While the recent spree of wind turbine construction across Catalunya does not come with the paramilitary violence needed to carry out the same construction in Oaxaca—in Oaxaca there are still Indigenous communities defending the commons, whereas in most of Europe the countryside has already been depopulated—these wind farms are nonetheless a continuation of the legacy of Franco’s hydroelectric dams. And those in turn were a continuation of the massive deforestation of the Pyrenees in the 19th century, to build the railroads, launch the steel industry, and at the same time impoverish the commons that gave sustenance to the rural peasantry who made up the backbone of so many social rebellions in those years.
Under capitalism, there is startlingly little difference between such vastly different sources of energy. And today’s wind farms and other energy infrastructures, though they seem to lack the explicit violence of their forebears, have already been linked to expropriations and other conflicts that affect the growing wave of people resurrecting the commons. And more than that, they constitute a chess piece played with perspicacity, holding down a position so the enemy—that’s us—cannot take it.
Green energy remonetizes many rural spaces that a cumbersome industrial agriculture had had to abandon, and it architecturally occupies those spaces in a way that prevents us from resuscitating the commons, accessing land, and cultivating food autonomy, a healthy relationship in which we heal the planet and ourselves without any need for State or Capital.