In Spain, wind energy development has followed a centralized, extractivist model, with wind farms concentrated in peripheralized and impoverished rural territories. The ability of developers to extract value and electricity from these areas rests upon the latter’s economic, ecological and cultural devaluation, that is to say, on its discursive and material construction as wastelands. This paper examines the dialectical relationship between devaluation and wind energy development through a specific case study from Southern Catalonia, a region that concentrates a large array of energy-related infrastructure. Basing my description on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, I explore the mechanisms through which wind developers aimed to materially and discursively devalue the region, and more specifically its land and the livelihoods it supports. Finally, I argue that opposition to wind energy development emerges, fundamentally, as a reaction against these devaluation practices. A struggle – which takes place through and in the idiom and dignity – that aims to assert and preserve the value of local reproductive strategies and the objective and subjective conditions that make them possible
Individual and local scale interactions and adaptations to wind energy development: A case study of Oklahoma, USA
