Matthew T. Huber

Associate Professor, Geography

Degree

Ph.D., Clark University, 2009

Specialties

Political economy, historical geography, energy and capitalism, oil, resource governance and social theory

Publications

Book:
2013. Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press).

Articles: 
In Press. Resource Geography I: Valuing nature (or not) Progress in Human Geography (Invited “progress report”).

In Press. Reinvigorating Class in Political Ecology: Nitrogen capital and the means of degradation. Geoforum (special issue on “Political Industrial Ecology”) 

In Press. Beyond the subterranean energy regime? Fuel, land-use, and the production of space Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 

In Press. “Fossilized liberation: Energy, freedom, and the ‘development of the productive forces’” In, Materialism and the Critique of Energy, Brent Ryan Bellamy and Jeff Diamanti (editors). Chicago: MCM’ Press.

2017. “Hidden abodes: Industrializing political ecology” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 107(1): 151-166                     

2017. “Value, nature and labor: A defense of Marx” Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 28(1): 39-52

2017. “We can’t be dependent on anybody”: The rhetoric of “energy independence” and the legitimation of fracking in Pennsylvania. Extractive Industries and Society 4(2): 337-343 (with Carlo Sica)

2017. “Chemical dialectics” in “Chemical Geographies” (special compendium essay with Adam Romero, Julie Guthman, Ryan Galt, Becky Mansfield, and Suzana Sawyer) Geohumanities 3(1): 165-166; 158-177 

2017. “Petro-capitalism”, Wiley-AAG International Encyclopedia of Geography, edited by Doug Richardson, et al. 

2017. “Political Economy of Environment and Resources” Wiley-AAGInternational Encyclopedia of Geography, edited by Doug Richardson, et al.

2016. “Teaching Energy Geography? It’s Complicated” Journal of Geography and Higher Education, 40(1): 77-83; Special Issue on Teaching Energy Geography.

2016. “Neoliberal energies: Crisis, governance and hegemony” In, The Handbook of Neoliberalism Simon Springer, Kean Birch, and Julie MacLeavy (eds). London: Routledge, 479-488.

2015. “Theorizing energy geographies” Geography Compass 9(6): 27-38.

2015. Author response, “Lifeblood Book Forum” Cultural Geographies 22 (4): 750-754.

2015. “Energy and Social Power: From Political Ecology to the Ecology of Politics” In, The Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology, edited by Tom Perreault, James McCarthy, and Gavin Bridge (London: Routledge), 481-492.

2015. “Oil for Life: The Bureau of Mines and the Biopolitics of the Petroleum Market,” Subterranean Estates: Lifeworlds of Oil and Gas, edited by Hannah Appel, Arthur Mason, and Michael Watts (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), 31-44. 

2013. Fueling Capitalism: Oil, the regulation approach, and the ecology of capital. Economic Geography 89(2): 171-194.

2013. Apocalypse, the radical left and the post-political condition. Capitalism, Nature, Socialism (with Mazen Labban and David Correia)

2013. The urban imaginary of nature: Cities in environmental politics, Urban Politics: Critical Approaches, edtied by Deborah Martin and Mark Davidson (Sage), 204-220.

2012. Refined politics: Petroleum products, neoliberalism, and the ecology of entrepreneurial life. Journal of American Studies 46 (2): 295-312 (special issue on “oil cultures”)

2012. Energy, environment and the geopolitical imagination. Political Geography 31 (6): 402-403 (invited review essay)

2011. Enforcing scarcity: Oil, violence and the making of the market. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 101 (4): 816-826 (special issue on energy).

2011. Intervention: Gusher in the Gulf and the despotism of capital. Antipode 43(2): 195-198 (editorial on the 2010 Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill).

2011. Oil, life and the fetishism of geopolitics. Capitalism, Nature, Socialism.22(3): 32-48.

2011. Extracting sovereignty: Capital, territory, and gold mining in Tanzania. Political Geography 30(2): 70-79 (with Jody Emel and Madoshi Makene).

2011. The richest hole on earth? Labor, nature and the politics of metabolism at the Bingham Canyon copper mine. In Engineering Earth: The Impacts of Megaengineering Projects, S.D. Brunn, A. Wood (eds.), 353-366 (with Jody Emel). 

2010. Circuits of capital. In B. Warf (ed.) The Encyclopedia of Geography, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. 

