91
5
Rick: I then introduced that life to the wonders of electricity! Which they now generate
on a global scale and you know some of it goes to power my engine and charge my
phone and stuff.
Morty: You have a whole planet sitting around mak’n power for you? That’s slavery!
Rick: It’s society . . . They work for each other, Morty. They pay each other. They buy
houses. They get married and make children that replace them when they get too old to
make power.
Morty: That just sounds like slavery with extra steps.
– Rick and Morty, ‘The Ricks Must Be Crazy’
The time has come to recognize industrialism, modernization, development and
‘progress’ – as it is euphemistically known – as the greatest threats faced by the
Earth and its inhabitants. The interrelated and self-propelling ecological, climate
and economic crises – the outgrowth of evolving processes of patriarchy, slavery,
white supremacy, ecocide and genocide, and a prerequisite for state formation – are
manifestations of this threat (Davis & Zannis 1973; Perlman 1985; Moses 2008;
Gelderloos 2017; Scott 2017; Öcalan 2013). While industrial development has not
been acknowledged as ‘the problem’, governments now recognize mass extinction
and climate catastrophe – in a narrower sense – as significant threats to the existing
political economic order. They recognize, at least discursively, the need to phase
out fossil fuels to satisfy the never-ending thirst for energy to power the capitalist
When the Wolf Guards the Sheep
The Industrial Machine through Green
Extractivism in Germany and Mexico
Alexander Dunlap and Andrea Brock
Alexander Dunlap and Andrea Brock92
mega-machine (Mumford 1967/1970) and push – together with many environmental
campaigners – for a shift towards ‘clean’ or ‘green’ energy sources: renewables.
Taking an anarchist political ecology perspective (Brock 2020b; Springer 2022),
this chapter examines the confluence of what mainstream environmental (justice)
activists might call the ‘problem’ – fossil fuel extraction, particularly coal-mining
– and the ‘solution’ – renewable energy such as wind energy. We put forward the
notion of the ‘renewable energy–extraction nexus’ to critique the continued reliance
on extractivism and ecosystem exploitation that are fundamental to the renewable
energy infrastructure supply chains and to highlight the parallels between renewables
and extractive industries via two case studies: coal-mining in the German Rhineland
and wind energy development on the Mexican Isthmus. Both, we show, are (and
continue to be) integral to a new ‘green economy’ that reinforces statist imaginaries
and industrial ideologies that attempt to obscure, invisibilize, and consequently
renew socio-ecological destruction.
In the present conversation around climate change mitigation, the coal and
wind energy industries are positioned as diametrically opposed and often compete
over state subsidies and market shares. Policymakers, corporate decision-makers,
researchers, policy advisors and environmental NGOs tend to share the enthusiastic
embracement of renewable energy technologies to break with fossil fuel dependence
and unsustainable energy production.1
The necessity of a ‘move’ to ‘clean’ renewables,
which would magically replace ‘dirty’ fossil fuels, is taken for granted. The
messy political history of so-called energy transition remains overlooked (Bonneuil
2016; Smil 2016a). Even in environmental justice circles, critiques of renewables are
often met with fierce opposition.
On further analysis, however, we argue, industrial-scale and corporate-controlled
renewables and fossil fuels are accomplices in the struggle to control, usurp and
transform the vitality of the natural environment. Coal-mining and wind energy are
constitutive of the trajectory of ecocide and a multiplicity of slaveries emblematic of
modernity. We draw on Bram Büscher and Veronica Davidov’s ‘ecotourism–extraction
nexus’ that demonstrates how resource extraction and ecotourism are actually
co-constructed, share similar logics and retain multiple forms of collaboration
(Büscher & Davidov 2013; Brock 2020c). The renewable energy–extraction nexus
extends this concept to renewable energy.
The rise of renewables, we argue – as part of climate change mitigation strategies
– is embedded in the hegemonic logic of green capitalism. Ideas of ‘sustainable
development’, the ‘green economy’, ‘ecosystem services’, ‘smart agriculture’ and
‘resilience’ have all been positioned to enable the continuation of capitalist development
under the name of climate change mitigation, conservation and/or adaptation
(Dunlap & Fairhead 2014; Hunsberger et al. 2017). The green economy not
only attempts to reconcile ecosystem health and capitalist development, but it also
offers new natural resource valuations that create new markets and opportunities
for expanding economic growth. This entails integrating previously excluded nonhuman
natures or, in economic jargon, ‘market externalities’ into economic logics
and accounting practices. The green economy is the economy that now recognizes,
When the Wolf Guards the Sheep 93
includes and consequently further intensifies the exploitation of ‘nature’, enmeshing
further natural resources into the machinations of economic and financial structures
(Fairhead et al. 2012; Corson et al. 2013; Dunlap & Fairhead 2014; Dunlap 2019).
