This chapter argues that large-scale biological and energy systems were an important environmental concept in Victorian literature. It traces two intertwined cultural narratives. On the one hand, the transition to a fossil energy economy raised fears of coal exhaustion that were echoed by narratives of entropy: In both geology and the thermodynamic physical sciences it was proposed that the eventual exhaustion of energy sources would lead to the end of civilization or even human life. On the other hand, narratives of biological degeneration and atavism arose from a certain interpretation of evolutionary theory; some writers claimed to see unhealthy symptoms of species decline in “degenerate” artists and criminals. We can see how these cultural narratives functioned as environmental concepts in Victorian literary genres of science fiction and decadence, through texts such as H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.

How did Victorian authors conceive of the rise of an extraction-based society? This chapter looks to the literary archive for early impressions of industrial mining’s wider social significance. Thanks to the new role of fossil fuels in nineteenth-century industry, the Victorian period saw a massive acceleration of mining in terms of the depths plumbed and volumes extracted. Mining operations in Britain and overseas were becoming a source of wide public attention at this time as the economy and culture shifted toward those of an extraction-based society, one grounded in the extraction of finite underground materials. This chapter explores the depiction of extraction in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s 1843 protest poem “The Cry of the Children,” Joseph Skipsey’s 1878 poem “Mother Wept,” Charles Dickens’s 1861 novel Great Expectations, and William Jevons’s 1865 study The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal-Mines.

This chapter brings in the complexities of the intersection between renewable resources, sustainable development, and Indigenous treaty law. It begins by examining international guidance for renewable energy sources and their role in achieving sustainability objectives. This chapter then delves into the principles and rules governing sustainable forestry practices, fisheries management, and energy development. It highlights the importance of international agreements, protocols, and treaties in promoting responsible resource management, conservation, and the recognition of Indigenous rights and knowledge. By considering these principles and rules within the context of Indigenous treaty law, it highlights the need for harmonious and inclusive approaches to renewable resource use in the age of sustainable development. It underlines the significance of collaboration, respect for Indigenous knowledge, and the integration of sustainability principles to ensure a balanced and equitable relationship between renewable resources, Indigenous rights, and sustainable development.

One major aspect involved in the development of post-intensive care syndrome (PICS) is muscle wasting and weakness. In health, augmented dietary protein is required for skeletal muscle maintenance or growth. Critical illness is characterised by complex metabolic alterations including initial hypometabolism followed by hypermetabolism and muscle catabolism. Despite the potential role of nutrition in attenuating extensive muscle wasting observed in critical illness, no large-scale definitive interventional trial has tested the impact of augmented protein delivery on muscle wasting, and observational and small randomised trial data are conflicting. This may be due to the extensive physiological response to critical illness that cannot be easily overcome or untested factors including individualised nutrition interventions delivered beyond the first week of critical illness. Despite the lack of definitive answers, prolonged under-provision of nutrition will likely result in nutrition-related consequences and has been associated with negative clinical outcomes. The aim of this chapter is to summarise the current critical care nutrition evidence and make practical recommendations for clinicians with the aim of preventing the development or progression of malnutrition and reducing the development of PICS following critical illness.

Chapter 2 turns to loco-descriptive lyric poetry, read in the context of expanding highway infrastructure. It opens with a consideration of oil maps deposited in Ezra Pound’s Cantos, some of which critique the expropriation of former Ottoman territories by Anglo-American cartels. At that very locus, the Iraqi modernist poet Nazik al-Malā’ikah envisioned a very different kind of energy poetics, where the dividing line between oil’s extractive and consumptive spheres is decidedly smudged. In postcolonial counterpoint, the chapter closes by reading the automotive aesthetics in Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens. The US highway system provides them with a conflicted linguistic resource, where the trace of oil’s violent extraction is smeared by the exhilarations of their lyrics.

This chapter takes a comparative approach to fossil fuel narratives to consider whether there are continuities between coal fiction and oil fiction in different periods of modernity and whether there are identifiable formal features that unify fossil fuel fiction. The chapter pursues these questions by examining correspondences between Helon Habila’s 2010 novel Oil on Water, which depicts the socio-environmental consequences of oil extraction in the Niger Delta, and several exemplary fictions of extraction written 100 or 150 years earlier, including Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854), Joseph Conrad’s ‘Youth’ (1898) and Heart of Darkness (1899), and D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1913). The commonalities that persist across the historical gap from coal fiction to oil fiction express distinguishing aspects of life under fossil fuels and constitutive elements of the writing of fossil fuels.

At the heart of classical mechanics sits the venerable equation F=ma. To solve this equation, we first need to specify the force at play. In this chapter, we start along this journey. We will look at various forces, including gravity, electromagnetism and friction, and start to understand some of their features. For each, we will solve F=ma in some simple settings.

Chapter 10 evaluates the challenges of SDG 7: Affordable and Clean Energy, which aims to ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy for all. The scarcity of non-renewable minerals and energy resources presents a critical global challenge that could constrain economic growth and well-being. Various ways to measure natural resource scarcity are evaluated, and an economic analysis of the optimal extraction of exhaustible resources over time is established. Policies to address future demands for mineral and energy resources while balancing the environmental impacts of extraction and use are discussed. For example, substituting non-renewable energy with renewable energy sources poses economic and environmental challenges. Concerns over supply constraints and reliance on critical minerals have prompted calls for self-sufficiency, reducing reliance on imports of essential raw materials, and creating incentives to enhance recycling, recovery, and reuse, especially of rare earth elements. In addition, developing new technologies to improve end-use efficiency can support the decoupling of dependency on non-renewable resources from economic growth.

By exploring issues of energy, efficiency, growth and systemic resets, the reader is able to see the trajectory humanity is currently on and how it needs to change in order to survive and thrive moving forwards.

This chapter looks at the most recent climate science and starkly sets out the severity of the problems ahead. It gives the reader all the knowledge needed to broadly understand the critical issues of our day from a technical perspective, including systems of production and consumption for energy and food, biodiversity loss, pollution (including plastics), disease threats and population levels. It then looks at ways in which we can technically transfer to a sustainable way of living.