Analyze

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.

At the end of the book, the authors state "in our view, there will be no 'renewable energy transition' worth having without a more holistic reimagination of relations in which we avoid simply greening the predatory and accumulative enterprises of modern statecraft and capitalism." A great example of this is the Ixtepec wind farm. Yansa's plan was a new model for Mexico, one in which the authors show full support for because it reduces the extractiveness and exploititiveness of the current wind farm plans. Other chapters in the book talk about how only landowners seem to benefit from wind farms, which is something the Yansa plan was hoping to address.

I'm curious to see how the wind farms turned out. On top of this, I feel like the book didn't go into as much technical detail on how wind farms work, but I suppose this is something I will have to research on my own. I would love to learn more about the culture of the indiginous groups as well, maybe more specific details about non land owning residents. I think details on how the interviews were conducted could have helped aid us in our own interviews. Overall, I was not left with too many questions, but the ones above are important.

Energy is still seen as something we all need. The lights must say on, even under COVID-19, a national crisis with no end in sight, our current levels of energy consumption must remain the same. COVID-19 has not caused people to ask fundamental questions like "why do we use so much energy, do we need to? what even is energy?" We had even failed to do this to some extent. Electric companies offer payment options and plans, but their relationship to their customer has not fundamentally changed under COVID-19.

The main way I will use this text in our future survey project is when crafting questions about energy. Our previous energy survey was built without an understanding of how "energy" came to be. We didn't question the fundamentals of how our understanding of energy came to be. Now that we have this knowledge, I think we can ask questions that get people to think about energy. Simple questions like "what is energy" and "why is energy important to your life" can serve to test some of the books claims. We can see if people think of energy like the book states: the ability to do work and some scientific measurement of that ability.

This text builds off of Marx's concept of the ruling idea. According to Marx, many concepts and ideas that are embedded as "common sense" in our society today exist to profilerate and benefit the ruling class. The book builds of this theory in multiple ways. For example, we view coal as one of, if not the only viable ways to power our sociey because the characteristics of coal most benefit the ruling class. It does not require communual effort like water and can be used all year round. On top of this, the way energy and work are intertwined also benefits the working class. We think of those that don't work as wasting their energy, when in reality they show that people do not need to work in the capitalistic sense of the word.

The biggest example of this is the scientific study of energy and entropy. The first two laws of thermodynamics somewhat contradict each other, but play into this idea that the earth is under our control. The second is even used to often justify forcing people into work, stating that if they waste energy, they cannot reuse it.

In their introduction, Vermeylen's argument for a particularist and decolonial approach to justice through a recognition of plural ontologies and epistemologies that decenters Western liberal discourse and its theory of justice. How does bringing the lens of coloniality into environmental justice literature alter our visions of energy futures? Can we make appeals to environmental justice without recourse to liberal theories of individual rights and property ownership? More specifically, I am wondering how our team can study and address this dynamic plurality of ways of understanding and experiencing in/justice in this site, and how can we engage this plurality in productive ways? What axes of difference and inequality should we be looking for/at (race, gender, class, sexual orientation, citizenship, housing status, etc)? If the Anthropocene is coloniality by another name, how can we foreground this in our approach?

The authors productively place three bodies of theory in conversation, abolitionist theories, urban political ecology, and decolonial theory, to rewrite the intellectual trajectories of EJ as extending the legacy of the Black Radical Tradition. What are our intellectual and political genealogies as students and researchers of the quotidian anthropocene? What genealogies are we pushing against? Drawing from their examples of spaces and historical moments of interracial solidarity, what kinds of coalitions do we see ourselves partnering with and contributing to as (largely?) newcomers to the activism in Austin?

In this fascinating review, the authors show how environmental justice is reproductive justice (following the water protectors at Standing Rock) and how this intersection reshapes understandings of the environment, embodiment, and exposure. I was particularly interested in the concepts of social and cultural re/production, and how we might think about this in light of Austin's rapid gentrification. They discuss an intersectional approach as a multi-scalar approach, from climate change to chemical exposure in the home - and I think this could be extended to a inter/multi-generational approach to justice (esp given our focus on renewables). The authors show how the RJ framework rethinks the individualism of reproductive choice as the right to conceive and bear children in conditions of social justice and human flourishing - then how does the current energy system (and future energy transitions) negate or create these conditions, and for whom? If we think about biological/cultural reproduction, how do we also incorporate the concept of reproductive labor into our analysis? Finally, I think they make an important point about the harms of documentation, and it would be great to hear everyone's thoughts (Esp those who have participated in earlier field campuses) on what the goal and ethics of our knowledge production are?

Walsh's piece gives us a concise history and geography of environmental racism in Austin, by drawing our attention to how ineequality is written into city law and urban planning. The ongoing legacies of segregation have shaped social life from access to public services to access to recreational spaces. Given the foundations of environmental racism in zoning laws and land use regulations, so succinctly highlighted by Walsh, how does/must the process of energy transition address these issues? Can there be zoning for justice, and what would that look like? In what way can our work at the field campus contribute to the existing work being done by orgs like El Pueblo and PODER?