Transportation and the Culture of Climate Change: Accelerating Ride to Global Crisis - Paperback

by Tatiana Prorokova-Konrad (Editor)

"This interdisciplinary collection of eleven original essays focuses on the environmental impact of transportation, which is, as Tatiana Prorokova-Konrad and Brian C. Black note in their introduction, responsible for 26 percent of global energy use. Approaching mobility not solely as a material, logistical question but as a phenomenon mediated by culture, the book interrogates popular assumptions deeply entangled with energy choices. Rethinking transportation, the contributors argue, necessarily involves fundamental understandings of consumption, freedom, and self"--

Front Jacket

This interdisciplinary collection of eleven original essays focuses on the environmental impact of transportation, which is, as Tatiana Prorokova-Konrad and Brian C. Black note in their introduction, responsible for 26 percent of global energy use. Approaching mobility not solely as a material, logistical question but as a phenomenon mediated by culture, the book interrogates popular assumptions deeply entangled with energy choices. Rethinking transportation, the contributors argue, necessarily involves fundamental understandings of consumption, freedom, and self.

The essays in Transportation and the Culture of Climate Change cover an eclectic range of subject matter, from the association of bicycles with childhood to the songs of Bruce Springsteen, but are united in a central conviction: "Transport is a considerable part of our culture that is as hard to transform as it is for us to stop using fossil fuels--but we do not have an alternative."

Author Biography

Tatiana Prorokova-Konrad is a postdoctoral researcher in the department of English and American studies at the University of Vienna. She is the author of Docu-Fictions of War: U.S. Interventionism in Film and Literature and coeditor of Cultures of War in Graphic Novels: Violence, Trauma, and Memory