Energy in the Anthropocene: How the concept of energy shaped both our current crisis and its professed solution

This essay traces how the concept of energy-defined as the ability to do work in physics-informed two similar fields of knowledge with very dissimilar results. One, the resource economy in the late 19th century, laid some important epistemic and ideological foundations for the destruction of the environment in the present. The other, ecology, introduced a new holistic view of nature, which laid the groundwork for the recent reconceptualization of ethics, epistemology, and humankind's role on Earth culminating in the Anthropocene hypothesis-formulated in direct opposition to the capitalist, anthropocentric notions inherited from the 19th century. In both cases, it was the concept of energy that enabled thinking about the multifarious visualities, materialities, and temporalities of natural phenomena as united in a single causal substructure of energy exchanges. In resource economics, the energetic worldview imposed an anthropocentric useful/useless divide on the environment-modeled, I argue, on the energy/entropy distinction-and made it "logical" to think of minerals, plants, and human labor as analogous resources, justifiably equated and linked in the economic system. The same ability to equate and connect was fundamental to the discipline of ecology and its application to sociology in the 20th century, and, in more recent years, to philosophy and historiography. In stripping nature of all surface illusions, energy proved enormously efficient for exposing the entanglement of large-scale systems composed of animate and inanimate actors equally imbued with agency.