Who Owns the Wind?
Climate Crisis and the Hope of Renewable Energy
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Why the wind, and energy it produces, should not be private property
The energy transition has begun. To succeed—to replace fossil fuels with wind and solar power—that process must be fair. Otherwise, mounting pop- ular protest against wind farms will prolong carbon pollution and deepen the climate crisis. David McDermott Hughes examines that anti-industrial, anti- corporate resistance, drawing on his time spent conducting field research in a Spanish village surrounded by wind turbines.
In the lives of a community freighted with centuries of exploitation—people whom the author comes to know intimately—clean power and social justice fit together only awkwardly. A green economy will require greater efforts to get ordinary people such as these on board. Aesthetics, livelihood, property, and, most essentially, the private nature of wind resources—all these topics must be examined with fresh eyes.
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Anthropologist Hughes (Energy Without a Conscience) investigates the history, politics, and culture of wind turbines in this eye-opening survey. He situates his study in a small village in Andalusia, Spain, where, in 2006, the locals protested a plan to install wind turbines nearby, claiming the project would destroy the aesthetics of their village and demanding they be compensated with "jobs, income, or both." The protest wasn't successful, raising questions for the author about the conflict between social justice, the privatization of natural resources, and ways of addressing climate change. Hughes argues that in order to achieve a sustainable world free of fossil fuels, people must find a compromise that doesn't just enrich corporations and landowners, and proposes that people can learn to love wind turbines: citizens, he writes, could own the energy they produce, and windmills could be designed with an eye for beauty and an appreciation of the land. At times, the analysis strays into explorations of literary works such as that of Cervantes, who called windmills "the most monstrous objects on the landscape," making for a fascinating if digressive account. Eloquent and incisive, this is an important contribution to climate change discourse.