A notable machination is the discursive transformation of nature into ‘ecosystem
services’ or ‘natural capital’, which necessitates the further spread and entrenchment
of enclosures, greater ecosystem surveillance and the cataloguing and discursive
fabrication of nature as a commodity service to become commensurable and tradable
within financial markets (Lohmann 2008; Sullivan 2010, 2013a, 2017; Dunlap
2019). This transformation of flora and fauna into carbon, biodiversity and other
so-called environmental commodities allows the enactment of ‘offsetting’ logic,
which assert that ecological destruction can be compensated with payments towards
emission reductions or environmental-engineering initiatives to create ecological
improvements in new or existing environmental sites (Sullivan 2010; Böhm &
Dabhi 2009; Brock 2015, 2020c). The creation of ‘new natures’ through restoration
activities is often accompanied by a large-scale land dispossession to facilitate ‘No
Net Loss’, ‘land degradation neutrality’ or ‘carbon neutrality’, and further forms of
‘accumulation by restoration’ (Huff & Brock 2017; Brock 2020c). In short, offsetting
is a crucial mechanism that claims to reconcile capitalist development with
nature ‘conservation’, which has become increasingly popular with extractive (and
other) industries.
Currently, industrial-scale renewable energy generation relies on – and is co-constructed
by – continued hydrocarbon and mineral extraction processes and conventional
energy infrastructures. Rather than breaking with the logics, power relations
and processes of fossil fuels, they deepen the existing political economy of energy,
processes of dispossession, destructive social and ecological relations, and accumulation.
Providing two case studies from different extractive industries, cultural contexts
and countries, we place coal-mining in Germany and wind energy development in
Mexico side by side to examine key features of the renewable energy–extraction
nexus emerging across sites. The studies are built on extensive field research, with
field visits and contacts with people in these areas. We draw on participant observation,
public events, informal and semi-structured interviews2
in addition to secondary
research material including books, newspaper articles, promotional materials and
blogs.
We begin our chapter by first offering some principles from green anarchy to
develop important values for an anarchist political ecology critique of the renewable
energy–extraction nexus, illuminating neglected issues that highlight the colonial
nature of the industrial system responsible for the present state of ecological
and climate crisis. After highlighting the normalizing and self-reinforcing nature
of industrial systems, we turn to examine RWE’s mining operations in the German
Rhineland. We discuss RWE’s Hambach mine, the world’s largest opencast
lignite coal mine that – while strongly resisted – is slowly destroying large parts
of the ancient Hambacher Forest. This destruction is justified by RWE’s deployment
of green economic technologies of governance including nature recultivation
and offsetting initiatives (Brock 2020c) and legitimized by their corporate social
Alexander Dunlap and Andrea Brock94
technologies that attempt to marginalize and pacify militant resistance in the area
(Brock & Dunlap 2018). After delving into RWE’s attempts at ‘sustainable mining’,
we then turn to the largest wind energy (factory) development in Latin America, the
Isthmus of Tehuantepec region of Oaxaca, Mexico – known locally as the Istmo.
Regarded as a climate change mitigation strategy, wind energy in the Istmo has
similar impacts to traditional extractive industries not only in the ways developers
acquire land but in relation to the violence dispensed against local indigenous groups
contesting the construction of these projects. The next section will compare and
discuss the similarities, differences and relationships between coal and wind energy
extraction. Here, we coin the ‘renewable energy–extraction nexus’ to describe how
conventional and renewable energy systems are dependent on each other, collaborate,
and together expand and intensify industrial development and socio-ecological
degradation in a rush to grab all the vital energies of the Earth. We conclude by arguing
that the green economy is renewing destruction not only by ‘greening’ – thus
legitimizing – inherently unsustainable industrial activities but by expanding such
activities and relationships at the cost of social and ecological diversity and health.
Value is extracted from the process of ‘greening’ itself, while industrial systems continue
to exercise ‘war by ecological crisis’.
NEITHER MARKET NOR STATE: SHEEP
AGAINST INDUSTRIAL PROGRESS
Michel Foucault’s genealogy of government locates the root of government in the
Christian shepherd-flock analogy: god is the shepherd of ‘men’, and the shepherd
(with ‘his’ connection to god) is the governor of the flock. In his reading, government
becomes the shepherd and the population becomes the flock (Foucault 2007).
The green economy, then, is akin to letting a pack of wolves guard the sheep or,
more accurately, letting governments and corporations organize ways to manage
and ‘repair’ ecologically and socially disastrous life forms that they themselves have
organized for so long. What is the goal or the endgame of ‘society’, the ‘state’ the
‘government’? Instructive is verse 1:28 in The Book of Genesis: ‘Be fruitful and multiply,
and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea
and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.’
