Timothy LeCain (Montana State University):

How Resources Created the Post-War Human: Thinking About Sustainability in an Age of Monsters

A central argument of the New Materialism is that humans emerge in significant part from their engagement with creative non-human resources, materials, environments, organisms, and artifacts. During the post-World War II “Great Acceleration,” copper, concrete, coal, cars, and other powerful things became embedded into our environments and bodies at an unprecedented level, creating new societies of human Monsters or Chimeras. The question of sustainability is thus not solely one of economics or resource extraction, but also a fundamentally post-human question: What manner of Monsters have we become, and what might we wish to become in the future?