Analyze

Sylvia Wynter (2003) suggests that our current struggles in Western colonized society regarding racism, classism, sexism, homophobia, ethnicism, climate change, environmental destruction, and the unequal distribution of resources are rooted in what she argues is the overrepresentation of the descriptive statement of Man as human, which only recognizes white, wealthy, able-bodied, heterosexual men as "human." As such, just as I argue Black feminist writers and scholars have drawn on speculative methods and Afrofuturism, the use of twentieth-century technology and speculative imagination to address issues within Black and African diasporic communities (see Dery & Dery, 1994), to insist on and explore the full humanity of Black girls, women, and femmes, so too have Black and African diasporic scholars called on Afrofuturism to imagine new ways technology and traditional knowledge practices can address environmental injustice. Suékama (2018) argues that as a form of resistant knowledge building and theorizing, an Afrofuturist approach to environmentalism “integrates speculation with the ecological and scientific, and the spiritual or metaphysical'' to make our environmental justice less European, male, human, (and I would add capitalist) centered. Thus, an Afrofuturist approach to environmental injustice asks us to think about our collective struggle for environmental justice as a part of and connected to other forms of systemic oppression rooted in the rejection of African diasporic and Indigenous people and their knowledge practices through the overrepresentation of Man as human in Western society. In this way, a speculative and Afrofuturist approach to environmental injustice draws on African diasporic knowledge practices in conjunction with modern and traditional technologies to imagine new solutions to environmental injustice that center the needs, values, and traditional practices of African diasporic people.

Peterson-Salahuddin, Chelsea. 2023. "An Afrofuturist Approach to Unsettling Environmental injustice." In 4S Paraconference X EiJ: Building a Global Record, curated by Misria Shaik Ali, Kim Fortun, Phillip Baum and Prerna Srigyan. Annual Meeting of the Society of Social Studies of Science. Honolulu, Hawai'i, Nov 8-11.

Biomass energy plants: see themselves as a cost-effective solution for farmers who need to get rid of dead trees and other woody waste that pose wildfire risks without openly burning them; they also produce energy

Utilities companies: looking for the "least-cost, best-fit" source of energy, don't care where it comes from just that it's reasonably priced

Farmers: need cheap ways to dispose of waste

Technology to dispose of woody waste from almond trees in ways other than open burning or biomass facilities doesn't exist yet, at least at the scale needed for massive almond orchards

Closures of biomass energy plants have forced SJVAPCD to allow more open burning of agricultural waste, which produces particulate matter and contributes to already severe air quality in the Central Valley

• Outside of this group, I believe my work will/is performing a similar type of work to Boyer's, detailing all of the factors, the multiplicity of forces, both historical and contemporaty, that enable, preclude, and characterize energy transition in a specific locale. However, I will dedicate more effort to developing that middle ground between conceptual minima and ethnographic maxima, primarily through the scales and systems. I hope to use the scales and system huristic to provide a clearer analysis of how these specific “multiplicity of forces” become entangled in different ways. I intend to tease out how these entanglements engender processes and phenomena that can be abstracted to generate such concepts as energopower and the like.

• Renewable energy transition, if it recreates the same extractive, centralized, domineering, energopolitical regimes as the fossil fuel industry, has the potential to be just as damaging to the planet and to human beings as fossil fuels.
• Abstract power concepts like energopower, biopolitics, capital do not do justice to the particularities of specific locales. Ethnography is needed to be better attuned to the historical and contemporary relations of power that characterize politics in the Anthropocene.

• "If we wish to imagine and discuss aeolian futures in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec—or, for that matter, anywhere else in the world—what is needed are more and better ethnographies of the multiplicity of forces (historical and contemporary, material and anthropolitical) that are generating, inflecting, and obstructing potential futures" (193).

• The separation of theory and ethnography in this text is… stark. There were literally only a few lines here and there that tied the ethnographic material back to the discussion in the introduction. I understand this to be an intervention in Anthropology that privileges ethnography over social theory. And I appreciate that. But perhaps there is a meso level between conceptual minima and ethnographic maxima? A level that identifies “the multiplicity of forces” that characterize the political terroir and that attempts to discern the entanglement of these forces in a way that clearly specifies the limits of the concept.  

The text builds on the concepts "biopower" and "capital" and introduces the concept "energopolitics" to exisiting anthropolitical minima. In the text's introduction, Boyer disucsses the limitations of these concepts when universalized, because they are multiplicities that have been bundled into more nominal forms as part of analytic projects, and then expands on these concepts in order to situate them within anthropolitical and technopolitical domains in Mexico. For example, biopower, which can be defined as a practice of governance that denotes vast networks of enablement with many infrastructures and actors in order to optimize human life, and in Mexico the government put forth discourse around renewable energy development that discusses it as a means of guaranteeing or imporiving the health and welfare of human enviornments, economies, communities, and individuals. 

I will consider the impacts of retrofitting, rennovations, and weatherization in new terms now. A "just" transition will be at the forefront of my mind when considering the impacts of green energy in Philadelphia. Gentrification is already a massive issue in Philadelphia, and I had considered how green energy may play into it, but now I have models, like the Yansa model, which offer ways for a green transition to benefit the community at large. On top of this, I can now relate capital and biopower into this transition better, with detailed examples as seen in the book.

I good example of biopower in the book is how the extractive nature that is a requirement for oil and fossil fuel bussiness has translated into wind, despite not being a requirement. In Philadelphia, we have seen something similar with solarize Philadelphia. I do not have the exact details right now, but I remember a plan for a community based building for solar panels running into issues. I would like to reanalyze that and compare it to wind farms in Mexico.