From Local to Global, Past to Future: Deriving Entanglements of Energy Vulnerability from Energy Justice as an Interscalar Vehicle

            This PECE essay will explore energy justice and the importance of recognizing the entangled nature of the concept. It can be better understood by applying the STS theory-concept of interscalar vehicles coined by Gabrielle Hecht. This will allow the essay to travel forward and backward temporally, as past events have shaped the energy landscape on the global scale and impacted the environment and climate. It will also allow us to further understand the prospective futures and consider the impact that current energy poverty concerns will possibly have if we do not change our energy distribution tactics and procedures required to produce and disseminate energy resources.

            Energy justice as an interscalar vehicle will allow us to also see the impact that current injustices have on the global scale through environmental racism and food resource depletion. These inequalities feed into spatial injustices that allow this concept to travel through space and time. While tying energy vulnerability to the broader social and political processes causing discrimination through a variety of practices and procedures to extract, produce, transport and dispose of energy byproducts as well as on the user-end regarding the unjust resource distribution on the global scale.

            This essay’s goal is to utilize energy justice to explore the ideas we have surrounding what actors are deserved to have access to such resources. By tactfully navigating the landscape regarding the development of new ways of thinking about energy rights as a ‘basic human right’ we can identify ways to uphold a more just and equitable world framework. By exploring these concepts, we will develop arguments to cultivate a justice framework that includes perspectives from human to nonhuman actors, thereby exemplifying the impact that these entangled assemblages surrounding energy vulnerability impact the Anthropocene.

            Overall, the intention is to decenter human-centric ways of thinking and bolster a more inclusive overarching perspective to situate our understanding of the health of the world we live in broadly. By bringing new ways of relating to the people, places, perceptions, and plethora of agential factors impacted by energy use and its production, we will have the chance to identify and imagine new ways of thinking that incorporates sociotechnical frameworks that champion difference and diversity, to create a more accepting and inclusive justice-oriented environment.