Climate Talks. Claire Blencowe: *Spirits of Extraction*, with Michael Malay

Join us at EBB for an evening of discussion around Claire Blencowe's *Spirits of Extraction: Christianity, Settler Colonialism and the Geology of Race*, published by Manchester University Press. The author will be in conversation with Dr. Michael Malay.

*Spirits of extraction* explores the troubling history of an ostensibly progressive, anti-racist Christian movement – Wesleyan Methodism – and its role in the expansion of the British mining industry in the context of Empire. The movement was founded in 18< sup>th< /sup> century Bristol, where colonial desires played out in a missionary project to ‘civilise’ the ‘savage’ and ‘unruly’ miners of East Bristol. By the 19< sup>th< /sup> century, the movement was firmly established in Cornish mining communities, whom it followed to mines across the (settler) colonial world, becoming deeply entwined in race and labour-structures of the British Empire. At the same time, in Anishinaabewaki/Upper Canda/Ontario, Methodist missionaries laid the foundation of abusive education and racialised ideas of redemption that enable, and quasi-deify, the mining industry. Opening and closing with reflections on scenes of anti-racist protest in Bristol at the time of its writing (2020–2024) the book argues that the extractive industries retain a kind of sacred power in our politics – a power that is still enforced through projects to ‘civilise’, pacify, or erase the cultures of those who resist.

BIOS

Claire Blencowe is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick, researching the cultural structures of racial capitalism and planetary crises. Her research on the religious infrastructures that support extractive industries is ongoing. She also pursues hopeful work to disrupt power relations through participatory research. Previous books include *Biopolitical Experience: Foucault, Power and Positive Critique* (Palgrave, 2011), and the co-authored *Problems of Participation: The Struggle for Common Life* (2013), and *Problems of Hope* (2017) with ARN Press.

Michael Malay is a lecturer in English Literature and the Environmental Humanities at the University of Bristol. He works on poetry and environmental literature, having published articles on various literary figures and creative non-fiction on a range of subjects. His book *Late Light* (Manilla Press, 2023) explores themes of migration, belonging, and extinction, and has been recognized with the Wainwright Prize for Top Nature Writing. Malay is currently engaged in research projects that delve into the lives of John Berger and the relationship between plants and politics.
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EBB Talks: Climate. Avoiding the end of the world, navigating the end of the month

In 2008, Mark Fisher popularised the idea that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism in his now-classic Capitalist Realism. In the years since, it has become ever-easier to imagine climate collapse than truly transformative solutions. So much of what is written, said and done about climate change is driven by the urgency of preventing ever-worsening climate impacts, imagined as “the end of the world.”

But climate activism and green politics don’t happen in a vacuum. They also need to navigate the paycheck reality of the end of the month, and the real-politik of the world as we find it, increasingly featuring climate-hostile far-right populism. As apocalyptic climate futures loom ever larger, systemic political change can feel less and less possible.

EBB’s Climate Talks ask what links the big, abstract questions around the end of the world with day-to-day concerns about making it to the end of the month. What role do energy, art, agroecology, food systems, policy and perhaps even (green) populism play in bringing the climate crisis into the kitchen table calculations of everyday life? In a series of events from autumn 2025 to summer 2026, East Bristol Books hosts authors, artists and specialists whose ideas give different windows into climate activism and politics in an era of populism, a prolonged cost-of-living crisis, and political upheaval.