Ecologics by Cymene Howe - Sample Chapter

Ecologics

Wind and Power in the Anthropocene  Cymene Howe

Ecologics

Ecologics Wind and Power in the Anthropocene  Cymene Howe

Duke University Press  Durham and London 2019

© 2019 DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMER­I­C A ON ACID-­F REE PAPER ∞ ­D ESIGNED BY COURTNEY LEIGH BAKER AND TYPESET IN MINION PRO AND FUTURA STANDARD BY WESTCHESTER PUBLISHING SER­V ICES

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Howe, Cymene, author. Title: Ecologics : wind and power in the Anthropocene / Cymene Howe. Other titles: Wind and power in the Anthropocene Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2018050150 (print) lccn 2019000665 (ebook) isbn 9781478004400 (ebook) isbn 9781478003199 (hardcover : alk. paper) isbn 9781478003854 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: lcsh: Wind power—­Research—­Mexico—­Tehuantepec, Isthmus of. | Renewable energy sources—­Mexico—­Tehuantepec, Isthmus of. | Renewable energy sources—­Political aspects. | Electric power production—­Mexico—­Tehuantepec, Isthmus of. | Energy industries—­Mexico—­Tehuantepec, Isthmus of. | Energy development—­Political aspects. | Energy policy—­International cooperation. | Geology, Stratigraphic—­Anthropocene. Classification: lcc tj820 (ebook) | lcc tj820 .h69 2019 (print) | ddc 333.9/2097262—­dc23 lc rec­ord available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​/­2018050150 Cover art: Bat falcon in flight. Photo © Juan Carlos Vindas / Getty Images. This title is freely available in an open access edition thanks to generous support from the Fondren Library at Rice University.

For Dominic

Contents

Joint Preface to Wind and Power in the Anthropocene   ix cymene howe and dominic boyer Acknowledgments   ​xix Introduction   ​1 1 Wind   23 2

Wind Power, Anticipated   43

3 Trucks   73 4

Wind Power, Interrupted   ​103

5 Species   ​137 6

Wind Power, in Suspension   ​170

Joint Conclusion to Wind and Power in the Anthropocene   ​191 cymene howe and dominic boyer Notes  197   References  223   Index  243

Joint Preface to Wind and Power in the Anthropocene

A Dynamic Duo Welcome to our duograph. You may be entering into the duograph through Ecologics or Energopolitics, but in each case, we invite you to engage both sides of this work. The duograph is a new and experimental form that needs your active engagement. But what is a duograph? you might rightly ask. A duograph consists of two single-­authored ethnographies that draw from a shared fieldwork experience and the same archive of research material. As a textual form, the duograph emerged from our field research (2009–13) on the po­liti­cal and ecological dimensions of wind power development in Mexico’s Isthmus of Tehuantepec. The idea evolved partly out of experimental interest and partly out of necessity. The two of us spent many long eve­nings debating the significance of one aspect or another of the research and gradually found ourselves setting out from the center of the proj­ect in dif­fer­ent theoretical and thematic directions. The fieldwork itself was a joint enterprise from start to finish; ­every interview, ­every meeting, ­every protest, involved both of us. We originally expected that the writing would follow a similar path ­toward a coauthored monograph. But while coauthoring offers many opportunities to learn and grow through dialogue, it also involves many compromises and ultimately must resolve in a synthetic voice and direction. We wanted to do this differently. We eventually realized how impor­tant it was to each of us that we be able to tell a dif­fer­ent part of the im­mensely complex story unfolding in the isthmus. Cymene wanted to spotlight the salience of human-­nonhuman relations

in energy transition while Dominic wished to concentrate on unraveling the po­liti­cal complexity of wind power. We de­cided to experiment by elaborating our dif­fer­ent analytics and interests in companion volumes that are meant to be read together. A working definition of the duograph would be a conversation between researchers that materializes in two texts, which do not require analytic synthesis or consensus. We view the duographic form as a way to produce collaborative scholarship that helps to make vis­i­ble the multiplicity of stakes and attentions existing within the practice of research collaboration. The observations and arguments found in each of t­ hese volumes emerged from close dialogue and are by no means incommensurable, but neither are they serial parts of the same narrative. They speak in parallel, but not always in unison. Characters, dynamics, and events crisscross them, but they are approached through dif­fer­ent analytic lenses. We hope that the duograph offers an experimental prototype in collective authorship that may be of value to other collaborators and other proj­ects elsewhere.

Wind Power in Mexico Our ethnography addresses a central question of our anthropocenic times: How can low-­carbon energy transition happen? Or, put differently, What happens in ­those transitions? Who sets the agenda? Who—­human and other­wise—is affected? And what are the po­liti­cal (in the broadest sense of the term) forces that shape the possibilities for low-­carbon energy ­futures? ­These questions initially took shape at Busboys & Poets café in Washington, DC, in late 2008 as we prepared for a move to Houston, Texas, a global epicenter of the fossil fuel industry. We considered a number of dif­fer­ent fieldsites of renewable energy production that appeared to be poised for rapid development. We looked at the desertec solar proj­ect in Morocco and nascent programs of wind development in Venezuela and Brazil among other cases. But the one that attracted and held our attention most strongly was Oaxaca’s Isthmus of Tehuantepec. A gap in the Sierra Madre Mountains creates a barometric pressure differential ­between the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean, forming a wind tunnel in the isthmus where wind speeds regularly flirt with tropical storm strength. The istmeño wind is capable of overturning semitrailers with ease, uprooting trees, and stripping the paint off boats. This region—­often said to be the least developed in a state that is the second poorest in Mexico—is considered to have among the best resources for terrestrial wind power anyx  Joint Preface

where in the world. That potential was first tapped in the mid-1990s through government demonstration proj­ects designed to lure transnational investment in renewable energy production. But wind development only r­eally gained attention and momentum during the administration of President Felipe Calderón (2006–12). Although Calderón’s administration is better known for its drug war and for ceding sovereignty to cartels and capital, his climate change advocacy transformed Mexico from a pure petrostate into a global leader in low-­carbon energy transition. Mexico passed some of the most ambitious, binding clean-­energy legislation anywhere in the world, including a ­legal mandate that 35 ­percent of electricity be produced from non-­ fossil-­fuel sources by 2024, with 50 ­percent of that green electricity expected to come from wind power, and with most of that wind power expected to come from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. Private-­Public Partnerships (ppps) in wind energy development mushroomed rapidly. Between 2008 and 2016 the wind energy infrastructure of the isthmus expanded from two wind parks offering 85 megawatts of production capacity to twenty-­nine wind parks with 2,360 megawatts of capacity, a 2,676 ­percent increase in less than a de­cade that has made the isthmus the densest concentration of onshore wind parks anywhere in the world. Over the course of sixteen months of field research (in 2009, 2011, and 2012–13), we sought to cast as broad a net as pos­si­ble and speak with representatives of e­ very group of “stakeholders” in wind development in Mexico. Conversations with community members and corporate executives; federal, state, and local government officials and ngo staff; industry lobbyists and antiwind activists; conservationists and media professionals; indigenous rights advocates, bankers, and federal judges, all provided a meshwork of perspectives, which we traced as we moved between the many communities of the isthmus; to the state capital, Oaxaca City; and fi­nally to the federal capital, Mexico City. In total, we conducted more than three hundred interviews and participated in hundreds of hours of less formal conversations. Working with a team of local researchers, we ­were able to conduct the first door-­to-­door survey of reactions to wind development in La Ventosa—­one of two isthmus towns that are now nearly completely encircled by wind parks. We sat in on governmental and activist strategy meetings and toured wind parks. We marched, rallied, and stood at the fulcrum of many roadblocks erected by opponents of the wind parks. We witnessed the evolving politics of solidarity between binnizá (Zapotec) and ikojts (Huave) ­peoples whose shared re­sis­tance to par­tic­u­lar forms of energy infrastructure brought them into alliance ­after hundreds of years of interethnic conflict. We Joint Preface xi

arrived at and left fieldwork as committed advocates for low-­carbon energy transition. But our experiences in Mexico taught us that renewable energy can be installed in ways that do l­ittle to challenge the extractive logics that have undergirded the mining and fossil fuel industries. Renewable energy ­matters, but it ­matters more how it is brought into being and what forms of consultation and cooperation are used. We thus came to doubt that “wind power” has a singular form or meaning. Everywhere in our research, it was a dif­fer­ent ensemble of force, m ­ atter, and desire; it seemed inherently multiple and turbulent, involving both ­humans and nonhumans. To capture that multiplicity, we came to think about our object of research as “aeolian politics,” borrowing from the Spanish term for electricity derived from wind power, energía eólica. Three case studies of aeolian politics came to absorb us in particular—­ Mareña Renovables, Yansa-­Ixtepec, and La Ventosa—­the first is the most complex and is treated at length in the Ecologics volume. The other two are highlighted in the Energopolitics volume. All three represent distinct configurations of aeolian politics; two can be categorized as cautionary tales of failure and the other as an example of the successful achievement of what for many is the renewable dream come to life. And yet success and failure ­were always in the eyes of their beholders. In all three studies we have sought to balance the fact of anthropogenic climate change and the need for global decarbonization against the local salience of vulnerable statecraft, demands for indigenous sovereignty, and the other-­than-­human lives that inhabit the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.

Volumes Ecologics Ecologics tells the story of an antidote to the Anthropocene, one that was both a failure and a success. The Mareña Renovables wind park would have been the largest of its kind in all Latin Amer­i­ca, and it promised im­mense reductions in green­house gas emissions as well as opportunities for local development. In Ecologics we follow the proj­ect’s aspirational origins as well as the conflicts and ethical breakdowns that would leave it in suspension. Drawing from feminist theory, new materialisms, and more-­than-­human analytics, this volume of the duograph examines the ways that energy transitions are ambivalent: both anticipatory and unknown, where hope and caution are equally gathered. In the case of Mareña Renovables, distinct imaginaries of xii  Joint Preface

environmental care and environmental harm ­were in conflict, effectively diagnosing the deeply relational qualities of energy and environment. The core argument that Ecologics advances is that the con­temporary dynamics of energy and environment cannot be captured without understanding how ­human aspirations for energy articulate with or against nonhuman beings, technomaterial objects, and the geophysical forces that are at the center of wind power and, ultimately, at the heart of the Anthropocene. The analytic architecture of Ecologics is both anticipatory and interruptive, and readers are encouraged to engage with the work in an itinerant and wandering way. Three chapters focus on the case of the Mareña proj­ect, tracing its inception and the policy regimes and economic conditions that allowed for its initial development (chapter 2, “Wind Power, Anticipated”), following it through a series of dramatic standoffs and protests against the park’s creation among indigenous and mestizo communities in the isthmus (chapter 4, “Wind Power, Interrupted”), and fi­nally witnessing the collapse of the wind power proj­ect itself resulting from multiple po­liti­cal, economic, and communicational impasses (chapter 6, “Wind Power, In Suspension”). ­These chapters are interrupted by o ­ thers that focus on wind, trucks, and ­species respectively. The interruptive design is intended to mime the empirical, ethnographic dynamics of the research, where forces (like wind), technomaterial tools (like trucks), and other-­than-­human beings (creatures of all kinds) came to stall and vex human-­designed notions of pro­gress and infrastructural development. In Ecologics creatures, materials, and elemental forces are bound up with wind power as an analytic object, and they in turn invite new ­human responses to the paradoxes we face in a time of climatological uncertainty. Energopolitics Energopolitics engages the case of Mexican wind power to develop an ­anthropological theory of po­liti­cal power for use in the Anthropocene anchored by discussions of “capital,” “biopower,” and Dominic’s own neologism, “energopower.” At the same time, the volume emphasizes the analytic limitations of ­these conceptual minima when confronted with the epistemic maxima of a situation of anthropological field research on po­liti­cal power. ­Those maxima not only exceed the explanatory potential of any given conceptual framework, they also resolutely demand the supplementary analytic work of history and ethnography. Concretely, the volume argues that to understand the con­temporary aeolian politics of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, one needs to understand, among other t­hings, a contested history of land Joint Preface xiii

