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Wind and Power

Renewable Energy Futures

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Wind farms in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Oaxaca, Mexico have faced strong community opposition. Credit: L.Hernández / Associated Press

Mexico’s Isthmus of Tehuantepec has become home to the densest concentration of on-shore wind power anywhere in the world. In this collaborative ethnographic project funded by the National Science Foundation, I draw attention to the ecohuman interface of energy transitions. By bringing other-than-human species into parallel with the elemental force of wind and the technologies of energy infrastructures, I illustrate the fraught politics of “transition” in places long-marginalized and marred by the legacies of colonial expansion and extraction. The transdisciplinary approach that I have developed in this work allows me to show how both human and non-human entities are bound up with wind power as an energy source. Following the case of what would have been Latin America’s largest wind park, I argue for new collective responses to the paradoxes of climatological precarity.

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The winds of Oaxaca are ranked among the best in the world for the production of electricity. Credit: reve

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