Environment and Society

To avert the worst forms of climate catastrophe, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has called for immediate action toward achieving net-zero emissions of greenhouse gases that trap heat and warm the planet. In response, multiple forms of climate action and research, including emergent forms of climate modeling, have manifested in response to calls for “clean energy transitions.” During such “transitions,” however, the existing social and ecological harms are often compounded rather than attenuated. What once seemed clean turns out to be entangled with violence of many kinds. It is now clear that so-called transition technologies are emerging not so much as alternatives with intrinsically liberatory outcomes but are often enacted by states and corporations to serve the status quo. The last decade has witnessed how the promise of renewable energy has become possible through coerced political dependency on the expansion of oil and gas extraction. Moreover, the moral discourse of “clean” energy technologies obscures the very dirty practices of industrialization and other seemingly post-industrial innovations. The rare earth and other minerals needed to generate batteries, photovoltaics, and other requisite components of the infrastructure can only be made possible by the rapid expansion of mining activities, which are closely associated with disparate health outcomes and labor rights abuses. Those who live downwind, downstream, and downgradient of the mines and other industrialized energy operations experience these contradictions firsthand. Contrary to the promises of a way out of modernity's excesses, the pitfalls of clean energy raise critical questions for socioecological theory and environmental justice.

Latin America is deeply entangled with the technologies and infrastructures of low-carbon energy systems, mostly through the mining for transition materials and the installation of renewable energy projects. This review article highlights the history, contemporary panorama, and future of green energy in Latin America. The article also attends to the production of alternative transition models from Indigenous, Afro-descendant, worker, and activist perspectives. We approach these interventions as emergent scholarship that challenges traditional extractive models. We also draw on our fieldwork in Colombia and Costa Rica as examples of energy conflicts and possible energy futures. Through these examples, we call for more visible critical social science scholarship on the green energy transition, especially on efforts that strive to restore justice and well-being in frontline communities.

Chile is experiencing a successful energy transition, with emissions falling as new solar and wind arrays replace coal-fired power plants. As the mining industry switches to renewable electricity, many in power celebrate this as “sustainable mining,” but not fenceline communities, who feel exhausted by the scale and density of extraction and construction. This article bridges scholarship on the energy transition and the critical minerals boom with a hard look at Chile's unfolding energy transition. It proposes “exhaustion” as a concept that captures the routines that produce cumulative dangers, confusion, moral despair, and manic urgency, which manifest, among other things, in the absence of new development goals. Exhaustion can also bridge local and global scales, shining a light on shared experiences with social and ecological dislocations.

While electricity and electric grids have been a prominent focus in energy infrastructure scholarship, the role of energy efficiency in managing electricity infrastructure and services remains underexplored. This article argues that energy efficiency, often framed as a technical goal of doing more with less, is deeply entangled with ideologies about the state, energy consumers, and electricity provisioning. Drawing on anthropological and Science and Technology Studies literature, it reviews how electric grids have historically shaped political authority and citizenship and explores how energy efficiency operates as both a technical and cultural project influencing ideas of “good” energy consumption. It calls for greater scholarly attention to the role of energy efficiency in shaping sociomaterial relations within the home. Through a case study of Colorado's Weatherization Assistance Program, the article shows how US energy efficiency retrofits are shaped by neoliberal ideologies and prescriptive notions of the “good energy consumer.”

The promises and pitfalls of electric vehicles (EVs) are well-documented. EVs can decarbonize the automotive sector and generate “green-collar” jobs, but they rely on extractive, racialized supply chains and perpetuate an inequitable paradigm of vehicular mobility. While anthropologists have not extensively explored EVs, we argue that anthropology offers essential methodological and theoretical insights for confronting this complexity. Specifically, this article draws from anthropological literature to theorize what we call the EV ecosystem: the complex transnational network of corporations, governments, communities, geological formations, and other life forms that connects the multiple phases of EV development and deployment under racial capitalism, namely: raw mineral extraction; mineral processing; manufacturing; adoption/vehicle sales; recycling; and infrastructure development. As a concept, the EV ecosystem aims to inform ethnographic research that corrects for the shortcomings of non-ethnographic literature on EVs, including the compartmentalization of the EV supply chain and an inattention to racial capitalism.

Dominant discourses assert that the energy transition will be mineral intensive and will therefore require more mining. This article reviews how scholars have analyzed the politics and socio-ecological consequences of the push for transition minerals through concepts such as green extractivism. It advances this literature by examining scholar and activist accounts from Indonesia, the world's largest producer of nickel. Counter to themes of North–South exploitation in the academic literature, Indonesian politicians frame the “downstreaming” of the country's nickel sector as a break from colonial patterns of raw material export. Local critics, however, refute this narrative by documenting concrete mechanisms—new configurations of state control, transnational capital, corruption, and socio-ecological harm—that produce deeply uneven outcomes within Indonesia. These insights underscore the need to examine subnational dynamics of transition mineral extraction while extending scholarship on how green extractivism operates through locally situated narratives, forms of coloniality, and processes of accumulation.

This article explores the intersections between energy, gender, and labor and the multiple and multidirectional transitions involved in the expansion of renewable forms of energy. Drawing on ethnographic research in the country of Tanzania between 2019 and 2024, from the island of Zanzibar, rural Singida, and peri-urban Arusha, it examines how gender organizes social life, space, labor, and the distribution of new energy resources. Rooted in interview data that tracks how people in diverse households understand the relative benefits of household solar and grid electricity, this article demonstrates how electricity expansion initiatives have reinforced gendered and spatial binaries, as well as brought about social change that undermines and unsettles them. It argues that the uncritical prioritization of “productive uses of energy” comes with problematic costs for women and broader goals of energy transition.

