num_pages: 272
description: By the winner of the Rachel Carson Environment Book AwardAncient civilizations relied on shackled human muscle. It took the energy of slaves to plant crops clothe emperors and build cities. Nineteenth-century slaveholders viewed critics as hostilely as oil companies and governments now regard environmentalists. Yet the abolition movement had an invisible ally: coal and oil. As the world's most versatile workers fossil fuels replenished slavery's ranks with combustion engines and other labor-saving tools. Since then cheap oil has transformed politics economics science agriculture and even our concept of happiness. Many North Americans today live as extravagantly as Caribbean plantation owners. We feel entitled to surplus energy and rationalize inequality even barbarity to get it. But endless growth is an illusion.What we need Andrew Nikiforuk argues in this provocative new book is a radical emancipation movement that ends our master-and-slave approach to energy. We must learn to use energy on a moral just and truly human scale.Published in Partnership with the David Suzuki Institute .
language: English
title: The Energy of Slaves: Oil and the New Servitude
publisher: Greystone Books