It’s waste that makes capitalist value possible

Making wind legible transformed socionatural relations across the Isthmus and produced a capitalist wind energy landscape. The emergent energy resource landscape operates discursively and materially by demarcating specific people, places and things as valuable (and sustainable), and others as wasted (and unsustainable). In their examination of urban transformations in metropolitan India, Gidwani & Reddy theorize that “waste is the political other of capitalist value, repeated with difference as part of capital’s spatial histories of surplus accumulation” (2011, p. 1625). Drawing on the liberal political theory of John Locke, they examine how waste describes the “things, places and lives that are cast outside the pale of value” (Gidwani & Reddy, 2011, p. 1625). It designates the “unenclosed common, the external frontier,

the ethical horizon of civil society” (Gidwani & Reddy, 2011, p. 1626). Waste suggests not only a normative concept but also a material distancing between capital and those people, places and things it exploits. Representing “the constitutive outside of political modernity” (Gidwani & Reddy, 2011, p. 1628) conscious work must be done to transform wind “into value by dint of human labor and colonial stewardship” (Gidwani & Reddy, 2011, p. 1630). This work is legitimized as necessary from the standpoint of the natural progression of modernity, where in the case of the Isthmus the bountiful wind represents an “untapped potential [passively] awaiting transformation” (Gidwani & Reddy, 2011, p. 1630), insulating the actors involved from ethical responsibility for the necessary violence that accompanies this transformation.

As the body representing wind energy companies in the Mexico, AMDEE consistently described agriculture in the Isthmus as unproductive and have framed opposition to wind farming in the Isthmus as minor, isolated, driven by ‘external agitators’ whose motives are ‘unacceptably’ political (Oceransky, n.d.). According to the IADB Environment and Social Strategy for the San Dionisio project, “Cattle grazing activities, while present in the Project’s area of influence are not very productive due to the soil conditions (high level of salinity) and the absence of favorable vegetation” (IADB, n.d., p. 3). This discursive construction simultaneously infers that their work (being the self-described ‘benevolent’ promotion of renewable energy) is widely accepted, is based on scientific and objective ‘facts’, is apolitical and therefore uncontestable; while the demands and claims of local peoples are irrational, and local agricultural systems deemed ‘wasteful’. It is not only land that is represented as wasted and degraded; the labor of Istemeños is represented as ‘destructive’ and ‘primitive’. Again, the IADB Environmental and Social Management Report for the San Dionisio project declared that “[b]oth sites have been severely affected by anthropogenic activity such as urbanization, agriculture, small-scale salt extraction and cattle grazing” (IADB, 2011, p. 6). “As mentioned previously, both wind farm sites have been exposed to intense human activities in the past decades which have led to a deterioration of the “naturalness” character of the area” (IADB, 2011, p. 10). “Habitat loss, fragmentation, overhunting and poaching (for sports and for subsistence by resident people), uncontrolled human-induced fires to increase growth of green forage for cattle, and predation (coyotes but also feral dogs introduced by human settlement) over the years has restricted this species [IUCN Red Listed Tehuantepec Jackrabbit] to four isolated habitat patches” (IADB,

2011, p. 11). “Overexploitation and the lack of technical expertise to develop aquaculture as a livelihood alternative are affecting the main source of income of these fishing communities” (IADB, 2011, p. 14).

These representations of agriculture in the Isthmus are contested. Local activists have consistently said that their bio-cultural systems are not recognized or valued. The Asamblea de los Pueblos Indígenas en Defensa de la Tierra y el Territorio del Istmo (APIDTTI), for example, has argued that comuneros and comuneras across the Isthmus proudly produce up to three harvests per year in the irrigated lands and two in the non-irrigated lands (Oceransky, 2010, p. 507). In the days I spent with Zapotec fishermen and farmers in Álvaro Obregón, they explained the ways their daily practices were shaped by the wind. From the Barra, when the strong North winds blow, they can set their nets from the beach. When the wind shifts and mellows, they can launch their boats. Across the southern Isthmus they cultivate the zapalote chico (xhuuba huinii). Zapalote chico is a variety of corn that remains a staple today and that can withstand winds over 100km per hour, winds that are common in the Isthmus.

The neoliberal environmental governance of wind in Mexico has been a key driver of conflict in the Isthmus. This approach privileges ‘neutrality’ and ‘efficiency’ in relation to the proper management of socionatural relations – including conflictual relations (Mac Ginty, 2012). Technocratic interventions to make wind legible and governable privilege expert knowledge; produce standardized best-practice models, and attempt to mainstream neoliberal norms and values. As the historical transformations of the geopolitical and economic significance of the Isthmus illustrate, value is not static, but flexible, elastic, signifying the changing economic demands of capital accumulation and the normative demands of ‘civil society’. Today, demands for clean energy resources are articulated with the global discourse of ‘green economy’. The following chapter explores these political consequences of framing capitalist wind energy as ‘sustainable’. Within this discourse, sustainability, like value for Gidwani & Reddy (2011), becomes articulated with its political other: unsustainability.