tenure, caciquismo (boss politics), and student/teacher/peasant/worker/ fisher opposition movements specific to the region; the phantasmatic status of state sovereignty within Mexican federalism; the clientelist networks and corporatist machinations of the Mexican po­liti­cal parties; the legacies of settler colonialism; a federal government anxious about waning petropower and climate change; and a vulnerable parastatal electricity utility trying to secure its ­future in an era of “energy reform.” ­These forces are just as critical to Mexico’s aeolian politics as the pro­cesses and dynamics that are duly captured by concepts such as capital, biopower, and energopower. Energopolitics is thus an urgent invitation for Anthropocene po­liti­cal theory to unmake and remake itself through the pro­cess of fieldwork and ethnographic reflection. The invitation unfolds across five ethnographic chapters, each highlighting a dif­fer­ent localization of aeolian politics. We begin with the as-­yet failed effort to build a community-­owned wind park in Ixtepec, then move east to the town of La Ventosa, which is successfully encircled by turbines that ­were built in the dominant ppp paradigm, yet has also been beset by uncertainty and unrest. We encounter the performative sovereignty of the state government in Oaxaca City as it searches for a means to regulate and profit from wind development and then journey northwest to Mexico City to interview ­those in government, industry, and finance who firmly believe they are steering the course of wind power in the isthmus. Fi­nally, we return to Juchitán, which is not only the hub of local aeolian politics in the isthmus but also a town whose citizens imagine themselves to be the inheritors of a decades-­if not centuries-­long tradition of re­sis­tance against the Oaxacan and Mexican states. In this way, Energopolitics seeks to speak terroir to pouvoir, highlighting the need to resist anthropocenic universalism by paying attention to the profound locality of powers, agents, and concepts. As Claire Colebrook has argued, recognition of the Anthropocene should mark the “return of difference” that has been long called for in feminist and ecological criticism.

Collaboration in Anthropology Our duograph belongs to a long history of anthropological collaboration in research and writing. In the early de­cades of North American and Eu­ro­ pean ethnology, the discipline’s close ties to fields like geography and natu­ral history meant that the scientific expedition was an impor­tant apparatus of xiv  Joint Preface

anthropological research practice. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, proj­ects of linguistic and cultural salvage and analy­sis remained closely allied with archaeology and museology, which explains how some of the most ambitious and impor­tant collaborative anthropological enterprises of the era—­Franz Boas’s Jesup North Pacific Expedition (1897–1902), for example—­were or­ga­nized principally around building natu­ral history collections. As the twentieth ­century wore on, an individualistic model of field research came to predominate in American and Eu­ro­pean anthropology, at least normatively, and was celebrated for the transformative qualities of participant-­observational immersion. But one would scarcely have had to scratch the surface of any ethnographer-­informant dyad to illuminate the complex webs of social enablement—­involving research assistants, translators, laborers, intermediaries, government agents—­that made anthropological research in the classic Malinowskian mode pos­si­ble. ­After the Second World War, a new emphasis on interdisciplinary area studies research in the social sciences expanded and intensified anthropology’s range of collaborative engagements around the world. Much as expedition-­ era anthropology was absorbed into colonial and imperial knowledge proj­ ects, the area studies era was imbricated with the national and international po­liti­cal dynamics of the Cold War. Governments sought to enroll anthropologists in military and intelligence operations across the world—­Proj­ect Camelot being one of the most well known. However, anthropology was also broadening its epistemic ambitions and moving from cultural salvage proj­ects ­toward a grappling with modernity and the complex cultural and social dynamics of cities, nations, and world systems. Interdisciplinary exchanges no doubt served to accelerate this shift. And 1950s enterprises like Cornell’s Vicos proj­ect in Peru (creating a “laboratory for social change”) or the mit Modjokuto proj­ect in Indonesia (which gave Clifford and Hildred Geertz their first fieldwork opportunity) cultivated the kinds of long-­term interdisciplinary research networks that influenced gradu­ate training and pedagogy as well.1 The postwar period also saw an efflorescence of anthropological research partnerships mediated through marriage and other life partnerships. Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson are a classic example, Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict a more elusive but possibly more substantial one. Then came the Geertzes as well as June and Manning Nash, Marilyn and Andrew Strathern, Edith and Victor Turner, and Margery and Eric Wolf, followed ­later by Barbara and Dennis Tedlock, Michelle and Renato Rosaldo, Sally and Richard Price, and Jean and John Comaroff, among ­others. Anthropology has seen Joint Preface xv

many ­couples practice the crafts of research, teaching, and writing ­under at least a partly shared sense of identity, each navigating its own relational dynamics as well as the dominant masculinist heteronorms of the discipline and the university in the twentieth ­century. Reacting to the still broader and more complex scale of post-1980s globalization and its social, economic, and environmental consequences, the twenty-­first ­century has seen renewed interest in collaborative research partnerships. Three that have inspired our duograph in par­tic­u­lar have been the Matsutake Worlds Research Group (Anna Tsing, Shiho Satsuka, Miyako ­Inoue, Michael Hathaway, Lieba Faier, and Timothy Choy), the Ethnographic Terminalia collective (Craig Campbell, Kate Hennessy, Fiona McDonald, Trudi Lynn Smith, and Stephanie Takaragawa), and the Anthropology of the World Trade Organ­ization group (Marc Abélès, Máximo Badaró, Linda Dematteo, Paul Dima Ehongo, Jae Aileen Chung, Cai Hua, George Marcus, Mariella Pandolfi, and Phillip Rousseau).2 All are multi-­institutional and international partnerships that have explored new ways of creating anthropological knowledge by crossing the bound­aries between anthropological research practices and the arts. Collaboration itself is nothing new in anthropology; ­there is abundant evidence that it has been a productive dimension of anthropological research and writing since the discipline’s beginning. Further, intimate research partnerships have long fueled the production of anthropological knowledge. ­There is doubtless an impor­tant book to be written about how the par­tic­u­ lar qualities, subjectivities, and dynamics of par­tic­u­lar collaborations have influenced the kinds of knowing and knowledge that ­those enterprises generated. But our intervention h ­ ere is more ­limited. We have found it striking that the spirit of collaborative research has not always translated well into practices of authorship. Coauthored texts remain the exception rather than the rule in anthropology, even when they derive from jointly undertaken field research.3 The reasons for this gap are not ­simple and involve considerations ranging from professional reputation to relational dynamics to institutional audit cultures that seek to impose a mathe­matics of individual accomplishment and accountability on the sociality of research, analytic, and writing practices. What is striking in our view is that t­ here are relatively few models for collaborative writing beyond the model of the jointly authored single text that synthesizes analytic perspectives u ­ nder a common “we.” This is why we have centered our methodological intervention on the duographic form: we are looking for ways to strike a better balance between individual ideation and expression and collaborative fieldwork and archiving. xvi  Joint Preface

An impor­tant added benefit of the duograph is that it permits a more extensive analytic division of l­ abor between its volumes, as parallel yet distinct arguments can be developed with re­spect to the common research archive. In our case, the Ecologics volume’s close focus on how ­human energetic and than-­ human beings and environmental aspirations intersect with other-­ agencies complements yet also reframes the Energopolitics volume’s effort to offer a more nuanced and comprehensive set of analytics of (­human) po­liti­cal power, and vice versa. If the general premise of the entire research proj­ect has been that a certain politics of energy is creating a situation of ecological emergency, then it is fitting, and we might say necessary, to be able to offer detailed conceptual and ethnographic accounts of both sides of the equation—­energopolitical and ecological. Had we tried to compact all t­ hese storylines into a single, synthetic account, however, we might well have burst its seams or have been forced to simplify ­matters to the extent that neither side would have received its due. In the duographic form, meanwhile, two volumes working together in the mode of “collaborative analytics” can dive deeply into dif­fer­ent dimensions of the research while still providing valuable ethnographic elaboration and conceptual infrastructure for each other.4

Your Turn One of our favorite rationales for the duograph is what is happening right now: you are deciding where to start. True to the lateral media infrastructures and expectations of this era, we aspire to offer a more dialogic, collaborative matrix of encounter with anthropological writing. We have sought the words to write; you now seek the words to read. We have left signposts as to where we think the volumes intersect. But you can explore the duograph as you like, settling into the groove of one narrative or zigzagging between them. Think of it somewhere between a Choose Your Own Adventure book and open-­world gameplay. Follow a character, ­human or other­wise; riddle through the knots and vectors of aeolian politics; get bogged down somewhere, maybe in the politics of land or the meaning of trucks; then zoom back out to think about the Anthropocene. Or perhaps pause for a minute or two to watch the birds and bats and turbines that now populate the istmeño sky. Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer

Joint Preface xvii

Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge the following persons and institutions whose support made this duograph possible. The preliminary field research for the project was funded by a grant from the Social Sciences Research Institute at Rice University. Rachel Petersen and Briceidee Torres Cantú offered extraordinary research assistance in the early research phase. The main period of field research in 2012–13 was funded by the Cultural Anthropology Program of the Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences at nsf (research grant #1127246). We further thank the Social Sciences Dean’s Office and especially our colleagues in Rice Anthropology—Andrea Ballestero, James Faubion, Jeff Fleisher, Nia Georges, Susan McIntosh, and Zoë Wool—for absorbing our share of administrative, advising, and teaching duties to allow us to undertake field research for a full year. We give thanks as well to our dear colleagues in Rice’s Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences (cenhs)—Bill Arnold, Gwen Bradford, Joe Campana, Niki Clements, Farès el-Dahdah, Jim Elliott, Melinda Fagan, Randal Hall, Lacy M. Johnson, Richard R. Johnson, Jeff Kripal, Caroline Levander, Elizabeth Long, Carrie Masiello, Tim Morton, Kirsten Ostherr, Albert Pope, Alexander Regier—and the Center for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality (cswgs)—Krista Comer, Rosemary Hennessy, Susan Lurie, ­Helena Michie, Brian Riedel, Elora Shehabuddin, and Diana Strassmann— for much-appreciated moral and intellectual support during the writing phase of the project. In the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, our debts are many. We would first of all like to thank the Istmeño binnizá and ikojts communities of Álvaro

Obregón, Ixtepec, Juchitán, La Ventosa, San Dionisio del Mar, and Unión Hidalgo for hosting us during different phases of the field research and for a great many conversations and small acts of kindness that helped this project immeasurably. There were certain individuals in the isthmus who became friends and allies in the course of this research and without whose support this duograph would never have been possible. Our special thanks to Isaul Celaya, Bettina Cruz Velázquez, Daniel González, Mariano López Gómez, Alejandro López López, Melanie McComsey, Sergio Oceransky, ­Rodrigo Peñaloza, Rusvel Rasgado López, Faustino Romo, Victor Téran, Vicente Vásquez, and all of their families. Our condolences to the family of David Henestrosa, a brave journalist who passed away shortly after our field research was completed. In Oaxaca City, Mexico City, and Juchitán, there were several organizations whose representatives helped enable particular parts of our research, including amdee, apiidtt, appj, cfe, cnte (Sec. 22), cre, edf Energies Nouvelles, Iberdrola Mexico, segego, semarnat, sener, ucizoni, and the Universidad Tecnológica de los Valles Centrales. We would also like to thank several individuals who helped us navigate the complex world of Mexican wind power. Thanks to Fernando Mimiaga Sosa and his sons for convincing us to make Oaxaca the focus of our research, to Sinaí Casillas Cano for his insights into the political contingencies of Oaxacan state governance of renewable energy development, to Felipe Calderón for answering our questions concerning the importance of wind power during his sexenio, to Laurence Iliff for a wealth of insights into the behind-the-scenes politics of Mexican energy, to Dr. Alejandro Peraza for an invaluable series of contacts among the power brokers of Mexican energy, and to The Banker, who remains anonymous but who gave us critical insights into the financial dimension of wind power development. Both the project and the duograph have benefited immensely from comments at several meetings of the American Anthropological Association, the Cultures of Energy Symposium Series, and the Petrocultures Research Group. Conversations with colleagues in the following forums were also critical in shaping the thinking that has gone into the manuscripts: the Climate Futures Initiative, Princeton University; Association for Social Anthropology Annual Conference, Durham, England; Earth Itself: Atmospheres Conference, Brown University; Energy Ethics Conference, St. Andrews University; Religion, Environment and Social Conflict in Contemporary Latin America, sponsored by the Luce Foundation and the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies, American University; Hennebach Program in the Humanities, xx  Acknowledgments

