Frequent news headlines and rising gas prices are constant reminders of the fuel shortage linked to the war in Iran. But energy crises are about more than oil and geopolitics, say and , who co-teach “Communication, Design and the Environment” in the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý’s Communication Leadership program.

Muren, a teaching professor of design, and Russell, a professor of communication, examine environmental problems from a perspective beyond the hard sciences. They are currently working on a book that explores how the systems we design and the stories we tell shape the relationship between society and the living world.

UW News spoke to Muren and Russell about what today’s energy crises reveal about contemporary societies’ dependence on fossil fuels and how we can create a “solar-powered system.”��

The war in Iran has put energy back at the center of public debate. What stands out to you about the conversation we’re having?

Adrienne Russell: To me, it’s impressive how quickly the conversation — in the news media mostly — narrowed to . Where will the oil come from? How quickly can markets stabilize? What will happen to prices? Those are important questions, but they’re also very familiar. Every energy crisis seems to produce the same script. We talk about rather than asking why our societies are organized in ways that make them so vulnerable to disruptions in the first place.

Dominic Muren: Exactly. We tend to treat these moments as temporary interruptions to an otherwise normal system. But they’re also reminders that the system itself depends on finite resources and exceptional geopolitical stability. The crisis isn’t just exposing a shortage of oil; it’s exposing assumptions about how much energy we expect to have available and how our economies are built around that expectation.

What assumptions are built into this way of thinking?

DM: The biggest assumption is that energy should always be available in whatever quantity society demands. When supply falls short, we assume the problem is getting more energy, not reconsidering the expectations that created that demand. That assumption feels natural today, but of the fossil-fuel era.

AR: Those assumptions become embedded in everyday life. We stop noticing that overnight shipping, long commutes, streaming entertainment or all depend on enormous amounts of energy. They begin to feel like ordinary features of modern life instead of choices made possible by a particular energy system.

What are the material consequences of thinking about energy this way?

DM: We respond to crises by reinforcing the very system that created them. The was widely expected to trigger a dramatic spike in global oil prices. Instead, the shock was muted, in part because China rapidly shifted away from imported oil and relied more heavily on domestically produced coal. Economically, that reduced dependence on imported oil. Environmentally, however, it came at a significant cost: than oil per unit of energy, so avoiding one crisis just increased another.��

Even China’s massive electric vehicle fleet — normally a climate advantage — became more carbon-intensive because the electricity charging those vehicles increasingly came from coal rather than lower-carbon sources. From a climate perspective, that represents a significant step backward.

AR: We’re seeing similar patterns elsewhere. In the United States, the war in Iran has been in California and in the name of energy security. Each crisis becomes a justification for extracting more rather than asking why our societies remain so dependent on these fuels in the first place.��

In other words, the immediate response is often to stabilize today’s energy system, even if doing so locks in higher emissions tomorrow. We end up reversing much of the progress we’ve made in reducing greenhouse gas emissions because we’re treating the symptoms instead of addressing the underlying design of the system.

How have fossil fuels shaped contemporary society and our expectations?

DM: Fossil fuels gave us access to enormous stores of concentrated energy accumulated over millions of years. That allowed societies to expand production, transportation and consumption at unprecedented scales. Over time, we built our cities, economies and institutions around the expectation that this on-demand abundance could continue indefinitely. But this ��

AR: Fossil fuels and their infrastructures are one of the most powerful sense-making systems ever built. They have trained societies to expect continuous expansion. Because that expectation feels natural, it rarely appears as a choice; it appears as reality. That’s why energy shocks are so often misread. When supply is disrupted, the instinct is to restore the flow and return to “normal.” But that normal isn’t neutral. It’s a high-energy system organized around the assumption that growth has no meaningful limits. Energy crises aren’t interruptions to that system — they’re the moments when those assumptions collide with physical reality.��

DM: And because those systems become invisible, so do the assumptions they create. Continuous access to energy begins to feel like a law of nature rather than the outcome of a vast physical and political system. So when disruptions occur, we focus on repairing the flow instead of questioning the system that made uninterrupted flow seem inevitable.��

We could counter this tendency by recognizing that the only long-term source of energy available to life on Earth is the continuous flow of . Every fossil fuel we burn is nothing more than stored sunlight from the distant past. And like any finite reserve, it will eventually run out. What is guaranteed is the steady income of energy from the sun we receive each day, nearly unchanged from one sunrise to the next. Long before humans, life on Earth already adapted to this reality. Plants learned to capture sunlight directly, while animals survived by consuming those that did. Growth has always depended on access to this continuous energy flow. The point is not that we need more solar panels. It is that we need to think like a solar-powered system.

What does it mean to think like a solar-powered system? What would have to change, politically and culturally?

DM: A solar-powered system is one that aligns its activity with incoming energy rather than assuming limitless withdrawals from stored capital. Instead of designing around unlimited energy and perpetual expansion, we’d design around timing, sufficiency, resilience and adaptation. It’s not simply a technological shift; it’s a different way of imagining how society should function with whatever technologies — past, current�� or yet-to-be-invented — make that possible.

