Working Nature (Paperback)

Paperback. Working Nature offers a history of the energy economy and its representations over the 19th and 20th century.Russ argues that Energy is not a thing nor an ability, but a social relation to nature forged in capitalist industrialisation. The concept of energy mediates the appropriation of diverse natural forces - water, steam, coal, electricity altering the way these forces would naturally behave to perform work in production. From the valuation of coal and crafting of the current to the formalization of the substitution of energy commodities, it asks how engineers, scientists and economists achieved the production and circulation of natures work against social and natural resistance. In so doing, they undermined the very purpose of the energy economy - to emancipate humanity from nature. Can there be a human reconciliation with natures resistance for our time? A history of the energy economy from the perspective of critical theory Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…