Colorado School of Mines; Klopsteg Seminar Series in Science and Human Culture, Northwestern University; Colloquium for the Program in Agrarian Studies, Yale University; Rice University’s Feminist Research Group and cenhs Social Analytics workshop; Environments and Societies Institute, University of California, Davis; Global Energies Symposium, University of Chicago Center for International Studies; Durham Energy Institute; Yale Climate and Energy Institute; Rice University, Mellon-Sawyer Seminar; Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change, Manchester University; After Oil, University of Alberta, Edmonton; Institut für Europaïsche Ethnologie, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin; Electrifying Anthropology Conference, Durham University, sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation; Parrhesia Masterclass, Cambridge University; Alien Energy Symposium, it University of Copenhagen. Thanks also goes out to friends and colleagues at the Departments of Anthropology at the London School of Economics; Ustinov College, Durham University; University of California, Los Angeles; University of California, Davis; Yale University; and University College London who were kind enough to invite us to share our work-in-progress with them. Paul Liffman has been immensely helpful throughout the life of this project, offering smart critique and always ready to provide context by drawing on his truly encyclopedic knowledge of Mexico’s political, economic, and social worlds. Our collaboration with Edith Barrera at the Universidad del Mar enriched our field experience, and back in the United States we were lucky to work with Fiona McDonald, Trudi Smith, and Craig Campbell, members of the Ethnographic Terminalia Collective, to imagine/incarnate the wind house installation of Aeolian Politics at the Emmanuel Gallery in Denver, Colorado. Lenore Manderson was also kind enough to review that project of imagining ethnography and wind differently. Anna Tsing and John Hartigan provided marvelous feedback on earlier chapters, and in later stages, the duograph benefited greatly from anonymous reviewers’ incisive commentaries. We appreciate especially their willingness to think with us on the experimental form of the duograph and for their wise handling of interconnections between the volumes. Thanks are also owed to the wonderful professionals at the University of Chicago Press, especially Priya Nelson, as well as Stephanie Gomez Menzies, Olivia Polk, Ken Wissoker, Christi Stanforth, and Courtney Baker at Duke University Press.

Acknowledgments xxi

Introduction

On many after­noons, it is the windiest place on earth. Carving out the narrowed girth of southern Mexico, the Isthmus of Tehu­ antepec is home to a anemometric quality that is nearly unmatched. Wind ­ ere, its steady pulse an ideal quotient of kinetic force to turn the is valuable h blades of turbines that, in turn, make electricity. With this wind develop­ ment might follow; with this wind new wealth might follow. And ­these are two of the reasons why the Oaxacan isthmus now represents the densest concentration of wind parks on land anywhere in the world. But in this wind other ­things are also gathered and captured: birds and turtles, trucks and barricades, dirt and money. This book began as a way to follow wind, and wind power, as a “salva­ tional object”: a social and technical apparatus to mitigate climate change in environmentally precarious times. How wind power was being located—­ epistemically, infrastructurally, and politically—­were my abiding questions at first. However, what was initially an exercise in po­liti­cal economic reason­ ing or an accounting of resources and their manipulations, became some­ thing more. Across hundreds of conversations and thousands of hours of encounter, it became increasingly clear that energy transition is not the work of ­people alone. In questions of power, both energetic and po­liti­ cal, ­people’s aspirations and their cosmological views are crucial. But it is also the case that h ­ uman actions can never disclose the full extent of how new energy forms are able to reassemble the lifeworlds of creatures, or how they can shape the potential of inanimate ­things. Concentrating only on the ­sociocultural dimensions of energy risks obscuring ­others, particularly how

the elemental force of wind, in itself, might become differently. Deeply po­liti­cal proj­ects of renewable energy development and the rise of wind parks have come to occupy the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. Unequivocally. But coincident with this truth are ­others: biota and stones, machines and infrastructures, dust and air. It was in the wind itself that my attentions first became bent, ­because when it blows and when its velocity and pres­ sure reach their apex, the wind insists that every­thing is much more than anthropos. This book follows the wind, but it also describes an antidote to the Anthropocene—­the epoch of h ­ uman imprint upon all earth systems from the geologic to the biotic, from the chemospheric to the hydrological, and from the cryospheric to the atmospheric. As a concept, the Anthropocene hails a par­tic­u­lar kind of encounter between deep time and ­human habit; it is meant to highlight a genealogy of consequences as well as presage pre­ carious ­futures. Anthropogenic impacts from energy extraction, produc­ tion, and use have surfaced the reciprocal relationships between excess and deprivation, and they have become harbingers for the unsustainable log­ ics that have driven petromodernity.1 The material forms and interactions that we call “energy” have always been harvested from what the industrial­ ized world has named “the environment.” But if the paradigm of the envi­ ronment has sought to emphasize interdependencies and mutualities, the human-­energy nexus has increasingly come to reveal the corrosive ways that ­people and energy sources interact. Widespread h ­ uman demands to have energy at our disposal pre­sent a calculus between h ­ uman aspirations for power, h ­ uman attempts to manage the climate, and the vital possibili­ ties of all creatures, plants, and beings.2 Within the parallel worlds of en­ ergy and environment, it has become clear that although renewable energy transitions demand the adoption of less catastrophic fuel sources, equally critical is understanding how ­human energetic desires—­for light and heat, for movement and flourishing—­either correspond with or deeply disrupt the energetic needs of other biotic life and the systems on which we all depend.3 Therefore, the argument that I develop throughout this book is that we cannot capture the con­temporary dynamics of energy and environ­ ment without attending to an array of other-­than-­human relations includ­ ing ­those with nonhuman beings, technomaterial artifacts, infrastructures, and geophysical forces. By exploring the routes and passages between energies and environ­ ments, lives and machines, and the forces that compel them, I also want 2  Introduction

to create a narrative patterning that is at once anticipatory and interrup­ tive. An anticipatory approach is instructive in times that are marked by ecological discord ­because it attunes our attention to the subjunctive ­future of the might be.4 In anticipation, prognoses float, undetermined but not unknown; questions are raised, but conclusions hang in suspension. Wind also enters ­here as an interruptive force, awakening air and rousing it from stillness. In following the wind, intermittencies find their way into ­these pages through ­things like birds and dust, dead dogs and trash, gusts and stillness. The architecture I have developed across the book is likewise ­anticipatory and interruptive; chapters oscillate back and forth between the contentious development of the massive Mareña Renovables wind park and the ways in which par­tic­u­lar other-­than-­human forces and entities came to challenge that proj­ect. Parallel to the case of Mareña Renovables, I devote attention to three distinct other-­than-­human actors in the saga of wind power: wind, trucks, and species. Each of ­these entities has had a profound role in the develop­ ment of wind power. Strong and steady wind is, of course, a prerequisite for the development of wind power; it is elemental in the most literal way. But trucks, like wind, are also everywhere within wind power in the isthmus, moving men and materials and operating to create par­tic­u­lar po­liti­cal out­ comes. And in the places where wind power is being developed, t­here are also myriad species with ­those threatened by industrial-­scale wind parks appearing in particularly stark forms. While wind, trucks, and species all hold ethnographic resonance for the case of wind power in Oaxaca, each also provides an analytic for the scalar thinking that the Anthropocene demands. They mark temporal coordinates both past and ­future. Wind that blew centuries ago was a force that can be said to have partly inaugurated the Anthropocene. It was wind power, ­after all, that blew colonial exploration and imperial exploitation to the New World. In the mid-­twentieth-­century “­Great Acceleration” of carbon use, trucks served as a mechanism to embody the work of fossil-­fueled moder­ nity. And fi­nally, in the precarious ­future of Anthropocene conditions, ­there are species—­the compendium of all known life hanging in the balance in an un­balanced world. Species includes flora and fauna as well as a ­future humanity, all of which now face uncertain geoenvironmental risks. Through knowing wind power more closely—in its elemental, technological, and more-­than-­human forms—my hope is to assem­ble ecologics differently and to look for a new, turbulent prototype. Introduction 3

How Wind Collapses, in the ­Future Subjunctive We could begin anywhere on a continuum, tilting ­toward one position or the other, and find ourselves, ultimately, in a story of utter failure or a tale of extraordinary success. ­Here are two scenarios of how wind collapses in the ­future subjunctive. SCENARIO 1

The Mareña Renovables wind park would have been the largest wind park in all Latin Amer­i­ca. It would have generated almost 400 megawatts of electricity, enough to power more than 600,000 Mexican homes. With the isthmus wind as its resource, the 132 turbines and their generators would have prevented almost 900,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions e­very year for at least two, perhaps three, de­cades. Financed by a consortium of international investment programs—­part Japa­nese, part Australian, and part Dutch—­the Mareña park would have put millions of dollars into the hands of environmentally conscious investors, providing capital for sustainable infrastructure proj­ects in the f­uture. The companies that would have purchased the clean power from the park would have benefitted from receiving bonos de carbono (carbon credits), offsetting their carbon footprint, and burnishing their profiles as socially responsible corporate enterprises. In the isthmus, jobs would have multiplied during the construction phase, giving work to ­unionized laborers from across southern Mexico. Local construction companies would have sold their goods. Once built, the proj­ect would have provided jobs in engineering, maintenance, and management. Indigenous communal landholders, ikojts (Huave) and binnizá (Zapotec) p­ eople, would have collected millions of pesos for the lease of their land. ­These funds, in the hands of farmers and fisherfolk, would have been invested in better homes, equipment, and education.5 More ­things would have been bought. ­People would have been healthier and happier, and development would, at last, have arrived in the more remote regions of the isthmus. Roads would have been paved, streetlights would have appeared. Politicians and agencies of government would have been pleased. Mexico would have stood prouder, leading countries of the global South t­ oward greener ­futures. The Mareña park, like many of the wind power proj­ects now occupying the isthmus, would have had all of the signatures of success, including 4  Introduction

im­mense amounts of transnational capital and unflinching state support. It would have been devoted to a new regime of energy that not only would have empowered Mexico but also would have lived as an energetic infrastructure to heal the world’s wounded climate.6 But this would be a failure. SCENARIO 2

The Mareña Renovables wind park would have been the largest wind park in all Latin Amer­i­ca. It would have occupied seventy-­three acres of territory, its ivory turbines arcing across a sliver of land between the Laguna Superior and the Laguna Inferior. The territory where it would have been erected is a biogeo­graph­i­cally vulnerable place, a narrow sandbar, or barra. This sandy stretch of land would have been asked to support 132 turbines, each one reaching 105 meters (thirty-­two stories) into the sky and weighing 285 tons. The 132 towers of steel, many tons of cement, and 396 blades churning the air might have created quakes in the sand, sending tremors across the lagoons. Lights atop the turbines would have burned day and night, and fish, shrimp, and other seaborne life might have retreated and migrated, leaving local fisherfolk without their daily catch. The fish might never have returned. And local communities in San Dionisio del Mar, Álvaro Obregón, and Juchitán might never have fished again. Construction work would have displaced many tons of mud and earth, and the docking stations where steel and concrete would have been off-­loaded would have forever changed the barra. Jobs constructing the park would have gone to outsiders, not to residents of the region. And the work that would have materialized for local laborers would have been brutish, short, and poorly paid. For the lease of their land, some would have become richer while o­ thers would not. Frictions would have endured. Corporate ­lawyers would have designed the contracts as “evergreen with right to cancel,” meaning that landholders would have indentured their lands for de­cades. Automatic renewals on lease contracts would have come to feel very much like dispossession, or despojo—­being robbed of one’s land. Indigenous and campesinos’ lands would appear, once again, to be vulnerable to the whims of the transnationals. Members of the comuna (communal estates), or comuneros (communal landholders), who originally signed contracts would feel that they had never been informed about the gargantuan size and impact of the park.7 Wind power would cause strife Introduction 5

and pitched ­battles between neighbors and within families across the isthmus. And in the communities surrounding the barra where the massive wind park would have been located, protests, blockades, vehicle heists, and raids by state police would carry on for years. ­Those who vocally spoke out against the works of the proj­ect would receive death threats and beatings. But with perseverance and strategies learned over de­cades of po­liti­cal unrest, protestors would ultimately stop the park’s construction. It would be arrested and incapacitated. This would be a success. The case of the Mareña park, in the scale of its potential and the enormity of its collapse, is an instance of one megaproject undone. But while the park has its singularity, it can also be taken as emblematic of programs of renew­ able energy that fail to deeply engage with and account for the p ­ eople, ­things, and other beings that are coincident with them. The anticipatory good that the park was meant to bring, both for local development and for the ener­ getic redemption of the global climate, existed as subjunctive ­futures: the might be, the could be. But that potential began to wither. It was not a series of technical flaws that presaged the g­ iant wind park’s denouement. Instead, its collapse was consecrated in the relationship between ­human hopes and an increasingly frail ecosystem. Wind power would have been a cleaner way to generate electricity, but the creators of the Mareña proj­ect failed to real­ ize the ways in which their plan reproduced an extractive model in which “resources” are possessed and sold and the proceeds are divided, often in inequitable ways. It has been the modus operandi of fossil-­fueled modernity to extract re­ sources in places that are relatively remote from the centers of consump­ tion.8 However, in mimicking the logics that have underwritten the carbon economy for the last three centuries, renewable energy transitions risk re­ peating old conventions that end in ruin. New ecoenergy forms ­ought to instead proceed with an ethos of rehabilitation rather than resource ex­ ­ uman aspirations for traction. This should be an exercise in rebalancing h energy with the energetic life needs of the more-­than-­human beings with whom we are in orbit. It ­ought to be a reckoning with forces like wind and ­water as well as an encounter with our technomaterial apparatuses. In truth, we cannot afford to get it wrong.

6  Introduction

F I G UR E I NTR O . 1 .  ​Wind turbines, Isthmus of Tehuantepec

Aeolian Arrivals The power of electricity and green neoliberalism have converged in the isthmus, reshaping life in the region. Over sixteen months of fieldwork, our research team of two traveled to all the critical sites of wind power develop­ ment in Oaxaca, from the isthmus where turbines w ­ ere being sited to the country’s capital where policy makers strug­gled to develop a program of energy transition that would be beneficial not only for the Mexican state but for the world’s climate.9 Our proj­ect became a practice of defamiliar­ izing “wind power” as a singular, technical, managed energy form, looking instead for the multiple ways that “aeolian politics” ­were gathering force. Aeolian politics—­borrowing from the Spanish energía eólica, meaning electricity derived from wind power—­emerged and evolved in many direc­ tions, from policy acts to the placement of bodies on barricades and from salvational winds to broken habitats. Aeolian conditions are everywhere in this work, expanding the term to mean many kinds of wind and their competing energies. We set out to see what sorts of social impasses or collective victories ­were informing the terms of renewable energy f­ utures. To do so meant un­ derstanding the positions of all involved, t­hose commonly thought of as stakeholders. ­These ­were ­people living in the shadows of the turbines or on the threshold of a wind park yet to be born. And they w ­ ere the land creatures and sea life inhabiting ­those same domains. They ­were renewable energy Introduction 7

com­pany executives and representatives of the Federal Electricity Commis­ sion (cfe), Mexico’s national electricity provider and sole grid operator. And they ­were environmental professionals tasked with protecting water­ sheds and environmental systems. They ­were officials at ­every level of gover­ nance from local representatives in the isthmus region to state policy makers in Oaxaca City to lawmakers in the country’s capital. They ­were journalists and laborers, aspiring politicians and hard-­boiled caciques (local bosses), truck ­drivers and fisherfolk. And they ­were ­those who lived in and with the wind. We spent many hours with activists who w ­ ere opposed to the parks as well as t­ hose who applauded the arrival of the eolicos (turbines). Over the ­ eople about course of our work, we also spoke with many, many “regular” p their thoughts on the wind parks, on development in Mexico, on Pemex (the state-­owned petroleum com­pany) and renewable energy, on climate change and transnational capital. ­These ­were ­people we encountered in the course of our days, who might not have seen themselves as implicated in the po­liti­cal sweep of wind power or renewable energy but who ­were, nonetheless, part of a greater aeolian politics. We went to where the wind is in order to grasp how renewable energy forms ­were coming to occupy the global South. But we also went to where the oil is. Mexico continues to be a petrostate—in recent times it has been dependent upon oil revenue for 43 ­percent of its federal operating bud­get. With declining oil reserves, however, the country had suffered financially, with much of its economic lifeblood buried deep ­under ­water in the Bay of Campeche.10 Some regions of the Mexican state, however, are rich with wind, and in the early part of the twenty-­first ­century, the country’s policy regime tilted optimistically ­toward the development of renewable energy infrastructures. In fact, Mexico was among the first countries in the devel­ oping world to institute comprehensive climate change legislation, earning the country international accolades from environmentalists and industrial­ ists alike.11 If we ­were seeking to understand the phenomena of energy, Earth and ­human habit, we found that conjunction in Mexico: bioplanetary effects and the multiple energies that have fueled them. Corporate investment and state sponsorship inaugurated the devel­ opment of wind resources in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec beginning in the mid-1990s when the first wind park, sponsored by the cfe, became operational in La Venta in 1994. By 2004 a full-­scale study of the entire wind corridor, devised by the United States Renewable Energy Labora­ tory, provided evidence of the considerable wind power potential that the isthmus held. Much of the region’s land was marked “excellent” for the 8  Introduction

production of electricity.12 During Felipe Calderón’s presidency (2006–12), when the power of drug cartels soared and oil began to wane, a serious campaign began to develop the renewable energy sources of the isthmus. Although never compelled to do so through the Kyoto Protocol, new leg­ islation in 2009 required that 35 ­percent of the nation’s electricity come from noncarbon sources by 2024.13 Lucrative incentives for private-­public partnerships ­were created, and the Mexican wind power sector flourished. In 2008 ­there ­were only two parks, producing 84.9 megawatts of power in the isthmus. Four years ­later ­there ­were fifteen parks, producing more than 1,300 megawatts, making Mexico the second-­biggest wind power producer in Latin Amer­i­ca. By 2016 the wind energy infrastructure of the isthmus had expanded to twenty-­nine parks with 2,360 megawatts of capacity, a 2,676 ­percent increase from the first years of operation. According to the Mexican Wind Energy Association, amdee,14 Mexico’s total installed wind power w ­ ill reach 15,000 megawatts by 2020–22.15 While t­ hese metrics are evidence of impressive and rapid growth in the wind corridor, they cannot begin to capture all the complexities of wind power. Th ­ ere is much more to it.

Staying with the Turbulence in Transitions Wind power is not just any power. It is a promissory force. Unlike mining, logging, or drilling for oil,16 wind power generation is supposed to, in part, save the world. Infrastructural pro­ grams that claim to climatologically benefit the “greater good” hold a par­ tic­u­lar ethical ballast. Renewable energy proj­ects would seem to righ­teously, and rightly, drown out the banal drone of greedy shareholders or demands for cheap fossil fuels. Wind power offers both redemption from dirty energy and, in places where wealth is sparse, the potential of economic salvation. But ­there is complexity all the way down. In many places in Latin Ameri­ can and elsewhere, denunciations against the environmentally destructive practices of fossil fuel extraction have now morphed into protests against proj­ects marked by the ambiguous sign of “sustainability.” Challenges have arisen as to ­whether local places are being sacrificed in the name of global climate salvation.17 And yet re­sis­tance to anything that is environmentally “sustainable” or is a technology of “resilience” can be taken as suspect. From one vantage point, ­those opposing new-­energy infrastructures can be ac­ cused of obstructing the ­future and gambling with unknown climatological Introduction 9

consequences that are still evolving. By this logic, if local populations of ­people, and ­others, become irreversibly disrupted in the transition pro­cess, then that is simply the price to be paid. The global stakes are so high, and correcting the planet’s faltering temperature equilibrium looms as the sine qua non of the subjunctive ­future. And yet old practices of extraction and exploitation can easily inhabit new spaces of sustainability, preserving a sta­ tus quo that continues to seek cheap resources and vast tracts of exploitable land. Energy transitions thus beg the question, What precisely is being sus­ tained? And what is being maintained? Scientific consensus has determined that carbon incineration needs to end, but transitions have proven to be ambivalent. They are at once an­ ticipatory and unknown. Hope is gathered ­here, but caution is too. Dis­ tinct scales of ecological remedy—­those tuned to “local” worries or, on the other hand, to “global” concerns—­can be incommensurate, each fo­ cused on addressing par­tic­u­lar kinds of distress and distinct vectors of contamination. By emphasizing benefits to planetary ecological systems, local ecosystems may be further imperiled; and yet in failing to amelio­ rate widespread global impacts, the entirety of the living world remains in jeopardy. Therefore, in order to take an ethical position that prioritizes ­future possibility, it is impor­tant that we attend to how the mechanisms of transition are being operationalized, precisely b ­ ecause they can create their own forms of harm for ­humans and ­others. Each increment of eco­ logical care o ­ ught to be thought of and enacted as a composition t­oward a ­whole. So while t­here should be no argument about the superiority of wind over oil in terms of externalizations and environmental damage, the institutionalization of any new energy form should inspire questions be­ fore resolutions.18 And it has. As I ­earlier wrote, this book was meant to narrate an antidote to the An­ thropocene. And in some ways, it still can, but not without hedging and ­ hether ­human beings can rebalance a warped world and equivocating as to w restore habitability.19 The Anthropocene speaks of vulnerabilities and risks, not simply for par­tic­u­lar creatures, plants, and persons, but in the aggregate and in the ­future. A growing awareness can be sensed in dramatic weather events, such as cyclones and superstorms, just as it can be read across me­ diascapes in reports of fatal heat waves and arable land becoming desert. Anthropogenically induced environmental precarity ­will not be felt the same everywhere by every­one; the consequences ­will be uneven. Nonethe­ less, ­people around the world are increasingly exposed to the direct material 10  Introduction

and physical truths of ecological mutations and exaggerated weather forms. We are living it. And in this sense, the Anthropocene is not simply a geo­ ­ uman impact upon earth; it is a way of explic­itly logical designation for the h recognizing that impact. It is a state of consciousness. As a planetary condition of precarity, the Anthropocene conjures a cer­ tain kind of extinctophilia, or an attunement to the necrotic. Each move that is made to chill the effects of a heating planet exists as an implicit recogni­ tion of ­human fragility.20 Proj­ects for sustainable energy that aim to mitigate further climate and biotic destruction are, in part, predicated upon the rec­ ognition that as a ­human species, we too are endangered. In ways like never before, “we” hang in the balance,21 traveling the risky corridors of species being as the Anthropocene intensifies its effects. This means confronting extinction in new ways, that of other species and our own. But a state of im­ pairment has a way of focusing attentions.22 As Anna Tsing has described, life on a “damaged planet” is also a prerequisite for “livable collaborations,” which are, in turn, the stuff of survival. If ruins are now our gardens and blasted landscapes compose the sites of our livelihoods, then we need to find optimism and perseverance in t­ hese ruins, in the cracks and fissures, in the spores and weeds.23 This is where wind comes in. Like the air out of which it is made, wind thrives on interplay with bodies, both lively and inert. An oscillation of gases and heat differentials, wind is an insistent reciprocal exchange between air, beings, and objects. Its relationality is impor­tant, even indexical. It is in contact that wind is seen. We might think of leaves quivering or branches undulating, dust in the air or a plastic bag aloft. In all cases, wind is seen only in ­those places where it touches or moves something ­else. A pencil drawing of curled lines is a way to illustrate wind, as are graphs, charts, and maps. But ultimately wind is only ever made vis­i­ble through its impact and influence on other ­matter, other materials, and other ­things. Wind’s ontol­ ogy refuses to take separateness as an inherent feature of the world. Its re­ lationality exists as an inverse allegory to the teleology of extraction that operates in one direction, to one end and for a singular purpose. And this is, in part, wind’s value—it has an existential precondition that appears only in the context of contact. Wind is touching, mutual, moving. In an era of renewable energy transitions, wind exists as a heuristic as­ semblage where powers and ­future imaginaries are tethered to one another. But wind also refuses to be gathered or to be caught as a t­ hing; it cannot be held in a jar. Unlike other resources—­such as ­water, land, or oil, wind evades Introduction 11

enclosure; it is nothing if it is not movement, and therefore it is a force that is not easily made into a propertied object. Placed in a box, its ontic state is fundamentally transformed, becoming air. It is a force that may be captured but never contained.24 While wind’s kinetic force may be seized by the blades of turbines, wind in itself cannot be held. It is elementally loose. It is motion. Even as wind may be inanimate, it is nothing if it is not animated. In ecologies of relationships that survive and sometimes thrive in the gusting winds of the isthmus, I want to avoid drawing deep divisions be­ tween the ontological capacities of nature and society and instead find their useful recompositions.25 ­There is no fetishization of nature, or Nature, ­here. In fact we might begin with the acknowledgement that “nature” (or for that ­matter “environment” or “ecol­ogy”) now exceeds and overspills definition.26 Attempting semantic jurisdiction over the terms of what is or is not natu­ral or constitutive of the environment is a conceit best left in historical place, like in mid-­twentieth-­century theories that lavished attention upon such binaries.27 As Marilyn Strathern predicted a few de­cades ago, somewhat prophetically, our epistemic climate has increasingly come to represent an epoch “­after nature.”28 ­These kinds of dissolutions and temporal demarca­ tions seek new, re-­adaptive thinking. If ­there ever was one, the “thin bright line” between ­people and the mys­ tified category of nature appears to be increasingly dissolving. Jackrabbits and Nissans, sand dunes and electric current, turtle eggs and stunted corn crops now all occupy this side of history, a cohabitational zone of socio­ natural space. Many thinkers have begun to emphasize the importance of ­ uman and nonhuman beings, or what recognizing the coconstitution of h Donna Haraway calls “making kin.” As the demarcations between ­humans and nonhumans have increasingly crumbled, in rubble too is the contention that “natu­ral” history can be disentangled from the history of “Man.” From this, ­theses have emerged prompting questions as to how “­human” ­human history ­really is or ever was.29 Where we have singularized ­human activity and separated it from every­thing ­else, we have, in fact, failed to understand the evolution of modernity and globalization as pro­cesses of interaction between material forms and forces as well as among multiple species. Of course, the history of capital must likewise enter into this genealogy b ­ ecause it has conditioned lifeworlds the world over. In this context, it has become clear that the “social” in social theory needs to be reproportionalized, at least the “social” that has been bracketed as referring to exclusively h ­ uman interrelationships. 12  Introduction

An Anthropology Alive to the Anthropocene Some have suggested that the Anthropocene is a remarkable and unique gift to the discipline of anthropology itself.30 Both nominally and epistemologi­ cally, Anthropology has claimed to be the science of anthropos, and its prac­ ti­tion­ers have spent well over a c­ entury attempting to grasp the many ways of ­human being. However, anthropological work has likewise been keenly alert to the conditioned specificity of “nature,” particularly as a code that seems to surface most dramatically within its putative inverse: modernity. The bimodal categories of nature/culture and environment/society have sparked debate and challenged normative assumptions in the discipline for many de­cades. Such juxtapositions, their theoretical generativity, and the recognition of their limits have roots in philosophical propositions. But per­ haps more importantly, they have been gained through empirical wisdom. The ­people with whom many anthropologists have worked, historically and in the pre­sent, often claim no rigid, exclusive, categorical distinction be­ tween ­human living and the material and multispecies domains in which ­people and their ­others interact and thrive.31 From this accumulated insight, an anthropological fascination with a posthuman condition, multispecies studies, or more-­than-­human encounters would seem to be a rather “natu­ ral” outcome for a discipline that has observed firsthand the refusal of nature as a singular form.32 If the trou­ble with nature has been an anthropological preoccupation, displacing a universal understanding of the ­human might qualify as an an­ thropological obsession. Illustrating difference across ­human experience while also narrating transpar­tic­u­lar similarities has remained at the core of anthropological work. Anthropologists have spent many de­cades demon­ strating that t­ here is more than one way to be ­human, and so it would seem the next step is to think through how the more-­than-­human is equally part of that story. In the conjunction of ­human and more-­than-­human encoun­ ters, attention to material t­ hings and other species should also encourage us to take ­humans as a species: a species that has altered earth systems and a species that ­faces its own status as newly endangered. Put another way, in a human-­contorted world, we o ­ ught to push t­ oward deepening the groove in which cross-­species intimacies or socialites are evolving. Perhaps we are now even obligated to work beyond the h ­ uman, as no ele­ment of ­human life exists untouched by ecosystemic circumstance. Where nature is increas­ ingly erupting through ­human lives and vice versa, to ignore the unhuman is to walk willfully blind into a time of vivid possibilities. Introduction 13

The infusion of the more-­than-­human into the science of anthropos has not come sui generis. It has developed together with correlates in the physical sciences, from biology to physics.33 Science and technology studies have stressed the incorporation of agentive technologies, machines, and ap­ paratuses into ­human being, and this perspective has been woven into the ­ ere. Feminist epistemologies, in par­tic­u­lar, have provided analytics I use h generative ground for multispecies studies and techniques of science and technology. Attention to cyborgs, for example, explic­itly called for the ma­ chinic to meet the biological, frustrating an easy separation between natu­ ral and “man-­made.” In times of ecological instability, the biological itself can likewise be recognized as more permeable, or “transcorporeal,” as Stacy Alaimo has put it.34 In the conditions of the pre­sent, I am especially cautious of delimiting our intellectual method to a facile version of actor-­networked forms of agency.35 In order to understand our environmentally precarious form of late industrialism, as Kim Fortun has reminded us, we must be responsive to the material and social ontologies of toxic conditions and unlivable envi­ ronments that are not fully captured in actor networks.36 Where discursive approaches to meaning have operated to distribute nodes of power and their outcomes, thinkers such as Karen Barad have also insisted that physical sub­ stance (­matter) must be given its due in the world’s becoming.37 Or perhaps many worlds’ becoming.38 As she has put it, “­Matter ­matters as much as mat­ tering”; the physical and the significant are inseparable.39 The call to name this age the Anthropo-­cene may appear to some as the ultimate aggrandizement of an overbearing species that is now carving its name into an epoch: the Age of Man.40 However, as we well know, the An­ ­ eople equally but thropocene condition did not come about through all p from the cumulative acts of certain ­people with par­tic­u­lar powers, the g­ reat majority of them being men. Past times that have valorized par­tic­u­lar kinds of male achievement established a reigning Age of Men that, in turn, pro­ duced the Anthropocene age. And while the accumulation of h ­ uman hubris may remain underfoot in plasticized and carbon forms in planetary stra­ tigraphy, we can also aim to refuse the spirit of anthropos’s reign. If an Age of Men created the Anthropocene condition, it is now time to invert that logic. Response to ecosystemic precarity w ­ ill need to come from every­one, everywhere; it is not that fault lies equally, ­because the global North bears the greatest blame, nor that solutions w ­ ill be evenly executed, for the global South is facing the greatest scales of harm. Th ­ ere is risk in flattening species being into one ­grand humanity ­because it erases histories of exploitation and ­futures of unequal consequences. However, debates about the qualities, origins 14  Introduction

and outcomes of the Anthropocene have invigorated questions about the place of the h ­ uman in the world and the worlds that h ­ umans share with all other earthly life and ­things. The Anthropocene may guide us to interrogate the consequences of a dominating anthropos; but, in truth, feminist thinking has always had that kind of attunement. The designation of an Anthropocene age invites a spe­ cies reckoning to be sure, but it also summons gender trou­ble. This is a good ­thing. Old Cartesian distinctions that cleave h ­ uman social and intellectual dispositions from their ecosystemic origins ­ought to continue to face cri­ tique. Equally impor­tant, however, is that the politics that have allowed for ­these sorts of inorganic fissures—­which are almost always posed as natu­ral—­ should likewise become part of a sedimented history of man that we leave ­behind. That “anthropos”—as “Man”—­resides so centrally within the notion of the Anthropocene is, in e­ very way, an invitation to a feminist corrective; that corrective shapes the way I have written this book. Citational practice is one of the tools we have at hand as authors, and I use that prerogative inten­ tionally ­here. While the scholarship in this book reflects a range of thinkers and disciplines, all of which are represented in the notes and bibliography, I prioritize feminist scholars of environment and ecological conditions in the text by using only their names in the body of the book. This is intended as a small counterbalance to the current politics of citation where male authors (often from the global North) continue to accrue more citational recogni­ tion, and thus legitimacy, particularly in the domain of theory. This is what Sara Ahmed has called “the citational relational.” My intervention ­here is meant to acknowledge and surface a dynamic that unfortunately continues in the production of knowledge. This may be an imperfect experiment, but it is, from my point of view, a beginning.41

Fueling the Anthropocene The Anthropocene speaks to the h ­ uman manipulation of terrains, animals, and air. It calls attention to a pro­cess that has been ongoing and that may, in fact, singularize ­humans as a species. While p ­ eople have always changed the land, creatures, and atmospheres where they have lived, we now live in times of exaggerated scale and depth. H ­ umans grew up in the Holocene, an epoch that began almost twelve thousand years ago. It was in t­ hose conditions that we learned our agriculture and our letters, arriving at a state that we have Introduction 15

been inclined to call civilization or culture.42 But if the physical sciences have begun to agree upon the traceable existence of anthropogenic impact on earth systems, t­ here remains disagreement as to when this Age of Man began and what it was that initiated it.43 Propositions regarding the onset of the Anthropocene range widely. It may have begun with the age of agricul­ ture or with imperial expansion to the (so-­called) New World or with fossil fuels or with nuclear fission.44 Each has its logical origins and outcomes. Holding ­these differences in place, what remains consistent about the An­ thropocene are three t­ hings: it is about time; it is about exploitation; and it is about fuel. time The suffix “-­cene” is derived from the Greek kainos, meaning “new.” But geo­ logical time is very slow and newness rare. And thus, the Anthropocene asks what it might mean to be out of time—­chronically allochronic—­incapable of imagining a seemingly boundless past, or an infinite ­future.45 A new -­cene might also attune us to what it might mean to be out of time—­as in the jig is up and apocalypse is upon us. Distorted worlds may need trou­ bled temporalities. And yet the Anthropocene continues in its accelera­ tionist mode. Current extinctions are happening quickly.46 We may worry about our own. ­These are times of prolepsis, where seeing a knife in the first act means knowing that the cut ­will certainly come. But we might also see a more hopeful foreshadowing ­here, where a grain of sand is a sign of a gem to come. A fascination with Anthropocene causality and the periodizations of its unfolding is an indicator of one of the epoch’s signature dynamics: bringing ­ uman us deeper into our collective encounter with time.47 The marriage of h history and geologic time is a call to the subjunctive form. We may recognize the ­future as both a lure and a tripping point ­because the Anthropocene is an anticipatory exercise. We know for certain that the skyscape is radically altered for millennia to come. Geos itself, with a seemingly infinite existence, embodies time that is deep and long. Temporal immanence like this can be cognitively challenging for ­those who live the fleeting existence of a ­human life-­span. When Kathryn Yusoff writes that the Anthropocene is an opportunity to imagine ourselves “geologically,”48 in the slow accretive meta­phors of minerals and timescales in the hundreds of thousands or mil­ lions of years, she is correct. And yet in many ways we have already been living geologically. While the Anthropocene underscores how ­humans have become geologic agents the world over, our cohabitation with hydrocarbons 16  Introduction