The transition isn’t simply replacing fossil fuels with renewable technologies. It’s replacing the mindset fossil fuels made possible. If we continue expecting unlimited growth while changing only the energy source, we’ll recreate many of the same problems in a different form. supports this.�� A durable transition means learning to organize society around the energy that is actually available, rather than around the illusion of limitless reserves.��

AR: We would have to rethink many of the assumptions we’ve inherited about progress and abundance. Much of contemporary culture treats continual expansion as both natural and desirable. Changing energy systems requires changing those stories as well.

For more information, contact Russell at adruss@uw.edu and Muren at dmuren@uw.edu.

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On the second day of “Communications & Design for the Environment,” a Communication Leadership course held for the first time this spring, and took their students to the Apple Store and told them to implode it.

Figuratively, of course.

The concept comes from Donna Haraway, a scholar of science and technology studies, who famously challenged her students to “implode” everyday objects to unpack the way the world works. Russell, a ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý professor of communication, and Muren, a teaching professor of design, applied the technique to their course by challenging students to examine the objects around them and how they connect to the environment and the climate crisis.

For example, in a zine created for the course, Russell and Muren used the implosion method to examine a ceramic mug. The mining, shipping and firing of porcelain clay generates carbon emissions. The industrial molding process creates a low-cost product, but material and energy are wasted on mugs that break easily. A joke giftware mug, which likely gets little use, still leaves behind carbon emissions. This all means that a ceramic mug often has a carbon footprint ten to hundreds of times greater than a glass or plastic mug.

In the Apple Store, the students came prepared with a printed list of things to observe and questions to ask. They went through the implosion process for an hour and a half before returning to the classroom. They then discussed the dissonance that emerged when considering the welcoming store layout and clean brand design with the environmental impact of mining, refining and producing the company’s products.

The course teaches students how to examine the climate crisis and environmental problems from a perspective beyond the hard sciences. From a communication standpoint, this means considering which topics resonate with audiences, whose views get amplified while others are silenced, which ideas are backed by money and more. The design viewpoint means exploring how people get around, what they wear and where they live. Russell and Muren are working on designing a certificate program for Comm Lead, in which students will take a series of courses focused on environmental design and communication.

“The climate crisis is such a huge issue,” Russell said. “A lot of people get stalled trying to deal with it. But what we hope students take away from this class is that no matter where you are or what you do or what your expertise is, there’s an entry point where you can think about things and how they relate to the environment.”

The idea for the course took root at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Russell and Muren happen to be neighbors, and, like so many others, they started a book club to get through lockdown. Much of their respective work revolves around the environment and climate change, so their reading list did, too. And since they were already immersed in��research on the topic anyway, they started planning a class.

“The way communication and design allow you to understand the climate crisis is really different from the scientific or political tradition,” Muren said. “Both of those traditions are powerful, but there’s not a lot that an individual can do within them. You basically need giant actors to fund these huge things for climate change to get addressed by science or the government. We approach it from a more bottom-up, influence-based perspective, where ideological threads can be encoded into objects, spaces or organizations.”

With this in mind, students completed projects that were tailored to their interests and skills. One student, who worked as a user experience designer, was interested in designing more sustainable websites. While redesigning the website of a popular clothing store, she learned how to create websites that use less energy and made a how-to guide for other designers.

Another student, inspired by her Native Hawaiian ancestry, focused on loʻi kalo — traditional Hawaiian wetland farms where taro is cultivated in terraced ponds. She considered the perspective of an organization that’s trying to restore the system, explaining the science and why they’re pursuing it. She created multiple vehicles for the information, including a zine and a presentation that explicitly discussed the reason kids are important to the revitalization’s success.

“One of the things everybody always wants to hear is what they can do about the climate crisis,” Russell said. “The fact of the matter is, there’s no way we can solve this if we just put the most vulnerable people out there and expect them to do it.”

But, Russell said, there are many ways people are engaging with environmental issues. Some professors, for example, work the climate crisis into their everyday classes. There are also alliances like Clean Creatives, a movement of advertising and public relations professionals who refuse to work with fossil fuel clients.

“Our fundamental idea behind this course is shifting people’s mindset to think about how whatever you’re doing can intervene and not exacerbate the climate crisis,” Russell said. “This is very different from talking about individual solutions, and it’s not shifting the responsibility away from governments and corporations that are doing most of the polluting. It’s a mentality shift so people don’t feel so discouraged, and it’s also about the ways we can shape our smaller communities.”

This kind of reframing also allows people to address problems like emissions while simultaneously building resilience.

“We had a farmer come in and present his work on community food sovereignty and racial inclusivity around food,” Muren said. “He’s trying to bring wine and people of color together in community. That’s a joyful side effect of trying to solve the climate crisis. It doesn’t have to be all about these negative things if you can think about it in clever, more holistic ways.”

For more information, contact Russell at adruss@uw.edu and Muren at dmuren@uw.edu.

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