Of Modern Extraction - (T&t Clark Explorations in Theology, Gender and Ecology) by Terra Schwerin Rowe (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Predominant climate change narratives emphasize a global emissions problem, while diagnoses of environmental crises have long focused a modern loss of meaning, value, and enchantment in nature. Yet neither of these common portrayals of environmental emergency adequately account for the ways climate change is rooted in extractivisms that have been profoundly enchanted.

The proposed critical petro-theology analyzes the current energy driven climate crisis through critical gender, race, decolonial, and postsecular lenses. Both predominant narratives obscure the entanglements of bodies and energy: how energy concepts and practices have consistently delineated genres of humanity and how energy systems and technologies have shaped bodies. Consequently, these analytical and ethical aims inform an exploration of alternative embodied energies that can be attended to in the disrupted time/space of energy intensive, extractive capitalism.

Review Quotes

Of Modern Extraction situates contemporary discourse about energy and climate change in the context of religious and theological histories that show how modern energy regimes align with gendered, racist, and colonial forms of power. Rowe develops this account of extractivism with an enviable knack for story-telling and an attention to philosophical detail.

In our accounts of the economics of climate change, and even of the theology of dominion that lubricates it, we have missed a crucial part of the story: the effects of a particular white masculine individualism that have energized an extractivist civilization. Terra Rowe's critical petro-theology unearths the U.S. enchantment with autonomy and the aesthetic of the open highway flowing through an oily intersectionality. With "terranean" brilliance, she tracks the affective investments, theological and secularized, that keep Western fossil fuel so world-destructively energized.

The history of the last 120 years without oil would be an alternative so profound it is hard to imagine it. Mechanised tanks, bulldozers, chainsaws, aerial bombers, pharmaceutical drugs, cancer epidemics, plastics, artificial fertilisers, high explosives, and US global dominance would all not have happened without it. This volume is a profound engagement with oil and energy and its intersections with divine energeia and climate change: deeply researched and yet lucid and readable, I highly commend it.

About the Author

Terra Schwerin Rowe is Assistant Professor at the University of North Texas, USA.