recycled. Can this be amended? This book provides realistic answers."
Joan Martinez-Alier, ICTA Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona
"Everybody is talking about an energy transition. But we rarely see where this transition is actually unfolding—or what it is leaving behind. This is precisely why Mathew Seibert’s Atlas is so profoundly necessary. With a creative and highly engaging format, the authors of this volume guide us through the landscapes of extraction and exploitation that fuel our anything-but-clean energy transition. A must-read for anyone seeking a radical alternative to the tired, recycled promises of 'green' development."
Marco Armiero, ICREA Research Professor at the UAB and editor-in-chief of Resistance. A Journal of Radical Environmental Humanities
"An informative and much needed challenge to modern design’s complicity in capitalism and its conceptions of progress and development. Seibert’s Atlas offers compelling resources for rethinking our reliance on ecomodernist approaches to green energy transition, and directs us towards a future more open to alternative ways of providing for human flourishing and prosperity"
Kate Soper, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, London Metropolitan University
"In engrossing first-person accounts of the far-flung locales where green capitalism collides with local ecosystems, landscapes, and communities—and interspersed with stunning data visualizations, creative cartography, and photographs of field sites—this atlas vividly depicts, critiques, and reimagines the extractive frontiers of green technologies and renewable energy. An essential resource for scholars, students, and organizers alike."
Thea Riofrancos, Associate Professor of Political Science, Providence College, author of Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism
"Matthew Seibert’s Atlas draws a much-needed pathway out of green energy utopianism by taking readers into those landscapes and their attendant ecologies that have been conscripted into the green energy supply chain. It’s an ambitious proposition backed by richly layered maps, embodied collages, charts, narratives, counternarratives, and a diverse suite of contributors. Both persistently disruptive and optimistic, the book crosses continents to illustrate the scope, scale, and urgency of what has all too easily been framed as simply a 'transition.' Still, the book dares to visualize a just, beautiful, and reciprocal green future with clear, tactical framings of our next steps. I dare readers to do the same."
Kristi Cheramie, Professor and Head of Landscape Architecture, Ohio State University
“Matthew Seibert’s An Atlas of Material Worlds reorients us by asking us to consider the earth from the perspective of seven materials—uranium, lithium, clay, crude oil, sand, mud, and metabolite—seven nonhuman protagonists whose fascinating stories take us far from home and deep into our own bodies. Through radical cartography, image, and text, Seibert and his fellow landscape architects map out alternative, non-utilitarian, non-anthropocentric ways of thinking and being in our world, that, if we take this new materialist sensibility seriously, may just lead us away from the brink of climate catastrophe.”
—Susan Barba, author of geode
"Atlas of Material Worlds delves into the earth’s lithosphere, presenting a series of mineral narratives that animate the so-called inanimate world. Matthew Seibert’s expertly edited and illustrated volume challenges the capitalist extraction enterprise by mapping the very agency of elemental minerals, moving seamlessly across scales from the microscopic to the cosmic. Much like Alexander von Humboldt’s 1845 Kosmos, the atlas seeks to radically redefine relationships between the biosphere and the geosphere, while asserting that we humans are inseparably, fluidly entangled with the vibrant matter of our planet. This timely volume repositions elemental materials as dynamic agents of power, and calls for new materialist assemblages to address our crises of climate, health, and inequity."
—Catherine Seavitt Nordenson, City College of New York
"This beautiful and insightful collection stretches the idea of the atlas to offer a meditation on the material elements with which we are historically entangled. Just listen to the names of the chapters—uranium, lithium, clay, crude, sand, mud, metabolite—to hear the resonance of industrial worlds in motion. Through a fantastic array of images, maps, and words, the atlas offers stories that need to be told."
—Anna Tsing, co-editor, Feral Atlas: The More-than-Human Anthropocene
