Retrieving the historical contrast between open and closed wind energy structures

Our present perception of wind energy technology is dominated by the version of wind turbines that we find in ‘wind farms’ (‘wind parks’), which is associated with landscape degradation and local resistance. Locals don’t want these turbines installed in their back yard, we don’t ever see them posing happily in front of them. Even their most ardent supporters, who promote them as an unavoidable necessity in the face of the global environmental crisis, agree that there is nothing aesthetically appealing about these wind turbines. They just charge the local opponents of these wind turbines with suffering from the ‘not in my back yard’ syndrome. The reference to such a syndrome is by itself an acknowledgement of the negative aesthetic impact of these wind turbines. The ‘energy landscapes’ produced by the installation of wind farm turbines are certainly not attractive. In fact, if the criterion for the evaluation of the merits of wind energy turbines is their impact on the landscape, wind farm turbines score no better than fossil fuel energy generation plants (Pasqualetti and Stremke, 2018).

There were, however, in the past versions of wind energy technology that people were looking forward to be in a picture with. Going through the album of pictures that T. Lindsay Baker collected in American Windmills: An Album of Historic Photographs leaves no doubt about it (Baker, 2012). The owners of the kind of wind energy technology that we find in this album, together with a crowd formed by their relatives and friends, posed happily in front of it on all important occasions: from a baptism ceremony that was taking place at a water tank filled through the use of a wind pump to a wedding ceremony that was bringing together a comparable crowd, which also posed in front of the wind pump and the farm house that it was right next to (or just behind of). As we see in the picture that Baker chose for the cover of his book, people could not simply pose in front of this wind energy technology; they could actually pose in it (and on it). We will here refer to this past farm wind energy technology as ‘open’, while we will argue that the wind farm energy technology of present day is ‘closed’.

The agroecology of Genuino Clandestino

Starting from the end of the 1960s the so called ‘Green Revolution’ significantly transformed the ways through which agriculture has been developed on a global scale (Shiva, 2008; Altieri and Toledo, 2011; Rosset and Altieri, 2017; Altieri, 2018). The central role of mechanization, the adoption of new technologies, the selection of high yielding varieties of cereals and the extensive use of chemical fertilizers and agrochemicals are the main features of current ‘industrial’ agriculture. These technologies of food production have wide-ranging eco-social implications on biodiversity and climate change, and they entail a relationship of strong dependency between farmers and the world’s largest chemical producers. Agroecology (Altieri, 2018) appears as one of the main alternatives for overcoming the shortcomings and damages that the ‘Green Revolution’ has caused. Agroecology is a response to the question of how to transform and repair our food system and rural life, starting from the ecological practices of peasants and farmers, artisanal fishers, pastoralists, indigenous cultivation methods, urban food producers and so on. In this sense, food sovereignty movements and agroecological farming are creating alternative politics of matter (Papadopoulos, 2018) and by seeking different material circulations and channels of involvement, they enact different possibilities of humansoil-food relations.

Permaculture, organic, bio-dynamic, regenerative agriculture, alternative food distribution: these are some of the names given to practices by which movements of ecological agri-food transition are converging today in emphasizing a need to attend to the health of the soil and the broader ecologies in which we grow food (Altieri, 2018). Food sovereignty campaigns entail the simultaneous responsibility of participants to be food growers and consumers, which means being involved in the processes of food production and distribution by inventing alternatives to the large supply chains that currently dominate the existing agri-food system. However, food sovereignty is something more than the consumers and growers’ right to choose what to consume and what to grow and how. Agroecology and food sovereignty are, first of all, about creating alternative ways to deal with the ecological interactions and interdependencies involved in the processes of farming: the collective enterprise of creating an alternative lifeworld within the interactive dynamics that inhabit the soil and its inhabitants.

Introduction: a metaphysical catastrophe

And suddenly the world began to quake. The ground trembled. Soils liquified under the smooth covers of asphalt. Modern infrastructures were bent, dented, upended. Buildings moved to the rhythm of their crumbling dance. Those inside ran out, when they could. Others succumbed to the collapse. The rumbling noise filled the air. Amidst the turmoil, hundreds of metres of coastline fell off a cosmic cliff, dropping vertically by over half a metre. The Earth itself trembled, shaken, literally knocked off its axis. Days have been shorter ever since. The Pacific Ocean shrivelled a little. And Japan, whose northeastern region of Tohoku was closest to the epicentre, was moved 13 feet closer to North America. With a magnitude of 9,1 Mw, it was the biggest earthquake to have struck the archipelago, and only the fourth most powerful in the history of seismology. And yet it only took six minutes. Six. The planetary blink of an eye, making it present that most things happen in the break, through the cracks, with the tides of time, through the resonance of events: ‘point of view on a point of view, displacements of perspective, differentiation of difference’ (Deleuze, 2004: 200). For indeed, the earthquake that struck northeastern Japan on 11 March 2011 turned out to be but a prelude, a foreshock of its own, a call to another kind of intensity whose response washed it all away. This was what seismologists call an underwater megathrust earthquake – a name that could belong just as well to geology as to poetry – and the 39-metre tsunami that it summoned flooded the entire area, ravaging it all in a 200-square mile range. The dark wave truly devoured everything: almost 20,000 people died, countless other critters saw their lives brought to a sudden end, and over 45,000 buildings were destroyed. Among those who survived, 4.4 million households were left without electricity, over 340,000 people were displaced, and suffered from food, water, shelter, medicine, and fuel shortages for a long period of time afterwards, even when considerable material efforts were deployed to restore infrastructures in the wake.

