PUSH Kiruna? An Arctic example of mobilizing archaeology to address Poverty and Plenty in Energy and Power.

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Poverty And Plenty In The North", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Physicists say that energy is the ability to cause change (or do work), while power is the rate at which energy is transmitted or used. When human’s harness or harvest energy, it must take material form so people can use, transmit, or store it. During industrialization, humans increased scales of energy mobility through extraction, storage, and consumption focusing on carbon-based systems; building flowscapes that included combinations of growth/change, loss/waste, enrich/impoverish for cores/peripheries and nodes/frontiers. Guided by the Sustainable Development Goals, the global effort to decarbonize the energy system has become a transformational opportunity that requires building new “webs,” “flows,” or “scapes” of energy that must also redress current inequities built into legacy systems. This case study from Kiruna, Sweden, shows how people may use archaeological methodologies to mobilize communities and imagine collaborative solutions, using the Energy Transition to combat climate change and build an inclusive and sustainable world.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Poverty And Plenty In The North   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow