Today was the third day of political ecology week. It's been hectic; so much content, so many new ideas, and barely any time to integrate them. I try to take notes during the presentations, but it's been so long – or, rather, I've never really taken notes before, in an academic sense, so I'm quite rusty.
In any case, today was all about the hot topic of energy. The two first lectures were interesting, but it feels like the third, allocated to the complicated time slot after lunch, stole the show for the day.
Aristotle Tympas on wind-renewable energy
Aristotle Tympas presented a lecture on the topic of the inseparability between technical and social definitions of renewable energies; the title is convoluted (and maybe slighty wrong) but, in practice, it mostly revolved around wind energy.
It didn't exactly kick off banging on that theme: there was some historical context (Tympas is a historian) about human labour and machines (with a sidenote about the interesting idea of theater being used, in Ancient Greece, as a means to educate the people in the context of society), and some standard definitions and ideas about mechanics came about. It was established that some technology is, in itself, inherently bad or prone to nefarious consequences, even if discovered, and further pursued, by good people.
Later we finally got to the topic of wind renewable energy. The first big point to be made regarded the distribution of this kind of energy. Its harvesting, or producing, seems simple enough – one is comfortable with the notion that it is generated from the force the wind exerts on the structure, triggering the rotation of the helix – but, then, this power needs to travel long distances, relying on the usual, familiar structures of overhead wired power lines to ensure the availability of energy. This idea was concluded by the assertion that long-distance transmission is, in a sense, ''a priority of capitalism''.
But the best was yet to come. Aristotle stated that, in the middle of the 20th century in the United States, an equivalent amount to the population of Slovenia was using wind-powered electricity in their homes, using their own wind turbines, without relying on external power grid or energy generation. In fact, this is documented in Wikipedia (and there are some other sources on the matter). It feels, however, like a very wild assertion, maybe somewhat difficult to believe or even to picture – farmers had self-sufficient energy back in 1930?! – but with the aid of some Hollywood film clips, the point was visually made with Giant (1956), Bonnie and Clyde (1967), and Once Upon a Time In The West (1968); the professor even suggested that some of the films of the period, depicting farmers struggles and rural life, could be interpreted as manifesting the struggle of transitioning from the wind-generated energy to participating in the energy grid, thus losing the autonomy and self-sufficiency provided by the first.
In 1936, the U.S. started a rural electrification project that killed the natural market for wind-generated power, since network power distribution provided a farm with more dependable usable energy for a given amount of capital investment.
in Wikipedia
The case was made for the previous existence of decentralized, almost artisanal methods of producing energy, which was later supplanted by the centralized approach of connecting farmers to the electrical grid, and to some other possible benefits of using this sort of technology, like opening local jobs for maintenance and repair of these structures. Above all, there is the argument for self-sufficiency, which has been entirely lost by relying on the grid.
As the lecture finished and the room was given space for questions, there was one intervention from an American student, whose grandfather had been a farmer in rural Kansas. She had memories of him and his collection of small windmill miniatures, the significance of which she had no idea of prior to this lecture. Tympas elegantly stated that the losers lose everything; even their right to history.