The tsunami precipitated ripples of its own.

Land in Our Names (LION) began in 2020 as a young collective with big plans for the year. At the Oxford Real Farming Conference in the UK, in January 2020, we facilitated a workshop with Leah Penniman of Soul Fire Farm on the topic ‘Farming So White: Land, Ownership, Race and Racism in Britain’ and held the first ever Caucus for Black and People of Colour (BPOC) growers, land workers, environmentalists and food justice organizers at Willowbrook Farm. It was an emotional experience for everyone who attended. We all remarked that we had never been in the countryside in Britain surrounded by People of Colour before. The care, excitement, community and safety that we shared with each other was energizing and made us even more dedicated. We want to speak to BPOC growers, land workers, land and food justice organizers.

Then our plans for the year took a dramatic turn with the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter demonstrations in the US, Britain and elsewhere. We have been humbled by the amount of people who have reached out to us asking for our thoughts and feelings. The truth is that we carry each life lost to racism with us always. It is a grief that we must manage every day. This is one of the reasons why we founded Land in Our Names – we want to create an anti-racist and inclusive land and food justice movement that speaks to Black and People of Colour. Racism is a structural and systemic problem that needs reparative justice in order to stop the unnecessary violence that People of Colour experience. That is why we see land reparations as crucial towards building resilient and sustainable anti-racist communities. We want to continue nurturing our fledgling network of BPOC growers, land workers, organizers, educators and enthusiasts with empowering and inspiring events. We want to create resources that look at food and land justice through an intersectional lens. We want to support BPOC growers’ access to land and work.

The opening lines of The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt’s (1958) sweeping ‘reconsideration of the human condition from the vantage point of our newest experiences and our most recent fears’ (5) describe the Sputnik launch in 1957.

These lines also name the principal sentiment against which the alternative viewpoint that follows is offered. Like Arendt, I am unsettled by the dream of escape captured in this scene and countless others played out in the subsequent enthusiasms of sci fi writers, space aficionados, and billionaires – a dream that seems only to have grown as our sense of planetary fragility has intensified.

Introduction

Memory is the connective tissue that makes lives meaningful. A connection to the past enables sense making in the present and renders possible futures as thinkable. In the case of traumatic or difficult pasts, this connection becomes intensely important. At personal, collective and national levels, past harms and injustices need to be made visible and subject to commemorative exploration in order for victims to ‘go on’ in the present. In this context, repair is usually considered to be a memorial work of putting the past in order to meet ongoing moral and epistemic demands (Margalit, 2002; Blustein, 2008; Campbell, 2014). Through this work it becomes possible to envisage a reconstruction or ‘healing’ of personal and social ecologies of thought and feeling.

This understanding of memorial work as repair is complicated by issues around mental health. For example, while some approaches to trauma (for example Johnstone and Boyle, 2018) emphasize the need to understand personal histories – ‘what happened to you’ – as a way of addressing current feelings and experiences – ‘what’s wrong with you’ – there is also a counter-discourse around the inherently unrepresentable nature of traumatic pasts (Caruth, 1996). Pain and suffering incurred through extraordinary and horrific violations of social and personal relations may be simply incomprehensible and hence difficult to both recollect and to narrate. Mental health issues may also call into question the reliability of memory. Victims – and in some cases perpetrators – may have their recollected experiences problematized or discounted (see Haaken and Reavey, 2010). They may also be accused of focusing unduly and unhelpfully upon the past rather than facing up to problems in the present. Here, repair can take the form of an injunction to disconnect from a difficult past in order to ‘move on’ with living.

In this chapter, we want to explore the tensions in memorial repair work around mental health. We will be concerned with the question of when and how the past comes to matter for persons managing severe and enduring mental health issues. Crucially, we look at the practices which are enacted to manage these tensions, and how they are collectively performed within an institutional setting. Our argument is informed by work we have conducted in a medium-secure forensic pathway in a large inpatient psychiatric unit.