and fossil fuels—­harvested from deep down in geos—­are an indication that we have long been, if unconsciously, already living geologically.49 Times that are marked u ­ nder the sign of the Anthropocene may simply mean that the difference between life (bios) and nonlife (geos) is now more assertively marked, even as it has always existed and been apparent to some ­ thers. In Elizabeth Povinelli’s reading, this historical juncture is and not o no longer a ­matter of life and death. Instead the “new drama” being staged is a form of death “that begins and ends in Nonlife.” Extinctions far and wide expose anthropos as simply another installment in a grander collective of not only animal life but all “Life” as opposed to the state of “Nonlife.”50 Traveling far enough back in time, we find that it was geos that supplied the conditions of bios’s becoming. It was an “inert” earth that gave birth to all life. Just as ­humans have engraved themselves in and on geos, so too has geos permeated humanity in vari­ous ways: molecularly and biopo­liti­cally. The Anthropocene is therefore not only a way to locate the sedimentation of ­human practice, it is an invitation to uncover how bios has always been interlocked with geos. exploitation The colonial affliction that began in the ­middle of the last millennium for­ ever altered the movements of ­people, animals, and plants. Worlds ­were brought together in unpre­ce­dented ways, often brutal but sometimes be­ nign. At each step, residual marks remained on the crust of the earth itself. Exploiting lands and ­people at scales that ­were heretofore unseen, imperial conquests and settler colonialism induced bouts of growth and withering. The transformation of forests and farms into private, enclosed plantations was often powered by enslaved h ­ uman beings and their forced l­ abor. As wild places ­were replaced with plantation monocropping, biotic abundance and panspecies habitats became denuded: contorted places to grow plants for profit. What began in the colonial era as the radical transformation of di­ verse kinds of human-­managed farms, pastures, and forests is in the pre­sent exacerbated by agribusiness and industrial meat production, in what Anna Tsing and her colleagues have dubbed the “Plantationocene.”51 ­These biotic shifts may have multiplied in the fifteenth c­ entury, but ­those effects ­were intensified further in the long sixteenth ­century and the rise of capitalism. While capital may be famously promiscuous, humanity on the w ­ hole cannot be assigned equal responsibility for the injurious channels that it has produced. Anthropogenic harms that have accrued ­under the figure of “the Capitalocene” are a combination of capital accumulation and the (­human) Introduction 17

pursuit of power.52 Operating in dialectical fashion, capitalism itself would become a world ecol­ogy enabled by changes in science, production, and the distribution of power. Capitalocene temporality, like that of the Plantationo­ cene, resides in the extension of imperial seizures that engendered a restruc­ turing of “natures” everywhere.53 Plantations—­and their close kindred in industrial agriculture—as well as capitalism continue to be at work in the ­here and now. As we recast history in the light of a deforming planet and climatological trou­bles, it is also vital to recognize that neither plantations nor capitalism nor industrial accelerations would have existed if it ­were not for anthropos. And that puts us back in the Anthropocene: a human-­created epoch generating uncertain ­futures. fuel The Anthropocene is often diagnosed as a plague of par­tic­u­lar fuels and their burning. In the latter half of the eigh­teenth ­century, the Eu­ro­pean in­ dustrial revolution turned to new fuels and increased scales. Forests had been erased across much of Eu­rope to sustain a growing population, but the ma­ ­ ere chines of the industrial age required more efficient resources, and they w found in fossil fuels. The advent of the Anthropocene age can be traced, by some accounts, to one singular invention: James Watts’s steam engine. This was the juggernaut of a peripatetic modernity, fed by coal that it would burn and burn and burn. Two hundred years ­later the industrial age reached its zenith and the mid-­twentieth ­century would become marked as the age of more. Every­thing exponentialized: h ­ uman populations, modifications to land masses, production and trade, excavations of petroleum pockets and mineral beds, the use of nuclear power for war and energy, and the emis­ sions of gases and pollutants accompanying each increase in scale. They call ­these velocities of change the “­Great Acceleration.”54 Speed and carbon formed an unpre­ce­dented coupling, and fuels became remainders residing in earth systems. Coal and oil, along with the split atomic nucleus, are the fuel forms that are most often associated with the Anthropocene and its accelerationist tendencies. But, I would argue, ­there is a critical other. While petroleum certainly hastened anthropocenic conditions, we can also find the causal power of wind at work in the making of the Anthropo­ cene. It was the power of wind that blew ships to the New World, inaugurat­ ing an age of imperial expansion and the increased exploitation of land and ­people, creatures and minerals. Wind-­powered sailing ships transported goods back and forth, moving flora and fauna to disparate places, provid­ ­ eople and ­things. It was ing an aeolian infrastructure for the movement of p 18  Introduction

wind power and ­human greed that spurred the transatlantic slave trade. And through this set of abuses against anthropos came further intensifications of agriculture, continuations of displacement and the realignment of much of earth’s ­matter. Wind that blew t­oward the New World led to certain kinds of ­futures. Captured within it, then and now, are other, potentially more equitable, possibilities. Perhaps it is irrelevant to speculate on which time periods, social pro­ cesses, or energetic sources can be charged with increasing ecological pre­ carity. Does it ­matter, in the end, ­whether it was atoms or oil or wind at the root of it all? Maybe not. But maybe so. Unlike carbon fuels, wind has been positioned—by governments, industry, and environmental advocates alike—as a way to reverse the Anthropocene order. Therefore, while wind might be blamed for abetting the trou­ble on terra, it also embodies a re­ sponse, a solution, or a method of energetic salvation. Wind thus holds us in an uncomfortable paradox: it exists as both partial cause and potential redemption for an anthropogenically wounded world. This book is an attempt to live within that paradox by illustrating how wind fails when it is made to repeat the extractive logics that have sustained carbon modernity or, conversely, how it can succeed by giving its energetic potential not only as a source of power but as a source for imagining politics and ecologics anew.

the first chapter of this book is named for what it attempts to contain: “Wind.” While elemental forces of air, ­water, earth, and sunlight have long maintained ­human and other life on the planet, they are now more broadly recognized as spheres that are at once crowded with extinctions as well as teeming with energetic potential. In this chapter, I engage with how wind is a dynamic and heterogeneous figure—­a force of aeolian multiplicity—­that ­ uman is formed by land and by hope, by technocratic management and by h care. In this pro­cess, I argue, wind becomes differently, moving from ele­ ment to condition and from experience to resource. Wind power itself can be said to occupy very dif­fer­ent places in any map of the Anthropocene as a force that fueled the epoch as well as one intended to undo it. Wind’s very ontology, therefore, calls for a “deterrestrializing” of thought, and what this chapter ultimately shows us is that wind cannot in fact be contained, only captured for a moment. In “Wind Power, Anticipated,” chapter 2, I track the evolution of wind power and its parks in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. In this origin story is Introduction 19

embedded the developmental aspirations of t­ hose who promoted the growth of wind power as a renewable energy source. In its most dramatic utterances, wind power was anticipated as a salvational object with far-­reaching ben­ efits. Out of this calculus came the Mareña Renovables wind park, which would have been the largest single-­phase wind park ever installed in Latin Amer­i­ca. I take the case of Mareña as paradigmatic of the challenges facing wind power in Mexico and, by extension, elsewhere. For t­hose who pro­ moted the proj­ect, its creation held enormous ethical potential not only to generate ­great quantities of renewable electricity but to provide social and economic development to the region. For t­ hose who stood in opposition to the proj­ect, firm ethical ground also upheld them: rejecting corporate mega­ projects and the industrialization of their environment. What I demonstrate in this chapter is that origins ­matter to outcomes. Trucks, the subject of chapter 3, would seem to be an unlikely nonhu­ man collaborator in the development of renewable energy. Trucks embody petromodernity in almost e­ very way, from their masculinist stereotyping to their fossil-­fueled metabolism. However, in this chapter I show how trucks are fundamental to the evolution of wind power: compelling the pro­cess, physically, po­liti­cally, and often affectively. In empirical terms, they are al­ ways at work in the construction of wind parks or transporting the material goods for their operations. Trucks literally drive wind power: in the men they transport, in the politics they create, and in the hopes and terrors they foment. Trucks enable mutual communication between ­matter and form. As a temporal marker, trucks also occupy the apex of Anthropocene ac­ celerations, and trucks therefore serve as “indicator machines” as well as “transitional objects”—­expressions of ­human and machinic interplay that lie between petromodernity and a renewable ­future. This chapter makes the ar­ gument that technomaterial tools, objects, or artifacts, such as trucks, need to be taken as (a) consequential “­matter” in understanding the ecosocial politics of energy transition. In chapter 4, “Wind Power, Interrupted,” I navigate the second part of the story of the wind park that never was. Although bolstered by power­ful allies and drawing from all the forces of governmentality, development­ alism, and transnational capital, the Mareña proj­ect found itself irretrievably interrupted by accusations of trampling indigenous sovereignty and en­ dangering other-­than-­human lifeworlds. For many supporters of the wind park, criticism of it was motivated by desires for personal financial gain. But for ­those opposed to the park, its collapse was a resounding victory against domination and displacement. Mediated across international news outlets 20  Introduction

and echoing through the channels of the Mexican nation-­state, the Mareña proj­ect became a paradigmatic case, as one government official put it, “of how it should not be done.” This chapter details t­ hose impasses to show that while the proj­ect may have intended to bring “transition” to the region—in the form of renewable energy and economic development—­those protesting the park saw no such transition. Opposition to the proj­ect ultimately ­shaped a philosophical critique as to ­whether renewable energy is ­really anything “new” at all, especially when seen from the point of view of centuries of domination and militant responses to that domination. I argue that in the end, transition is nowhere an objective or neutral pro­cess but one predicated on subjective positioning. Chapter 5, “Species,” is an invitation to unthink species as a classifica­ tory system of categorization and to instead be with species. In this chapter, ­human expressions of displacement—­like fears about the loss of land and territory—­find their analog in other species’ displacements: from jackrab­ bits to sea turtles. Species life in the isthmus is qualified differently in the con­ text of anthropocenic conditions and this is consequential to how ­humans diagnose, quantify, and seek to manage the species life that is wrapped up in wind. ­Humans are a power­ful species within the figure of the wind: calcu­ lating mea­sures of “environmental risk” in the offices of government agen­ cies and making claims about which ­humans, animals, or plants should be allowed to thrive or die in the isthmus. The feminist phi­los­o­pher Isabelle Stengers has called attention to the value scales associated with animal test­ ing, and I similarly take species in the Anthropocene as a par­tic­u­lar form of animal testing: t­ rials for both h ­ uman and nonhuman lives that currently hang in biotic balance. In chapter 6, “Wind, in Suspension,” Mareña’s fate is sealed. Through the rise and demise of what would have been the largest wind park in Latin Amer­i­ca, it becomes clear that the proj­ect suffered no technoscientific un­ doing but was instead sacrificed to the play of suspicions. Proponents of the park saw opposition to it as the work of troublemaking outsiders and po­liti­cal opportunists preying upon green cap­i­tal­ist enterprises, extracting bribes and mounting protests to enhance their own financial and po­liti­cal networks. For ­those opposing the park, its supporters ­were equally suspect: interested only in their profit margins, in the form of rents and contracts, and abetting the extraction of resources in a place keenly attuned to the privations of transnational capital. The g­ iant wind park was conceived in the paradigm that its global climatological good would correspond with the ecological, eco­ nomic, and social worlds that comprise ­human and other-­than-­human life Introduction 21

across the isthmus. But as I show, failures of attunement ran deep: histo­ ries of insurrection and displacement ­were not given their due, and perhaps more impor­tant, the ­imagined ­futures of local residents ­were fatally ignored. While the wind park’s destiny was tied to all manner of po­liti­cal maneuvers by caciques and corporate representatives, ultimately wind power would be drowned in the watery spaces between ­people and fish. The conclusion to Wind and Power in the Anthropocene is a joint reflec­ tion on the collaborative research that is detailed in each of the volumes of the duograph, Ecologics and Energopolitics. In our final chapter, we look ­toward aeolian ­futures through the turbulent pre­sent of aeolian politics. In revisiting the years of research and analy­sis invested in this proj­ect, we re­ turn to the original premise that compelled us to the field, and to Oaxaca in the first instance: namely, the global necessity of adopting less catastrophic fuel sources in order to avert further anthropogenic harm and climatologi­ cal insecurity. In revisiting this work, we also affirm more strongly than ever that renewable energy transition must be undertaken in a more fulsome way than it generally has been and that it must include the contingencies of both anthropo­liti­cal concerns and the more-­than-­human lives that energy infrastructures touch. Transition, we find, fails to achieve its potential when it is muted by the logics of extraction that have ruled the last several centu­ ries. In the end, we do not merely need new energy sources to unmake the Anthropocene; we need to put ­those new energy sources ­toward creating politics and ecologics that do not repeat the expenditures, inequalities, and exclusions of the past.