2010. Human ecology and energy. In B. Warf (ed.) The Encyclopedia of Geography, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

2010.  Hyphenated geographies: The deindustrialization of nature-society geography. Geographical Review 100 (1): 74-89. 

2009. The use of gasoline: Value, oil, and the “American way of life.” Antipode 41 (3): 465-486.

2009. Energizing historical materialism: Fossil fuels, space and the capitalist mode of production. Geoforum 40(1): 105-115. 

2009. Fixed minerals, scalar politics: The weight of scale in conflicts over ‘the 1872 Mining Act’ in the United States. Environment and Planning A 41 (2): 371-88 (with Jody Emel). 

2008. From lifeblood to addiction: Oil, space, and the wage-relation in petro-capitalist USA. Human Geography 1(2): 42-45. 

2008. A risky business: Mining, rent and the neoliberalization of “risk.” Geoforum 39 (3): 1393-1407 (with Jody Emel). 

2007. The urbanization of an idea: Imagining nature through urban growth boundary policy in Portland, OR, USA. Urban Geography 28(8): 705-731 (with Timothy Currie). 

2007. Global environmental standards for industry. Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 32: 295-316 (with David Angel and Trina Hamilton).

Research Interests

I am interested in three areas. (1) The relationship between oil, capitalism, and the politics of “life” in the United States. (2) The relationship between industrial capital and ecological degradation (3) The role of capital investment in shaping governance and property relations in mining territories.  

(1) My dissertation research had led to the publication of the book, Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom and the Forces of Capital (University of Minnesota Press, 2013). Looking beyond the usual culprits—Big Oil, petro-states, and the strategists of empire—the book finds a deeper and more complex explanation for our ‘oil addiction’ in everyday practices of oil consumption. I suggest that those practices have in fact been instrumental in shaping the broader cultural politics of American capitalism. The book traces the relations between oil and everyday life from the 1930s through the oil shocks of the 1970s to our present predicament, revealing that oil’s role in defining popular culture extends far beyond material connections between oil, suburbia, and automobility. I argue that oil powered a cultural politics of entrepreneurial life—the very American idea that life itself is a product of individual entrepreneurial capacities. In so doing, I use oil to retell American political history from the triumph of New Deal liberalism to the rise of the New Right; from oil’s celebration as the lifeblood of postwar capitalism to increasing anxieties over oil addiction.

(2) My new research focuses on making visible the “hidden abodes” of industrial production -- spaces of intensive material and energy throughput, emissions, and waste production. I suggest political ecology in general and the politics of climate change in particular have not paid sufficient attention to such the industrial core of our nature-society metabolism. My empirical entry point to this topic is a long-term research project into the history and political economy of the nitrogen fertilizer industry. Specifically, I am interested in understanding nitrogen’s “industrial metabolism” -- the deployment of tremendous amounts of natural gas (both as energy and feedstock) in the chemical “fixing” of nitrogen in large-scale factories. I am concerned with the carbon emissions from this metabolism, the ecological implications of the mass application of synthetic nitrogen in agriculture (involving significant disruptions to the ‘nitrogen cycle’ and water pollution), and the wider dependence of our food system on carbon-intensive fertilizer.

(3) I remain interested in the relations between the state, capital and the territorial control over mineral resources in multiple contexts.  I was involved in a long-term research project with Jody Emel (Clark University) on gold mining policy in Tanzania. Specifically, we examined the tensions between sovereignty and territoriality that inform the state’s legal ownership of all sub-surface minerals and their attempts to attract foreign direct investment.  I have also examined the geographies of mineral extraction in the United States from copper mining in Bingham Canyon, UT to the scalar politics of the “1872 Mining Act.” Living on the north side of the enormous “Marcellus Shale” gas formation, I am also interested in the emerging political geographies of hydraulic fracturing (hydrofracking) and its socioecological consequences.

Research Grants and Awards

2014. National Science Foundation, Geography and Spatial Sciences, $192,777.00 “The Nitrogen Fertilizer Industry: Integrating Industrial Ecology and Political Ecology Approaches”.

2014. James Blaut Award in recognition of innovative scholarship in cultural and political ecology, Cultural and Political Ecology Specialty Group, The Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, Tampa, Fl.

2014. The Daniel Patrick Moynihan Award for Teaching and Research, (junior faculty) Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse, NY.