Maintenance practices have been an object of growing interest in recent years, and numerous researchers working in a variety of disciplines have made stimulating forays into a vast continent of jobs and ordinary activities which still appears largely unexplored (Jackson, 2016; continent, 2017; Strebel et al, 2019; Denis and Pontille, 2020b). This body of research works has notably played an active role in acknowledging the importance of material ‘reproductive work’ in the constitution of social life, bringing to light the omnipresence of mundane practices dedicated to making things last. Among these ‘maintenance and repair studies’, some have also initiated a fruitful dialogue with feminist theories of care, especially the work of Tronto (1993), whose definition of care, articulated with Fisher, famously refers to ‘everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair our “world” so that we can live in it as well as possible’ (Fisher and Tronto, 1990: 40). Extending the empirical and analytical gesture aimed at ‘surfacing invisible work’ (Star, 1999), this conversation between maintenance and care has made two important contributions to the ways in which social sciences approach the relationship between humans and artefacts. On one hand, it has participated in decentring the traditional focus on stability and persistence towards material fragility and its various manifestation (Denis and Pontille, 2015; Domínguez Rubio, 2020; Henke and Sims, 2020). On the other hand, it has emphasized, and documented, the ethical and affective dimensions of maintenance (Houston and Jackson, 2017; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017).

In this chapter, we propose to further these reflections by exploring a less known, though complementary, aspect of maintenance: its sensorial dimension. If maintenance is a matter of affect, it is also a matter of attention. Material fragility is indeed anything but a transparent feature. In fact, when it appears obvious to anyone, this generally means that maintenance has failed. Fragility of things is thus something that one needs to become sensible to. Making things last entails cultivating a special relationship with them, keeping careful eyes and hands on their condition, and scrutinizing, even sensing, their transformations. Even though some scholars have highlighted the sensory skills involved in specific maintenance activities (Dant, 2008, 2010; Cállen and Sánchez Criado, 2015), little is known yet on how maintainers concretely become attentive to fragility. What is this attention made of? What does it take? How is fragility experienced? How is it dealt with?

Act of stammering. To be irresolute. To be undecided. In times of emergency and crisis, when the world crumbles and life is pushed to the brink of the impossible, to hesitate is second to irresponsibility. Perplexity was an exercise that we could indulge ourselves into back when the catastrophe was a future-to-come, somewhere, eventually. Today, when ecological breakdown is reorganizing the distribution of life and death, hesitation is ethically inappropriate and politically banal.

And yet, here we are, hesitating. I am not thinking generically. My ‘we’ is a very specific one. It refers to the sociocultural aggregate that for the lack of a better category it could be called ‘white people’. Or maybe it is ‘Western scientists’. Or both. In any case, those that have self-categorized themselves as the other of the Other, the other of the ‘Indigenous’. So, what I’m trying to situate is the moment in which, in times of heightened ecological sensitivity, ‘we’ stumble. And not because we find ourselves allowing climate deniers to perforate our principles and convictions – but because we meet the alterity against which we assert ourselves, with our convictions and their enemies; we meet other ways of defining what ecology means and how reparation is done, other ways of delimiting life from death, other modes of practicing time and grief. An ecological reparation otherwise.

Hesitation, for me, has unravelled partaking in the efforts of Likanantai and Mapuche communities to heal lands, waters and atmospheres damaged by settler-colonialism. In the presence of their narrations about and practices to repair wetlands, forests, oceans, and soils damaged by extractivism, I have stammered. I have stepped back. I have mumbled, at odd, confronting modes of organizing biotic and abiotic life in ways that defy my imagination. Other forms of existence, other chronologies and teleologies that mess up with (my) well-defined questions and answers. I like the image of hesitation because it moves away from the eventfulness and determination of the conflict. What I have experienced doing ecological reparation in the Salar de Atacama or Tubul-Raqui, rather than a clash of convictions, is a doubt.

Introduction

The conversations that follow took place while walking through the green spaces of Bristol, in South-West England, in preparation for Linda’s latest ‘act of care’: a commissioned artwork that performs a detailed, delicate repair on an object in public space. The act of care will take as its object a park bench, and on this occasion we’re on a tour of benches in Bristol’s urban parks, looking at their designs and materials, at how, when and where they were made, and where they have been adorned, damaged and repaired.

Public benches hold us; they support us when we need to rest, or talk, or perhaps sleep. They are sites of breakups, of impromptu get-togethers, of wistful daydreams and of drinking and drug taking. They are truly public amenities: an often-overlooked aspect of everyday infrastructure that tends to our bodily comfort, and our need to pause. Our focus on benches helps us to think about how we care for and relate to public objects, and how they in turn care for us. Here, we consider benches as sites for reparation, both against the neglect of public objects and spaces that has been an ongoing feature of the UK under neoliberalism, and against our alienation and separation from each other and from our worlds.