Commitments to clean energy transitions have accelerated as countries face growing climate-induced impacts. Simultaneously, countries, alongside international organizations, have increasingly recognized Indigenous Peoples’ contributions to energy transitions. Nonetheless, Indigenous Peoples have expressed deep concern about the colonial entanglements of current energy transition discourse and policy. Canada is particularly reckoning with net-zero transition commitments while attempting to balance its constitutional obligations to Indigenous Peoples but struggles to recognize the connections between colonialism and the climate crisis. This article explores this balancing act, by centering the voices of Indigenous climate leaders, shared in Indigenous-led climate gatherings, complemented by an Indigenous policy analysis of key government documents. We argue that to avoid entrenching climate colonialism and coloniality, energy transitions must address the structural legacies of colonization in energy systems, allowing for energy transitions that are clean, just, and decolonial.

Recent efforts to mitigate atmospheric carbon levels have spurred advancements in carbon capture and storage (CCS) and carbon capture, conversion, and utilization (CCCU) technologies, which some consider critical infrastructure for the global energy transition and others view as delaying more ambitious climate policy. This article reviews research on CCS and CCCU—described by some as carbon management technologies (CMT)—asking how scholars and decision-makers evaluate energy technologies for climate change mitigation and consider their potential consequences. Despite a range of critical studies on CCS, current research on CCCU technologies tends to focus on top-down implementation and techno-economic challenges. Further, while extensive work has been published on the technological, economic, and policy dimensions of both CCS and CCCU, scant attention has been paid to the justice concerns resulting from these technologies. This review article draws on approaches from critical social science research on energy transitions, particularly from work focused on the more advanced precursor technology, CCS. We then employ an energy justice lens to scrutinize power dynamics in CMT more broadly, with a specific focus on CCCU technology.

Under the banner of circularity, eco-modernists celebrate the transformation of trash into renewable energy through incineration, methane capture, anaerobic digestion, gasification, and recycling processes that turn plastics into fuel. Promoted as win-win solutions that reduce waste and produce energy, these technologies raise important questions about the definition of “renewable” and the true costs of converting municipal waste streams to energy. Reviewing recent research in discard studies, this article elucidates the technopolitics of reimagining waste as energy in the United States. Using three case studies, we demonstrate how circular economy logics and “technologies of unknowing” hide the true costs of these technologies, even within US borders. We conclude that efforts to redefine waste detract attention from waste reduction while perpetuating a long history of waste-related injustices.

The reuse of abandoned late-industrial sites for renewable energy projects has emerged as a promising strategy for decarbonization and environmental justice in a time of climate emergency. Although challenged by the roll-back of renewable energy policies in the United States, governments and companies frame the use of “unproductive” lands for solar and wind power development as viable solutions to problems of land use, economic decline, climate change, and the demands for energy transition. While the vast majority of existing research instrumentally addresses brownfield redevelopment, project siting challenges, and community acceptance, our historically and ethnographically informed approach seeks to reconcile their toxic legacies and contested valuation techniques with alternative practices of repair that link energy investment to recuperation of damaged lands and burdened communities. The article cautions against energy transition practices that continue patterns of coloniality and capitalist extractivism and gestures toward alternative visions of ecological relations and transformation.

One evening in June 2013, I joined local villagers serving as “technical monitors” at Guangzhou's first waste-to-energy (WtE) incinerator, the Phoenix Incinerator. Around 9:30 p.m., two monitors donned helmets, grabbed flashlights and cameras, and began their evening patrol. Following a route from the fifth floor to the control room and down to the ash pit, they recorded pollutant levels—dioxin, sulfur oxides (SO_x), nitric oxide (NO_x), and carbon dioxide (CO₂), along with dust and boiler temperatures.

Braverman, Irus. 2023. Settling Nature: The Conservation Regime in Palestine-Israel. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 342 pp. ISBN: 978-1517912055.

Curley, Andrew. 2023. Carbon Sovereignty: Coal, Development, and Energy Sovereignty in the Navajo Nation. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. 217 pp. ISBN 978-0816548675.

Dewan, Camelia. 2022. Misreading the Bengal Delta: Climate Change, Development, and Livelihoods in Coastal Bangladesh. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2021. 254 pp. ISBN (paperback) 9780295749617.

Eddens, Aaron. 2024. Seeding Empire: American Philanthrocapital and the Roots of the Green Revolution in Africa. Oakland: University of California Press. 191 pp. ISBN 9780520395305.

Kennedy, Emily Huddart. 2022. Eco-Types: Five Ways of Caring about the Environment. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 280 pp. ISBN: 9780691239569.

Mitchell, Audra. 2024. Revenant Ecologies: Defying the Violence of Extinction and Conservation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 390 pp. ISBN: 9781517906801.

Neale, Timothy, Courtney Addison, and Thao Phan, eds. 2022. An Anthropogenic Table of Elements: Experiments in the Fundamental. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 239 pp. ISBN 978487563578.

Sánchez Voelkl, Pilar. 2022. Indigenous Settlers of the Galápagos: Conservation Law, Race, and Society. London: Lexington Books. 229 pp. ISBN: 9781666906592.

Wrigley, Charlotte. 2023. Earth, Ice, Bone, Blood: Permafrost and Extinction in the Russian Arctic. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. 236 pp. ISBN: 9781517911812.

Cruz-Torres, María L. 2023. Pink Gold: Women, Shrimp and Work in Mexico. Austin: University of Texas Press. 384 pp. ISBN: 9781477328019.