Plenty of work has illustrated the violence and hierarchical ordering foundational
to the state system, and government as one of its manifestations (Gorz 1980;
Ince & Barrera de la Torre 2016; Scott 1998). This violent ordering is integral to
the statist system: the ‘pervasive, historically contingent organizational logic that
valourises and naturalises sovereign, coercive, and hierarchical relationships, within
and beyond state spaces’ (Ince & Barrera de la Torre 2016). The state system, the
capitalist economic system, and the industrial order and ideology that it protects and
relies upon are themselves the product of – and reproducers of – colonial mindsets
and practices reliant on the exploitation of humans and non-humans alike. Scholars
have long identified the continuities and intricate relationship between capitalism,
When the Wolf Guards the Sheep 95
industrialization and slavery – and especially plantation slavery as essential to US
American capitalism (Walter 2013). C. L. R. James and Eric Williams first argued
for the recognition of the centrality of slavery to capitalism and ‘modernity’ over
eighty years ago. By showing how Atlantic modernity was constructed through
engagement with colonial capitalism in the West Indies, James argued that slavery
was a product of Renaissance rationality (James 1938), while Williams explored the
relationship between colonial development and European industrialism to illustrate
the contradictions in modernist rationality (Williams 1944). Indeed, global capitalist
development was fundamentally dependent upon colonial appropriation and
exploitation, and ‘colonial processes are also central to the production of racialized
inequalities upon which capitalism is itself structured’ (Bhambra 2020, 14; Rodney
1972/2009). Plantations and plantation slavery were key to the development of
modern scientific management techniques (Rosenthal 2016) and profits from slave
trade and plantations were a financed Britain’s nascent industries (Williams 1944),
religious institutions, hospitals, railways (Karuka 2019) and more.
Contemporary, or ‘new capitalism’, according to Sven Beckert, characterized by
wage labour and states’ unprecedented bureaucratic, infrastructural and military
capacities ‘had been enabled by the profits, institutions, networks, technologies,
and innovations that emerged from slavery, colonialism, and land expropriation’
(Beckert 2014a: n.p.; see also Baptiste 2014; Clegg 2015; Beckert 2014b). Capitalism
itself, David Graeber famously argued, constitutes a continuation of slavery in a
broad sense, as ‘any form of labor in which one party is effectively coerced’ (Graeber
2006, 68–69). They share the reliance on separation of place of production and
social reproduction, the exchange of human powers for money, the requirement of
the social death of workers/slaves, the production of ‘abstract labor’ and the embedding
in an ‘ideology of freedom’ (Graeber 2006, 79).
Governments and their apparatuses of administrative decentralization – based
on multiple systems of oppression such as race, gender, class and speciesism –
drive political stability, industrial ‘progress’ and organizational expansion (Dunlap
2014b). These forces seek constant organizational self-affirmation, guarding their
existence and expanding their mentality, relationships and purpose across the world.
This religious drive manifests itself as economic growth, urbanization and infrastructural
development that require constant mining, processing, manufacturing and consumption
of natural resources, both human and non-human (Dunlap & Jakobsen
2020; Springer Volume 1).
Majid Rahnema (1997) and Lorenzo Veracini (2014) demonstrate the viral and
bacterial qualities of colonization and development that receive little attention or
redress, instead provoking cognitive dissonance from those immersed in industrial
life – life infected by rhetoric of ‘peace’, technological enchantment and ideas of
‘progress’, economic or otherwise. Organizational stability and qualitative and
quantitative growth are the modus operandi of modernity and consumer society,
which leads to two foundational insights for anarchist political ecology. The first
is explained well by Kirkpatrick Sale (1991/1985, 122), summarizing Murray
Bookchin:
Alexander Dunlap and Andrea Brock96
[S]ocieties that dominate nature also dominate people. Where there is the idea that a
massive dam should be built to control a river’s flow, there is the idea that people should
be enslaved to build it; where there is the belief that a giant metropole may serve itself by
despoiling the surrounding countryside and devouring its raw materials, there are castes
and hierarchies to ensure that this is accomplished.
Embedded here is Elisée Reclus’ realization that humans are nature or ‘nature becoming
self-conscious’ (2013/1905, 3) and Mikhail Bakunin’s notion that ‘every enslavement
of men [sic] is at the same time a limit on my own freedom’ (2005/1871, xi), as
these notions are applied to non-human life and megaprojects from ancient civilization
to present. Eco-anarchism, as John Clark reminds us, ‘is the form of political
ecology that situates the political most deeply in Earth history and in the crisis of the
Eart’ (Clark 2020, 9–14). Yet, capitalist development has instilled the exact opposite
idea: the more non-human and human lives are enslaved and consumed, the greater
‘freedom’ one is meant to obtain. While the fruits of modern life – cars, planes,
computers, microwaves – symbolize this new freedom (for those who can afford
them), these liberties are intrinsically enmeshed with military conquest, classical and
modern slaveries (Fitzpatrick 2018), and ecocide that have become historically justi-
fied,3
erased or made seemingly ‘irrelevant’ in everyday life (Dunlap 2020).
