New book from Rice anthropologist: ‘Our fossilized civilization has no sustainable future’

What would the world look like with no fossils - and therefore no fossil fuels?

Rice anthropologist Dominic Boyer, author of "No More Fossils," (University of Minnesota Press, 108 pages, $10 print edition, $4.95 e-book), says the world is tethered to an "ecocidal trajectory of petroculture." In his new book, he tells the story of how fossil fuels became so fundamental to our society, from the plantation origins of capitalism to the machine world of industrial coal to the current use of petroleum to create plastics, fuel and more.

But this dependency comes with a cost, Boyer says.

"It is an ecological Ponzi scheme," he said. "It is stealing away the lives of countless species and the well-being of future generations in exchange for contemporary conveniences and the luxuries for only a small portion of the human population. A fossil fuel-dependent world is one with no sustainable future."

And yet a world without fossil fuels is hard for many people to grasp. Just as in the final days of Soviet socialism, Boyer writes, we live in a paradoxical situation where the need for massive societal change is both obvious and yet somehow unimaginable. Nevertheless, he argues that petroculture's claim to steer the future is now in flux. Boyer examines how rapid electrification of vehicles, buildings and power has the potential to change the world around us.

"Electrifying the legacies of fossil fuels will not be enough," he says. "To make electroculture more just and sustainable than the petroculture we are leaving behind, we must leave behind fossil legacies like the belief that endlessly increasing the production and consumption of things is both possible and desirable."

Ultimately, Boyer says society needs to find ways to thrive within our ecological constraints.

"The good news is that most human cultures across time figured out how to do that," he said.

More information on the book is online at https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/no-more-fossils.