I don’t ordinarily do this sort of thing here at the blog, so I’ll beg forgiveness for a little self-promotion. But if you’re looking for a good beach read for the summer, might I recommend Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick? I’ve just edited a brand new edition and it’s out now from W.W. Norton.
What, you might ask, does Moby-Dick have to do with the matters we usually discuss around here? Well, for one thing, I’d argue it’s the greatest environmental novel ever written. For another, it’s a book that speaks powerfully to the climate crisis: extractive capitalism? check! resource exhaustion? check! species extinction? check! the folly of human domination over the nonhuman world? check! colonialism, imperialism, ecological devastation? check! check! check!
Oh, and it’s also a novel about the shift from one source of energy to another. Here’s a little bit from my introduction:
Moby-Dick is therefore attuned to what today we call energy transition. The novel might help us think through the imperative implied by the idea of transition, which typically imagines, potentially at least, a smooth shift from one (dirty) energy source to another (clean) one with a minimum of disturbance to existing social arrangements. Yet the novel questions both the historical reality of and the logic behind fantasies of transition.
And if all that’s not enough, it also just so happens to feature what I believe to be the first-ever oil spill in all of American literature (see Ch. 109).
Oh, and it’s the most boisterously hilarious novel you will ever read. Give it a shot. I’d love to hear what you think!