The ‘natural resource base upon which industrial societies stand is constructed
in large part through the use and threatened use of armed violence’, Liam Downey
and colleagues have argued, and it ‘quickly becomes apparent that armed violence
and the environmental degradation associated with it are intimately woven into
the everyday lives of core nation citizens through the purchases they make and the
fuels they consume’ (Downey et al. 2010, 437–438). Furthermore, Tanya Li writes,
‘When the land is needed but labour is not, the most likely outcome is the expulsion
of people from the land’ (Li 2011, 286), often by the military or other violent forces.
This sounds oddly familiar to A. D. Moses’s discussion of Jean-Paul Sartre (1968)
and the politics and methods of post–Second World War genocide where ‘physical
annihilation was checked by the need for indigenous labour’, as colonial powers’
response ‘to the inevitable guerrilla resistance was to annihilate part of the population
in order to terrorize the rest’ (Moses 2002, 24) into submission to a colonial
(producer–consumer) paradigm.4
This connection between widespread political violence
and ecological degradation or the ‘genocide–ecocide nexus’, as Damien Short
(2016) calls it, plays a fundamental role in the colonial and, by extension, industrial
progress that takes on increasingly complicated, yet progressive forms (Dunlap 2018;
Brock 2020b). In sum, the continuation of the present trajectory of industrial and
computational development requires increasing methods of strategic violence and
ever-more sophisticated forms of participatory slavery that are deeply intertwined
with dependency, addiction and systemic path dependency.
This leads to the second point: the recognition that both ancient and industrial
civilizations and later forms of state organization, in all of their varieties, are inseparable
from colonialism and the colonial model (Dunlap 2014b, 2018; Katsiaficas
2006/1997; Springer 2016). Explaining the complexities and continuities of colonial
When the Wolf Guards the Sheep 97
genocide, Patrick Wolfe reminds us, ‘invasion is a structure not an event’ (Wolfe
2006, 388). It is from this perspective that we assert that industrial development
itself is a system of domination, which domesticates humans and non-humans,
assimilates difference and transforms ecosystems to a point of severe degradation
or destruction. The evolution of industrial development has necessitated various
political modes of governance and politics – autocracies, oligarchies and democracies
– that always required some form of slavery or exclusion (Ellul 1964/1954;
Landstreicher n.d.; Gelderloos 2013; Güven 2015).
Transcending every type of capitalism – Keynesian, command control, neoliberal,
financial and so on – a focus on industrialism (Brock 2020b) allows us to peer into
the core of capitalism and its material embodiments – guarding against state and
working-class romanticism. It is industrialism itself, and its political and culture
industries, that manufacture desire and consent,5
imbuing human dependency,
addiction and normalization of political, economic and industrial structures (Porter
& Kakabadse 2006; Alexander 2008; Paoli 2013/2008). The normalization of
industrialism in everyday life prevents even critical scholars from acknowledging
their implicit statists and industrial subjectivities (Ince & Barrera de la Torre 2016).
Such acknowledgement means resituating how we view electricity (Winther 2008),
sanitation systems (Dunlap 2017a), roads (Dalakoglou 2012) and other industrial
infrastructural amenities. It demands analysing them as systemic techniques of
integration and domestication to create and reproduce an intricate, energy-intensive
network that justifies, enables and spreads industrial relations and infrastructure
(Berman 1983; Cullather 2006, 2013/2010). In short, industrialism constitutes the
material practice of conquest, otherwise known as the industrial, social (Dunlap
2014a) or genocide machine (Davis & Zannis 1973), which –despite its negative
social and ecological consequences – is becoming rebranded as ‘sustainable’ and
‘green’ that the study of political ecology has revealed so well.
The remainder of this chapter explores how the industrial system continues in the
face of ecological, climate and economic crisis, or how a cunning wolf can become
a shepherd in charge of the flock, by investigating the renewable energy–extraction
nexus through coal-mining in Germany and wind park development in Mexico. We
focus specifically at the material heart of the industrial system, which is extractivism
– the mining of the Earth and harnessing of wind.