This chapter discusses our relationship to these everyday material infrastructures in the context of neoliberalizing forces that erode the idea of the ‘public’. Drawing on the work of political theorist Bonnie Honig and psychologist Donald Winnicott, it argues for the importance of public objects: shared material forms that physically hold us, and provide material resources for the production of public life. Through a series of conversations, we explore what it means when these objects are invested in, valued and cared for, and what we can do when it is unlikely that this will happen. Linda’s work has, for many years, involved care and repair of public objects. Her acts of care – towards public toilets, streets and benches – are a provocation to rethink how we might care for objects and things. They model an ethos of care towards the world which is not reciprocal yet embeds ways of relating to objects into wider networks of support and worlding.

Ecological reparation

In recent years, practices of reparation (broadly including maintenance, repair, remediation and regeneration) have become lively sites of scholarly interest in the social sciences, particularly in relation to environmental concerns. Some scholars have critiqued the idea of repair as a framing for ecological reparation, seeing repair as too invested in a return to normative relations that are already broken (Middleton, 2018). Indeed, some have argued that repair and maintenance work can keep orders running long past their end dates, masking and displacing the opportunity for system change and alternative approaches (Ribes, 2017).

For others, the idea of repair still has something to offer. Jackson writes about repair as the kind of hope that we need, as we think from – and respond to – ‘broken worlds’ (Jackson 2014). Henke and Sims disambiguate between forms of repair action: ‘repair as maintenance’ works within existing orders whereas ‘repair as transformation’ brings new configurations into being (2020). Henke and Sims suggest that both are required for repair within the context of the Anthropocene, a recursive idea of ‘repairing repair’ (2020: 122).

What is clear to all interested in reparation, is that when moments of breakdown come under study, they are often revealing: decentring subjects and showing up relations in their complexity, in their fragility and in their ever-changing temporality (Houston, 2017). To study repair is to think about the possibility of action in this moment; to examine decisions that are taken about what endures and what is let go. On the one hand, that might mean thinking about building new orders in the world’s aftermaths: working with the conditions at hand and without the expectation of solutions (Tsing, 2017). On the other, reparation might also mean un-making damaging systems through design for decline (Tonkinwise, 2019; Lindström and Ståhl, 2020).

Algorithmic Food Justice

The politics of ecological reparation is increasingly played out in spaces of anticipatory governance. Here, repairing problems involves the conceptualization of new visions of future systems, in which algorithms increasingly loom large as reparative agents. In the case of smart cities, for example, the responsibility for emissions reduction is delegated to networked infrastructures and Big Data, which are intended to produce carbon efficiencies through real-time data gathering, analysis and control (Gabrys, 2014).

Commons and the ecological repair

It appears evident today that the current capitalist mode of production based on the idea of ‘eternal economic growth’ is incompatible with the ecological limits of the planet. The ecological disaster is too big and complex to be solved by existing capitalist politico-economic structures. This is because, on the one hand, many of these structures have a direct interest in maintaining the current mode of production and, on the other hand, the existing way of making and implementing public policies doesn’t have the capacity to follow and react quickly enough to the rapid ecological deterioration of the planet.

In this context, the commons suggest an alternative solution. Commons are defined as a ‘social system in which resources are shared by a community of users/producers, who also define the modes of use and production, distribution and circulation of these resources through democratic and horizontal forms of governance’ (De Angelis and Harvie, 2014).

Being built on relations of collective care, regeneration, and resilience, the commons can contribute to the planetary ecological repair and provide an alternative to the extractive and exploitative relations of the capitalist economy. Learning how to govern our planet as a commons is part of the imperative of becoming more resilient, but also more democratic. As such, the ecological question should not only be tackled in relation to the environmental crisis, but also, as suggested by Guattari (2000), in relation to the social and politico-economic crisis and the prevailing mental ecology. It also needs to be addressed in post-anthropocentric terms, going beyond the human world towards more-than-human life worlds. An important amount of theoretical work has been done in this sense by anthropologists examining indigenous relations with nature and territory (Viveiros Castro, 1998; Rose, 2013; Tsing, 2015), or post-humanist and vital materialist theorists (Barad, 2003; Bennett, 2010; Papadopoulos, 2010; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). Commons can address all these questions in practice at different territorial scales and levels.

Within deprived neighbourhoods for example, commons offer an alternative to the current urban regeneration approaches. This alternative involves not only refurbishing derelict housing estates and renovating physical infrastructure but also repairing broken social relations, altered subjectivities, depleted imaginaries, unjust politics and uneven economics as well as empowering communities to participate in the repairing of their neighbourhoods and at the same time participate in the repairing of the planet.