22  Introduction

Notes

joint preface 1. See Lynch 1982; Price 2016. 2. For more information on ­these partnerships, see Ethnographic Terminalia, http://­ethnographicterminalia​.­org; “Anthropology of the World Trade Organ­ization,” Institut interdisciplinaire d’anthropologie du contemporain, February 12, 2008, http://­ www​.­iiac​.­cnrs​.­fr​/­article1249​.­html. 3. But ­here, as in other re­spects, we find the aforementioned collaborative part­ nerships trailblazing. See, for example, Matsutake Worlds Research Group 2009; the exhibition cata­logs and zines produced by Ethnographic Terminalia, http://­ ethnographicterminalia​.­org​/­about​/­publications; Abélès 2011. 4. See, for example, Boyer and Marcus, forthcoming.

introduction 1. For anthropological and other social scientific approaches to the study of energy, see, for example, Boyer 2014; Daggett 2019; Howe 2014, 2015a, 2015b; Howe and Boyer 2016; Howe, Boyer, and Barrera 2015; Hughes 2017; Krauss 2010; Love and Garwood 2011; Mason and Stoilkova 2012; Nadaï 2007; Nader and Beckerman 1978; Nader 2004, 2010; Pasqualetti 2011a, 2011b; Pinkus 2016; Scheer 2004; Strauss, Love, and Rupp 2013; Watts 2019; White 1943; Wilhite 2005; Winther 2008; Winthereik 2018; Wolsink 2007. 2. Throughout this text I use the terms “we” and “our” with dif­fer­ent intentions that I believe the reader ­will find clear in context. In some instances, “we” (or “our” or “us”) is in reference to the collaborative research team of two. At other times, the “we” refers to ­those of you who are reading this text and therefore engaging in a conversation about the issues that are included ­here. And fi­nally, ­there are instances where “we” is meant to speak of and to a grander category of ­human beings. The latter usage of “we/our” is clearly universalizing in some ways, indexing “all of humanity.”

However, my intention is not to presume that all ­humans are equally positioned to act or respond to the environmental dilemmas that are the context for this proj­ect nor to suggest that all ­people—­past, pre­sent, or ­future—­are their root ­causes. Instead, I want to draw attention to ­humans as a species that has, through some of its agents over time, manipulated earth systems and “resources” to the point where it is now unclear ­whether a collective ­human effort ­will be able to control the environmental conse­ quences that have come from carbon incineration and other earth-­altering practices. Above all I want to emphasize that “we” is always a heterogeneous ­human. 3. For anthropological work on global warming, climate models, climate politics, and climate impacts, see Barnes et. al. 2013; Crate and Nuttall 2009; Edwards 2013; Henning 2005; Hulme 2011; Klein 2015; Lahsen 2005; McNeish and Logan 2012; Mon­ biot 2009; Oreskes and Conway 2011; Rhoades, Zapata, and Aragundy 2008; Roncoli, Crane, and Orlove 2009; Strauss and Orlove 2003. 4. By “subjunctive ­future” I resort to a (rarely used) grammatical form, the ­future subjunctive (available in Spanish and other language systems) to indicate what might be or that which could be ­were a certain set of pre­de­ces­sor events and qualities to unfold prior to that ­future moment being indicated: a hy­po­thet­i­cal ­future action. In con­temporary usage, the ­future subjunctive has been subsumed into the pre­sent subjunctive and appears only rarely (for instance, in literary or ­legal documents). However, ­here I want to underline both the ­future (temporality) and the subjunc­ tive (possibility). I contrast this with Kim Fortun’s “­future anterior” (2001, 353). For Fortun, the ­future anterior is a formula for prefiguring the ­future by assessing the past (and thus aspiring to a better and better-­understood ­future), whereas the ­future subjunctive is less sensitive to the past than it is to the present-­cum-­future. 5. I use the term “fisherfolk” to designate both ­those who actively fish and ­those who pro­cess and vend the fished products. We never encountered a fisherwoman in the isthmus during our research, though ­women ­were very involved in fishing as a livelihood. The séptima neighborhood—­a working-­class barrio where many Juchite­ can fisherfolk live—is buzzing with ­women cleaning, drying, and selling fish in the predawn morning. 6. Social scientific work on infrastructures has been burgeoning. See, for example, Anand 2017; Appel 2012; Barnes 2014; Bowker et al. 2010; Carse 2014; Gupta 2015; Harvey and Knox 2015; Howe, Lockrem et al. 2015; Larkin 2013. 7. Beyond privately owned parcels of land, two forms of land tenure serve as impor­tant social forms in the isthmus and in Oaxaca more generally—­bienes ejidales (or ejidos) and bienes comunales (or comunas, comunidades). Ejidos, a product of the Mexican Revolution, allow mestizo peasant farmers to collectively maintain and manage a communal estate, usually for the purposes of farming; members are referred to as ejidatarios. In the 1990s ejido collectives ­were able (and sometimes encour­ aged) to privatize land parcels, converting them into private properties with deeded ­owners. Bienes comunales are likewise collectively managed communal estates, but they are recognized as having belonged historically to indigenous ­peoples, gathered together as an asamblea or comuna; members are referred to as comuneros. Bienes comunales maintain a governing structure that calls upon the community’s overall 198  Notes to introduction

membership (the asamblea) to vote in ­matters of land disposition. The commissariat (comisariado)—­composed of a president, secretary, and treasurer—is charged with the administration of proper procedures and decision making, and they are in turn supervised by a consejo de vigilancia (oversight committee), comprising three comuna members, with elections taking place ­every three years. For more on ejidos and bienes comunales, see Cornelius and Myhre 1998; Castellanos 2010. 8. Remoteness is, of course, relative. For ­those communities being impacted by the extraction of fossil fuels and ­those laborers who work in the industry, extraction can be intimately felt on a daily basis. 9. This research was a collaborative proj­ect with Dominic Boyer—­beginning in 2009 and concluding in 2013—­that investigated the po­liti­cal and ecological dynamics of wind power development in Oaxaca, Mexico. For more on collaborative analytics in anthropology see Marcus 2018 and on authoring and writing in anthropology see Wulff 2017. 10. In 2013 the Mexican state undertook energy reform mea­sures, revising its seven-­decade-­long commitment to nationalized oil production and ending Pemex’s role as the sole owner and operator of the country’s fossil fuel assets. In spring 2017 an Italian com­pany was the first international operator to drill in Mexican ­waters, and it is expected that oil production ­will increase in the coming years. On Mexican energy reform, see the International Energy Agency report, “Mexico Energy Outlook.” 11. See Booth 2010, for example. 12. On wind resources in the isthmus, see Almeyra and Alfonso Romero 2004; Alonso Serna 2014; Aiello et al. 1983; Borja Díaz, Jaramillo Salgado, and Mimiaga Sosa 2005; Caldera Muñoz and Saldaña Flores 1986; Elliott et al. 2003; Hoffman 2012; Sánchez Casanova 2012. 13. In June 2016 the US, Canada, and Mexico agreed that they would jointly commit to 50 ­percent noncarbon fuel sources (for electricity generation) by 2025; this repre­ sents a significant upscaling of Mexico’s original formulation. Note that “clean” energy sources in this context include not just renewables but also nuclear energy, carbon capture and storage plants, and energy efficiency. ­Under that definition, 37 ­percent of North Amer­i­ca’s electricity in 2015 came from clean energy sources (Eilperin and Dennis 2016). Just 22 ­percent of Mexico’s electricity generation in 2014 came from nonfossil fuels, according to its government, though the country has pledged to raise that to 34 ­percent by 2024. 14. La Asociación Mexicana de Energía Eólica, A. C. 15. The number of Mexican ­house­holds that could be served by this quantity of wind-­powered electricity is difficult to predict. Calculations of ­house­hold electricity are complex and contingent on several ­factors. Electricity demands differ from state to state according to climate, habits, and installed devices. For one study of both urban and nonurban ­house­holds in Mexico derived from the Encuesta Nacional de Ingresos y Gastos de los Hogares 2008 (enigh), see Cruz Islas 2013, 198. 16. Or, for that ­matter, any other environmentally disruptive extractive practices exercised in the name of modernity and growth. See Bebbington 2009; Galeano 1997; Gudynas 2009; Johnson, Dawson, and Madsen 2007; Liffman 2017; Turner 1995; Notes to introduction 199

among ­others. On waste see, for example, Alexander and Sanchez 2018; Alexander and Reno 2012; Gabrys 2013. On the petropolitics of oil and its afterlife specifically, see Behrends, Reyna, and Schlee 2011; Breglia 2013 (Mexico); Coroníl 1997 (Venezuela); Klieman 2008 (historic, Congo); Sawyer 2004 (Ec­ua­dor); Mitchell 2011. 17. This can also be taken as a sign of cynical reason, or what Peter Sloterdijk (2014) calls “enlightened false consciousness”: ­people are equipped with knowledge but refuse to act accordingly. 18. For examples of oil and crises, see Bini and Garavini 2016; Dietrich 2008; Mitch­ ell 2011; Love 2008. However, from my point of view, questions of energy transition in the Anthropocene provide a deeper impetus to enact and live energy/environment “other­wise.” The environmental precarity of the pre­sent—in its global sweep and in­ terlinked ecocrises of melt, seawater rise, and climatological decay/precariousness that are scientifically proven—­suggests a unique condition for energy as well as encounters with and articulations of environment. 19. Changing our collective forms of energy is, from my point of view, an unquali­ fied necessity, and this book is certainly not an argument against renewable energy nor against wind power as an impor­tant node of that apparatus. The question, rather, is how transitions can be undertaken with more care and attention to potential harm than has often been the case in the past. 20. Kathryn Yusoff describes this potential as the “extinguishment of the late ­Holocene ­human subject” (2016, 5). 21. Again, I want to bracket the ­grand ­human “we” ­here in the recognition that not all ­humans have contributed equally to, nor ­will suffer equally with, anthropogenically induced changes to the earth system (see Davis 2010 for an excellent, related discus­ sion). ­There has been a tendency, in discussions about the Anthropocene, to imagine “­future humanity” as a way to erase con­temporary social differences and inequalities, including climate racism, as Kathryn Yusoff has pointed out (2016, 2). I do not want to rehearse that elision ­here, but I do want to focus on modulating the false separation of ­human and nonhuman survival and extinctions. 22. See, for example, Scranton 2015. 23. ­Humans as a “weedy species” (Wake and Vredenburg 2008) seems to be a more and more resonant designation, especially in the context of “ruins” and “blasted landscapes.” 24. Wind machines (to test aerodynamics, for example) or fans (for cooling) are instances of human-­generated wind, but their fundamental property continues to be (gaseous) movement and interaction. Unlike solid (minerals, coal), liquid (­water), or viscous (oil) resources, wind is only generative when it is in motion. It is contrastatic. 25. The ecol­ogy of relationships builds from Descola 2013a, 5. In seeking to avoid a strict division between ontological and phenomenological being, I am thinking of productive pairings of the two. See, for example, Bennett 2010; Braun and Whatmore 2010; Chen 2012; Descola 2013a, 2013b; Jasanoff 2010; Massumi 2009. 26. For a range of more recent interpretations as to what constitutes “Nature’s” end or its radical reformulation, see, for example, McKibben 1989; Latour 2004a. 200  Notes to introduction