GREENING DESTRUCTION: DISCIPLINING
AND DOMESTICATING HUMAN AND
NON-HUMAN NATURE IN AND AROUND
THE HAMBACH COAL MINE
With a size of 85 square kilometres or 8,500 hectares, the Hambach coal mine
(figure 5.1) is known to be the largest human-made hole in the world (Der Spiegel
1982). Throughout its lifetime, the open-pit lignite mine that is ‘migrating’ across
the Rhineland has been responsible for the forced displacement of thousands of
Alexander Dunlap and Andrea Brock98
people, the destruction of one of Europe’s most ancient and biodiverse forests (the
Hambacher Forest) and the release of more greenhouse gas emissions than any other
industrial project in Europe (Brock & Dunlap 2018). Despite intense resistance
against the mine – forest occupations, demonstrations and sabotage, among others
(Anonymous 2016) – the social and ecological disaster in and around the mine
continues to unfold.6
The defence of the mine at any cost by police and corporate
security forces is embedded in Germany’s long tradition of surveillance of resistance,
intensifying social control and increasingly visible authoritarian state structures leading
to violent responses to any kind of contestation.7
Most recently, this can be seen
in the violent repression of environmental defenders attempting to stop the construction
of a new highway in 2020 (Brock 2020a) as well as the well-documented
state violence against G20 protesters and their long prison sentences in 2017 (NDR
2017).8
Both point to the hypocrisy of the image of the German state as both socially
and environmentally progressive. The former state-owned electricity provider, coal
mine operator, nuclear and renewable energy producer, and self-proclaimed ‘energy
giant’ RWE and its shareholders continue to benefit from political support for ecologically
destructive activities like coal-mining and their close ties to the political
establishment (Brock & Dunlap 2020).9
The Rhineland thus serves as a great example to illustrate how the ecological
crisis is discursively acknowledged and subjected to policymaking while extractive
interests continue to be protected. The German state reconciles commitments to
climate change mitigation by mobilizing ‘green’ technologies and marked-based
mechanisms through promotion of renewables, e-mobility and carbon pricing as
solutions while selling new, ‘cleaner’ coal power stations as contributions to climate
Figure 5.1  Hambach Mine. Source: Hubert Perschke (2012).
When the Wolf Guards the Sheep 99
protection10
in an attempt to fragment popular contestation and to ensure public
support for mining.
RWE’s work to rebrand mining as ‘sustainable’ is justified by scientific abstractions
and calculations that focus on singular aspects of ecosystems – ‘carbon’ and
‘biodiversity’ – that neglect numerous issues and qualities associated with interventions
into ecosystems (Brock 2020c). Continued extractivism is possible because it
lies not only at the heart of industrial production but at the heart of modernist ideology
and the state system; involving not only the mining of (fossil) resources but also
the capturing of hearts and minds of the population. Green extractivism, or green
mining, is thus central to the reconciliation of industrial destruction with social and
ecological ‘sustainability’ in the form of the ‘green economy’. In the Rhineland,
this occurs through a number of mechanisms: first, the anchoring of RWE as ‘good
corporate neighbour’ and responsible employer with the best interest of local communities
and the wider German public at heart. Second, sustainable extractivism
is constructed through ‘green-washing’ of its operations and supply chains to ease
concerns around ecological impacts and human rights violations which go handin-hand
with the spectacularization (Debord 1967) and commodification of the
mining experience (Brock 2020c). Third, RWE is able to appear ‘progressive’ and
‘environmentally responsible’ through divide-and-conquer strategies to manage
resistance against coal-mining; from engagement with conservation organizations to
the criminalization of and physical violence against forest defenders.
Positioning RWE as responsible corporate neighbour and indispensable partner
for the German public involves substantive investments into a ‘Public Relations war’
to win the hearts and minds of the population (McQueen 2015), ensuring loyalty
to RWE’s corporate brand and engineering and buying consent to its projects. Propaganda
‘is cheaper than violence, bribery and other possible control techniques’
(Lasswell 1934, 524) or, in the words of Paul Virilio, ‘[b]eating an enemy involves
not so much capturing as captivating them’ (Virilio 1995, 14). Beyond RWE’s
Public Relations campaigns (through the advertising and marketing industries and
associated consultancies), this involves investments into astroturfing (the set-up of
fake citizens’ associations), lobbying efforts in schools, sponsorships of community,
police and fire service events, sports clubs and school projects, among many others.11
These efforts to win over the population extend to investments into new recreational
infrastructure including a huge cycling and hiking network, cultural activities, museums,
exhibitions and financial support for stadiums as well as school projects. At the
same time, RWE has worked hard to dismiss concerns about ‘irreparable ecological
consequences’ raised by government authorities and environmental groups as early as
the 1980s (Der Spiegal 1982). The state’s environmental ministry suppressed a study
warning of the disastrous ecological impacts of coal-mining in the region (including
biodiversity loss, ecosystem degradation and desertification) and doubting RWE’s
ability to recultivate, and/or mitigate the impact of the mine (ibid.).
