Fall 2025 Student Blog

November 15, 2025

Ethan Swatski

This blog post was written in the context of Dr. Stepanov's Fall 2025 Energy Humanities course.

Throughout this semester I’ve realized that energy is never just a technical question. It is something social, cultural, and political that shapes how communities see themselves and how they imagine the future. To me, one of the clearest examples was our discussion on the Manic-5 hydroelectric dam in Québec through the film Manicouagan. Before this course, I saw hydroelectricity as straightforwardly “green.” But the case of Manic-5 complicates that. It provides vast amounts of clean power, but its construction required displacing communities, literally reshaping an entire landscape, and redefining the territory in ways that still affects the local people. The thing that really stayed with me is that the dam represents pride and progress for some, and loss and disruption for others. Energy systems always choose winners and losers, regardless of when the energy itself is clean, or dirty when a coal power plant shuts down and people are out of work. I hadn’t really thought about how the hidden side of energy can be just as important as the visible infrastructure until now.

My last project this semester, on energy use by soccer clubs and major tournaments, showed another side of this contradiction. I grew up seeing football as something simple and local, just a sport people love and have passion for. But the modern game is powered by enormous energy demands: stadium lighting that uses as much power as small neighborhoods, constant international travel for clubs and fans, and even climate controlled stadiums in places where outdoor cooling doesn’t make any sense environmentally. The 2022 World Cup is the clearest example. Cooling open air stadiums still feels like something out of some sort of futuristic dystopia, but it actually happened in real life. Seeing energy through these two cases, a hydroelectric mega project and global football, helps me understand how energy stories operate. They are narratives about identity, modernization, sometimes prestige, and oftentimes political priorities. In Québec, hydroelectricity was a symbol of national ambition. In football, energy is part of the myth of a sustainable global sport.

Energy also shows how strongly national identity shapes public debates, because every country approaches energy through its own history, political culture, and geography. This is why the same technology can carry very different meanings depending on where it is used. In France, nuclear power is often tied to national independence, technological leadership, and the postwar ambition to build a modern and self sufficient state. But our class discussions about French nuclear tests in the Pacific revealed a very different perspective that challenges this national narrative. For communities in French Polynesia, nuclear testing did not symbolize progress or collective pride. Instead, it was associated with colonial authority, long term environmental harm, and a sense that local people were exposed to risks that metropolitan France would never have tolerated for itself. Hearing about these experiences made clear that energy decisions are never just technical or economic. They are cultural and political, shaped by unequal power dynamics and by the stories societies tell about themselves. When we compare these perspectives, we see how energy policy can both express national pride and reproduce historical injustices, depending on who is affected and who gets to decide.

This course made me rethink what “clean” or “sustainable” actually means. Clean energy doesn’t mean free of consequences. Sustainable doesn’t mean universally fair. And energy solutions that look perfect on paper often carry trade-offs that are felt unevenly. The conversations around Manic-5 and around global football both show that even well-intentioned systems have costs. I now see energy as something that forces us into conversations rather than conclusions. It demands that we talk about values, trade-offs, and the stories we choose to tell. I came into this class thinking we were going to focus mostly on the science or the politics of energy. But what I’m bringing out of the course is a much more human sense of energy, a sense that energy decisions shape landscapes, and that translating these issues across countries and languages is part of understanding them.