27. Claude Lévi-­Strauss and allied structuralists come to mind, but the ­human sciences have been in a more protracted discussion over the definitional qualities of nature/culture for far longer. 28. See, for example, Strathern 1980, 1992. 29. See for example Dipesh Chakrabarty’s influential 2009 essay, “The Climate of History: Four ­Theses.” His ­theses are (1) “anthropogenic explanations of climate change spell the collapse of the age-­old humanist distinction between natu­ral history and ­human history”; (2) “the idea of the Anthropocene, the new geological epoch when ­humans exist as a geological force, severely qualifies humanist histories of modernity/globalization”; (3) “the geological hypothesis regarding the Anthropocene requires us to put global histories of capital in conversation with the species history of ­humans”; (4) “the cross-­hatching of species history and the history of capital is a pro­cess of probing the limits of historical understanding.” For further perspectives on the Anthropocene, see, for example Steffen, Crutzen, and McNeill 2007; Steffen et al. 2015. 30. In his 2014 distinguished lecture delivered at the American Anthropological ­Association meeting, Bruno Latour saw the advent of the Anthropocene, and scholarly work on it (1) to focus upon “­human agency” as its central tenet, (2) to explic­itly conjoin the “physical” and “social” sciences, and (3) to raise moral questions of responsibility (or as Haraway would have it, response-­ability), all of which anthropology has been ­doing all along (Latour 2014, 2–4). 31. In fact, it would be impossible to narrate a history of anthropology without accounting for the significant role of nonhuman animals in ethnographic work from the inception of the discipline to the pre­sent. Early examples include Lewis Henry Morgan (1868) on the American beaver (a more naturalist account) or his account of Iroquois phratries (wolf, bear, and turtle, for example) and Boas’s research on seal-­ hunting practices among Inuit ­peoples on Baffin Island (1883). While some human/ nonhuman animal encounters are described in more programmatic terms (such as hunting), anthropology has represented a wide range of animal-­human lifeways. Think of Cushing and Benedict on Zuni animal tricksters, Mauss’s (1979) explicit eco­ logical frame for his “social morphology” hypothesis, or Rappaport’s (1968) deeper ecological approach concerning ­humans and their eco/animal. Douglas’s 1957 discussion of human/animal relations among Lele ­peoples, for one, presages many con­temporary discussions of human/nonhuman relationality. She writes that for Lele, one of the defining princi­ples of animals is “their own ac­cep­tance of their own sphere in the natu­ral order. . . . ​Most run away from the hunter, . . . ​but sometimes ­there are individual animals which, contrary to the habit of their kind, disregard the boundary between ­humans and themselves. Such a deviation from characteristically animal be­hav­ior shows them to be not entirely animal, but partly ­human” (1957, 48–49). 32. Social scientists concerned with other-­than-­human life as well as ­those commit­ ­ uman (or ted to more deeply investigating the ways that inanimate materials shape h nonhuman) beings are many and growing. See, for example, Alaimo and Hekman 2008; Candea 2013; Coole and Frost 2010; de la Cadena 2015; Franklin 2007; Hartigan Notes to introduction 201

2015, 2017; Hird 2009; Kirksey 2014; Kohn 2013; Lowe 2010; Myers 2016; Nadasdy 2007; Nading 2012; Paxson 2008; Porter 2013; Raffles 2010; Stengers 2010; Stewart 2011; Tsing 2012, 2015. In the humanities, see Wolfe 2009 among ­others. 33. For biology, see, for example, the paradigm-­altering biological research of Lynn Margulis (1970); John Hartigan’s excellent work on genomics, science, and racism in Mexico (2013). Regarding physics, Karen Barad, a theoretical physicist and feminist phi­los­o­pher, develops the concept of “agential realism,” which serves as an epistemo­ logical and ontological framework to center on the nature(s) of materiality and ­those relationships to discursive forms. The intention is to reform both “agency” and “real­ ism,” to underscore how ­human and nonhuman ­factors intervene in how knowledge is produced. In other terms, agential realism tries to move beyond the usual dyadic in­ terpretation that distinguishes between social constructivism and conventional forms of realism (2003). Thus, agency, for Barad, “is a ­matter of intra-­acting; an enactment, not something that someone or some-­thing has.” 34. See Alaimo 2010, 2016. Also see Haraway 1996. 35. The lit­er­a­ture on actor-­network theory is too massive to fully include h ­ ere. How­ ever, for a comprehensive, chronological list of ant texts and responses, see “ant Resource,” Centre for Science Studies, Department of Sociology, Lancaster University, http://­www​.­lancaster​.­ac​.­uk​/­fass​/­centres​/­css​/­ant​/­ant​.­htm, last updated 2000. 36. Kim Fortun warns, for example, of what she calls the “Latour effect” in anthro­ pology and science studies: that is, a singular focus on practices of expertise and actor networks in late industrialism that does not account for the material and social matrix of the toxic and inhospitable environments that make up ­people’s lives ­today (2014). 37. See Barad 2003, 806–7. 38. On “worlds” and “worlding,” see, for example, de la Cadena 2015; Viveiros de Castro 1998. 39. In “Posthumanist Performativity,” Barad (2003) is responding to theorists of performativity, in this case Judith Butler, but by extension a ­whole oeuvre of post­ structuralist work on discourse and the hailing of iterative linguistic per­for­mance that has derived (largely) from the work of linguist J. L. Austin. 40. Many alternative designations for our current age have been proposed in recent years: “Eurocene” (Grove 2016); “#Misanthropocene” (Clover and Spahr 2014); “Naufragocene” (Mentz 2015); and perhaps best known (currently), Donna Haraway’s “Chthulucene,” a period of “collaborative work and play with other terrans,” where “flourishing occurs across assemblages of intra-­active multispecies life, that includes more-­than-­human, other-­than-­human, inhuman, and human-­as-­humus” (2015). 41. See Strong et al. n.d. for citation practices and female authorship in cultural anthropology. 42. Compare to Tim Morton’s “agrilogistics” (2016), which locates roots of the An­ thropocene in the advent of agriculture and its material and ideological force begin­ ning about ten thousand years ago. The Plantationocene indexes a more recent period of colonial expansion and its continuing effects. 43. In 2016, ­after seven years of study, an eminent group of scientists and scholars called The Anthropocene Working Group—­composed of geologists, engineers, paleo­ biologists, geographers, historians, and phi­los­o­phers among ­others—­declared that the 202  Notes to introduction

world had entered a new geological epoch called the “Age of Man.” The panel reported that biospheres, lithospheres, hydrospheres, cryospheres, and atmospheres every­ where on earth contained the imprint of ­human activity, including radioactive debris, plastic tides, displaced soil, and increased methane and carbon dioxide. 44. For a useful overview of Anthropocene “sources,” see, for example, Bonneuil and Fressoz 2016. 45. Allochronic time occurs in a dif­fer­ent geologic time. Anthropology itself has strug­gled with such allochronicities, namely the mistranslation of space into time. As Johannes Fabian (1983) has famously pointed out, the discipline has crafted reports that deny the coevalness between the ethnographic subject and her ethnographer. “Savages” could be temporally displaced, cast back in time as primitives, their worlds made static, largely ­because of their remoteness from “civilization.” Fabian’s formula­ tion of allochronic, asynchronous time in the context of the Anthropocene may be worth revisiting as a way of recalibrating ­human time into geologic sync with nonhu­ man materials and beings. 46. See, for example, Kolbert’s The Sixth ­Great Extinction (2014). 47. An emphasis upon periodizations of the Anthropocene also speaks to Chakrab­ arty’s (2009) theses where historical time frames, or periodizations, that separate ­human from natu­ral history come ­under critique. Or we can think about Tim Morton’s admonition that while the Anthropocene time line may be “fuzzy” (Was it the advent of agriculture? Was it the industrial revolution? Was it the ­Great Accelera­ tion?), we can nevertheless find an operative set of coordinates, for it is clear that it did not start 1.3 million years ago (2013; 2016). 48. Yusoff (2013a, 781) writes that in the Anthropocene, with ­humans as geomor­ phic agents, “new understandings of time, ­matter, and agency” accrue for the ­human as “a collective being.” Through the immersion of humanity in geologic time, she sug­ gests a move away from (simply) biological life courses to instead “a remineralisation of the origins of the ­human” as well as a shift in ­human time scales to stretch ­toward the horizons of the epochal and species lifescapes. 49. See, for example, LeMenager 2014; Zalasiewicz 2012. 50. Povinelli 2016, 8–9. In Geontologies, Beth Povinelli makes the argument that “geontologies” have long been ­here with (and of) “us” but that the conditions of the Anthropocene may be surfacing that fact to some ­human beings (often settler-­ colonialist socie­ties), whereas many indigenous ­peoples, like ­those who have become Karrabing, have in fact recognized this ­ontological real­ity all along (see especially chapter 2). The separation of life and nonlife, she goes on to state, is also a technique of settler colonialism that has historically been used to debase indigenous ontologies and cosmologies that take nonlife beings as sentient. See also de la Cadena 2015. 51. The term “Plantationocene” emerged from conversations at the University of Aarhus in October 2014—in the aura program (Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene)—­where participants collectively generated the concept for the traumatic changes seen in human-­tended farms, pastures, forests, and fi­nally, enclosed plantations predicated on private property and reliant on slave ­labor and other forms of exploited, alienated, and usually spatially transported ­labor. See “Publications,” Notes to introduction 203

aura: Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene, http://­anthropocene​.­au​.­dk​ /­publications​/­, updated October 26, 2010. 52. “Capitalocene” is a term attributed to Andreas Malm (2015) and Jason W. Moore (2016, 2017), who locate the rise of cap­i­tal­ist society in the year 1450, corresponding with the Eu­ro­pean formation of capitalism. This dating also places the Capitalocene in historical parallel with Anthropocene theories that emphasize colonial expansion as fundamental to the epoch’s formation. The designation Capitalocene is meant to dislodge the industrial revolution as the primary impetus for anthropocenic changes. However, it is also impor­tant to note that the industrial revolution initiates a new “means of production” (in a Marxist sense), which takes place within a cap­i­tal­ist “mode of production,” and thus represents a specific form of cap­i­tal­ist accumula­ tion. To eschew the importance of that late nineteenth-­century moment (the rise of industrialism) and how it convened capitalism and the environment in very specific ways would be a ­mistake. In other words, the operations of capital and industrialism cannot, at this point in time, be analytically separate. However, I do agree with Moore, and with Isabelle Stengers (2015) as well, that Anthropocene discourse, and perhaps intervention, risks becoming neo-­Malthusianism (often as depopulation rhe­toric), too technophilic (as in, “we can engineer our way out of this”), and can become a set of tropes that overlook inequalities. Fi­nally, while Capitalocene proponents find capital­ ism as the primary force driving ­toward ecological degradation, it is also true that we continue to live with emissions from the (former) noncapitalist world (e.g., the USSR and China ­under actually existing socialism). 53. Alternatively, the Anthropocene can be seen as crystallizing capitalism with nature. See Swyngedouw 2010. 54. I thank Kalyanakrishnan Sivaramakrishnan for the phrasing “velocities of change,” which he proposed during our seminar in the Yale MacMillan Agrarian Stud­ ies program. See Steffen et al. 2015 on the ­Great Acceleration.

1. wind 1. See Barad 2007 on intrarelations; Ingold 2007 on touching “in” wind. 2. Both “aeolian” and “eólica” draw their etymology from Aeolis. I want to signal that link and also underscore the linguistic relationship between the terms used in Mexico and “the aeolian” as a concept. Los eólicos is the Spanish term commonly used in Oaxaca to designate wind park developments (or the turbines themselves), and wind-­generated electricity is energía eólica. Re­sis­tance to the proliferation of wind parks is commonly known as the antieólico strug­gle. 3. See the introduction to “Life above Earth” (Howe 2015a). 4. See Harvey and Knox 2015, 6–15, on how roads (or in this case, roads trans­ formed into streets) are spaces of projection and material transformation where we can observe a negotiation between generic and specific forms of knowledge. Copaving by government and corporate entities in La Ventosa reflects a similar concentration of specialized knowledges and expert intervention. See also Dalakoglou and Harvey 2012; Masquelier 2002. 204  Notes to introduction