Green-washing activities take place on different levels of operation. Internationally,
RWE has been leading efforts to ‘improve’ coal supply chains through Bettercoal,
a voluntary initiative that involves mine audits and stakeholder engagement,
Alexander Dunlap and Andrea Brock100
which serves as convenient opportunity to deflect critique, according to research
participants (Brock 2018). Domestically, the company promotes its research on
sustainable coal – framing its power plants as ‘sustainable’ due to achieved CO2
emission reductions – and increases in efficiency as well as carbon offsetting. In its
‘innovation centre’, RWE publicly displays its testing of carbon capture and storages
technologies (‘CO2
washing’) as ‘technology of the future’, and ‘almost ready
for application’. To ensure further local support, RWE set up a recultivation centre
that is responsible for its nature ‘restoration’ work, as part of (legally required)
compensation measures in the form of enormous environmental-engineering experiments
based on the belief in the human capacity to recreate nature (Brock 2020c).
These offsets are meant to compensate for the destruction of species habitat (read
non-human forest life) in the Hambacher Forest. Compensation measures include the
newly restored Sophienhöhe,12
an artificial, forested hill that was ‘built from scratch’
by the mine operator, according to RWE research participants. The offset involves
careful planning and ‘scientifically informed’ mixing of soils – creating a diversity
of ecosystems from more barren, sandy areas featuring ‘rare species’ to more fertile
forest grounds that ‘require’ the continued destruction of the original forest to
secure provision of topsoil (according to the company). Ironically, RWE not only
built the largest artificial mountain in Europe but has simultaneously been financing
mountaintop removal to mine coal in the United States (Hecking 2016). The
new landscape or ‘better nature’, according to RWE, involves replanting trees and
shrubs, establishing artificial bodies of water and ‘local biodiversity hotspots’ that are
complete with resettled ant hills, relocated hazel dormouse colonies and dead tree
trunks for breeding habitat. The restoration of Sophienhöhe is frequently showcased
and has become a destination for regular scientific and touristic excursions and
research projects. The creation of this ‘better nature’ is based on the very same violent
processes of classification, quantification and measuring of life mentioned earlier –
what Camila Moreno and others have called ‘ecological epistemicide’ (Moreno et al.
2015) – ignoring interconnections and social relations to the land and enabling
claims of ‘net gain’ of trees (Brock 2020c).13
In effect, Sophienhöhe is the outcome
of RWE’s efforts to make nature commensurable, legible and controllable; requiring
continuous surveillance, monitoring and ‘careful management’ including regular
fertilizer application for decades after planting these ‘new forests’.
Sophienhöhe forms part of the spectacularization and commodification of the
mining experience that is manifest in its transformation through ‘communicative
infrastructure’ and into ‘extractive attractions’ (Brock & Dunlap 2018, 40; Brock
2020c). The Sophienhöhe contains 150 kilometres of hiking and cycling trails, an
educational nature train for students, numerous visitor points including lookouts,
Celtic tree circles and a ‘giant redwood trail’ to spectacularize the visit. Some trails
are equipped with information boards containing QR codes to allow visitors to experience
‘nature’ through their smart phones and learn about ‘the new landscape and
its flora and fauna’ (RWE Power 2016). Novel technology is thus used to mediate
human relationships not only with the fauna and flora around them but also with
their ‘creator’ – RWE. ‘New nature’ is heavily pre-structured and policed to prevent
When the Wolf Guards the Sheep 101
engagement beyond Sunday-strolling and dog walking, signposted and delineated by
shrubs to keep people on the path: ‘spatial environment[s] saturated with contemporary
ideologies of containment and exclusion’ (Ferrell 2012, 1688). Signs, rules,
‘natural grids’ and fellow visitors prevent exploration beyond the pre-planned trails,
turning Sophienhöhe into a ‘highly regulated, predictable and enclosed environment
– like city parks positioned to serve as PR’ (Brock & Dunlap 2018, 41).
Sophienhöhe is complemented by the creation of tourism opportunities around the
mine, such as viewing platforms complete with commercial opportunities including
a bar and a restaurant. Visitors are invited to enjoy the view over the mine from the
revealingly named, terra nova (‘New Earth’ platform), modelled after a beach resort
in anticipation of the planned transformation of the mine into Germany’s second
biggest lake upon mine closure.
Visitors from near and far are invited to enjoy the view, drinks, food and games, and
applaud the 200 plus-meter long diggers, the ‘largest mobile machines of the world’,
invoking fantasies of huge playgrounds where soil is shifted and men have God-like
control over both machinery and nature. (Ibid.)
