Analyze

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. 

"Anthropological knowledge is perpetually incomplete, disrupted, uncertain, somehow less than the sum of its parts. It is the right kind of knowledge for grappling with what Anna Tsing and her collaborators have termed “a damaged planet.”"

"This is, then, a call for political theory to not so much “take ethnography seriously” as to accept ethnography’s invitation to unmake and remake itself through the process of fieldwork.  If we wish to appreciate difference within the Anthropocene, fieldwork is a much-needed supplement to any theory of power"

"Instead of an ideal dialectical process of self-realization through productive activity, “capital” signaled how the division of labor allowed labor power to congeal in such a way that it could be alienated from its source, circulate beyond the self, be appropriated and commanded by others, and thus be transformed into new social and material forms"

"The resistance to infrastructural transformation thus has less to do with the fear of blackouts or “energy poverty”—although societal paralysis and devolution continue to be conjured to delegtimate renewable energy transition—but rather because of a more basic but also invisible codependence between our contemporary infrastructures of political power and our infrastructures of energy."

"Getting wind power has less to do with land rents, let alone clean energy, than with getting running water for the village, making electricity more constant and reliable, and developing better transport linkages since the villagers had few vehicles of their own."

"So he founded the Yansa Group with the ambition to export the Danish model of “community wind” production to rural communities in developing countries in order to help democratize access to renewable energy expertise and technology and to serve as a powerful tool for community integration and development."

"Yansa-Ixtepec gives us a glimpse of how new energopolitical potentialities are struggling to come into being in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec (and not only there).Yansa-Ixtepec follows the charge of Scheerian thinking, seeking to harness renewable energy sources to transform and improve the social and political conditions of humanity, to bring justice and empowerment to long-marginalized indigenous communities in the postcolonial world. But instead of finding the Ixtepec high-voltage infrastructure of national enablement, Yansa-Ixtepec’s vision has been kept off grid in more ways than one."

"Elsewhere, we hear a few truly chilling stories, like the one about an intrafamily dispute over a hectare of land for which a rental contract is being sought. A man is said to have organized the rape of his cousin in order to get her to back away from her land claim"

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"But in the zone where aeolian politics and anthropolitics intersect, we have seen how wind development has been avidly embraced by some as a means of concentrating wealth and power in the constant game of positional advantage in the city."

"For others, meanwhile, we have seen how wind parks are excoriated as worst kind of megaproyecto development, the sinister collaboration of local caciques and transnational capitalists to complete a centuries-long project of capturing and expropriating the wealth of the isthmus."

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?