Book Talk with Daniella Russ – Working Nature: A History of the Energy Economy

Daniela Russ  argues that the category of ‘energy’ is best understood not in terms of particular material things but as a social relation to nature forged over 200 years of capitalist industrialization. Working Nature  examines how engineers, scientists, and economists harnessed and circulated the products of nature despite social and natural resistance.

She is a historical sociologist working on the relationship between society and nature in a global perspective. My first book Working Nature: Steam, Power, and the Failure of the Energy Economy (forthcoming) offers a historical account of the energy economy informed by a Critical Theory of Nature: Rather than assuming society uses energies available in nature, I propose to conceive of the energy economy as a dialectical self-realization of society against nature's resistance.