Through the creation of ‘better nature’, its diversity of greening activities, and
corporate social responsibility activities, RWE draws in conservation organizations
and other potential critics to ensure the smooth functioning of the system (Brock
2018, 2020c). The goal of such corporate engagement is ‘to isolate the radicals, cultivate
the idealists and educate them into becoming realists, then co-opt the realists
into agreeing with industry’ (Lubbers 1999, n.p.). Conservationists are invited to
the RWE recultivation conference, given a stage to present their research on orchids
and butterflies, and receive public praise for their work. Local people are sent regular
‘neighbourhood magazines’, in which they can learn about RWE’s recultivation
work and the unruly and deranged ‘radical’ forest defenders. Other community
engagement activities include RWE’s ‘baking cart’ that drives across the country
handing out baked goods, recipes, RWE material and energy-saving advice. The
company was also engaged in a ‘Peace Plan’ as part of the ‘Hambacher Dialogue’
where it engaged with ‘moderate’ protesters, and has undertaken a large-scale acceptance
study, The Power of Participation, to explore how stakeholder engagement and
dialogue can ‘avoid or reduce resistance’ against megaprojects to protect ‘the future
viability of our business’ (RWE AG 2012).
At the same time, coal-mining – and its social and ecological ‘costs’ – is further
normalized through the capturing of hearts and minds of surrounding populations,
planting pro-corporate ideologies, industrial desires, and fears of ‘de-industrialization’,
‘blackouts’ and ‘primitivism’ (Brock and Dunlap 2020). These are fostered by
RWE’s Public Relations work, lobbying and (so-called) Corporate Social Responsibility
activities, complemented by its infiltration into decision-making bodies at all
levels of the German government. ‘Wherever decisions are taken, you find people
who work for RWE or have worked for RWE’, according to one local resident –
testifying to RWE’s role in shaping the physical, political, cultural and social environments
in the Rhineland and beyond. These technologies serve to invisibilize the
Alexander Dunlap and Andrea Brock102
inherent violence in industrial coal-mining (or any large-scale electricity production)
as well as the violence against forest defenders and dissidents (Brock and Dunlap
2020, 40 & 44).
Opposition against the mine has been harshly disciplined through various forms
of (aggressive) policing, public–private security partnerships (Hissel 2015), surveillance,
arrests and court procedures, subjecting land defenders and residents to ever
greater control. More combative resistance against the mine has been met with police
and corporate violence involving the increasing criminalization of forest defenders,
physical attacks and threats of rape and death. The German state, of course, is
intrinsically tied to fossil fuel interests, large-scale energy projects and infrastructure
provision, having to defend such ‘critical infrastructure’ projects at all costs (Europol
2016, 8). It is no coincidence then that ‘protests, vandalism, blockades and “lockons”
’ against resource extraction companies and ‘large-scale infrastructure’ are singled
out in Europol terrorism reports (Europol 2016, 43), branding anti-capitalist,
animal, anarchist and environmental social movements as ‘extremist’ and ‘terrorist’
(ibid.). The mine is ‘defended’, however, not only by state/security forces and the
media but also by all those who are captivated by ideas of progress, modernization
and the green economy, having learned to hold dear the comforts gained and the
‘promise’ of good, ‘honest’ mining jobs.
Meanwhile RWE’s sponsorships and multiple strategies to buy and engineer
consent create new dependencies while the displacement of entire villages increases
social fragmentation and alienation from each other and the land, breaking down
social relationships. The world’s largest hole continues to migrate. This ‘hole’ is visible
from the four-lane highway that cuts through the landscape, allowing drivers to
catch a glance of the moon-like landscape. The solar panels lining the highway, and
Figure 5.2  Windmills at the Edge of Hambach Mine. Source: Andrea Brock.
When the Wolf Guards the Sheep 103
the enormous windmills around the mine, play into the ‘greener future’ that RWE
promotes and markets in concert with the ‘better nature’ and ‘pretty landscapes’
the company claims to produce. The windmills become collaborators in the quest
for accumulation and legitimacy, capturing the wind and feeding into the electric
circuits which power the diggers 400 metres below. They illustrate the spectacular
convergence of coal and renewables – the ‘problem’ and the ‘solution’ – for the sake
of intensified industrial activity, economic growth and power (figure 5.2).
HARNESSING PEOPLE, CAPTURING WIND AND
SUBDUING REBELLION IN OAXACA, MEXICO
The unique geographical features and positioning of the Istmo between the Gulf
of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean have triggered a wind rush in the region (figure
5.3). It began with the 2003 USAID sponsored report, Wind Energy Resource
Atlas of Oaxaca (Elliott et al. 2003), which mapped the ‘excellent’ wind sources in
the region that the International Finance Corporation later called ‘the best wind
resources on earth’ (IFC 2014, 1). The coastal Istmo can be divided into two sections:
the North and the South. Sitting at the base of the Atravesada mountain
range, the northern part of the region is generally regarded as Zapotec (Binníza),
while the southern side is predominately Ikoot (Huave) territory. These territories
overlap, while the Istmo is home to five different ethnic groups as well as a mestizo
population (Campbell 1993)
Since 2004, wind energy development has resulted in the construction of 1,642
wind turbines (Rivas 2015; Rubí 2016) with twice this number being planned for
Figure 5.3  Wind Park in the North Istmo. Source: Wiki commons.
