Climate anthropologist Cymene Howe
Ecologics:
Wind and Power in the Anthropocene
This is a book about wind, and the people, creatures and infrastructures that get caught up in it. Ecologics begins with the story of environmental precarity and then turns to questions about how projects of climate mitigation, like wind power, can replicate the same kinds of extractive logics that brought us into the Anthropocene in the first place. Based on collaborative fieldwork in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec (Oaxaca, Mexico) the book moves through the many permutations of wind: as elemental force, as cosmological divinity, as site of neocolonial statecraft and finally, as a fraught and contested, antidote to the Anthropocene.
I follow the development of what would have been Latin America's largest wind park and document how local campesinos and indigenous peoples resisted the project, as well as the political and corporate rationale that infused the megaproyecto from its inception. Drawing from ecofeminist and more-than-human theories of encounter, I show how the dynamics of energy and environment cannot be captured without understanding how human aspirations for energy articulate with nonhuman beings, technomaterial objects and the geophysical forces that are at the heart of wind and power.