Alexander Dunlap and Andrea Brock104
the region (Briseno 2016). While the desire for work, social development, and prosperity
initially created support for wind projects in the region, many of these benefits
remained unfulfilled or only benefited a minority of the population – politicians,
their networks and select land owners (Dunlap 2017b). The towns and fishing communities
of the ‘South’ witnessed wind park developments in the northern region,
and as wind projects began spreading southward, people began organizing to resist
them, especially those who valued their semi-subsistence lifestyle intertwined with
the land and sea. Resistance and collaboration with the companies took on archetypal
qualities in the Istmo (Borras et al. 2012; Hall et al. 2015). Contestation in the
North is focused on exploitative land deals and labour contracts as locals fight for
greater incorporation, as well as for individual and collective benefits. This includes
unions – who were initially fighting for more wind parks – criticizing wind companies
for bringing in technical employees and offering unequal pay between Mexican
and Spanish workers. Meanwhile, in the South, the total rejection of wind energy
projects largely arose, according to interviews, from the belief that wind companies
(and the wider political system) cannot be ‘trusted’ since they ‘propagate lies” to take
people’s land and “damage the sea” – thereby undermining local subsistence. Much
has been published on wind energy in this region,14
but here we highlight its role as
an emerging apparatus of industrial control and vital usurpation.
The cries of the 1980s punk band Oi Polloi, ‘Harness the wind – Harness the
waves – We don’t need this filthy nuclear waste!’ has come to haunt the present.
Emerging from the environmental movement as an alternative to coal and nuclear
energy production (Stirling 2015), wind energy, especially its industrial-scale instillation,
has been recuperated to renew business as usual. Until today, the environmental
movement, leftist and other progressive circles view industrial-scale wind energy
as a solution to the climate crisis and a pathway to ecologically sustainable futures.
To lay bare the delusions of the green economy and the spell cast by renewable
energy (marketing), the reality of wind energy development needs to be analysed for
what it is actually doing in practice – rather than based on technological idealism or
ecological modernization theory. This means briefly examining four aspects of wind
energy development: the necessity of extractivism for raw materials, local social and
ecological impacts, ownership and benefits, and wind power energy consumption.
The resources to create industrial-scale wind energy, first, come from mining
and dredging of the Earth. Comprised of metals (iron, copper, aluminium, nickel,
etc.), concrete, plastics, oil and rare earth minerals (dysprosium, praseodymium
neodymium, terbium), so-called renewable wind energy requires not only traditional
extractivism, road infrastructures, and (fossil fuel) transportation but also the deployment
of marketing and security apparatuses to make extraction operations politically
feasible (Downey et al. 2010; Bonds & Downey 2012). Highlighting this point early
on, Eric Bond and Liam Downey recognize not only that increases in technological
development can result in rising overall resource use but that “widespread commercialization
of ‘green’ technologies has the potential to create new, more serious, or
at least different environmental and humanitarian problems for less wealthy and less
powerful groups” (Bond and Downey 2012, 181). While the ecological and policing
When the Wolf Guards the Sheep 105
cost of mining is well-documented (Brock & Dunlap 2018/2017; Guezuraga et al.
2012; Veltmeyer 2013; Geenen & Verweijen 2017), mineral extraction also leaves a
daunting shadow over wind and other renewable energy technologies.
A two-megawatt wind turbine uses roughly 150 metric tonnes of steel for the reinforced
concrete foundations, 250 metric tonnes for the rotor hubs and nacelles and
500 metric tonnes for the tower (Smil 2016b). This also includes 3.6 tonnes of copper
per megawatt (Smith 2014). Drawing on a World Bank report (La Porta et al.
2017), Jason Hickel estimates that to produce an annual output of about 7 terawatts
of electricity by 2050 with wind and solar infrastructure will require mining ‘34 million
metrics tons of copper, 40 million tons of lead, 50 million tons of zinc, 162 tons
of aluminum, and no less than 4.8 billion tons of iron’ (2019: n.p.). This estimate
does not take into account fuels necessary for mining, processing, manufacturing
and transporting raw materials and manufactured components. According to Begoña
Guezuraga and colleagues the main contributors of wind energy’s CO2
footprint are
steel, concrete and cast-iron production, while plastic production constitutes the
most energy-intensive process (Guezuraga et al. 2012). The production of every ton
of steel requires roughly 0.8 ton of coking (metallurgical) coal,15
in addition to the
energy required for steel production. While carbon accounting has surreptitiously
justified these processes, the issue of mining and processing rare earth minerals to
create wind turbine permanent magnet generators remains publicly neglected.
Baotou (Inner Mongolia) and South East China have historically produced
between 85–98 per cent of rare earth metals used in wind turbines, electric cars,
smart phones and other technologies (Hongiao 2016). Ninety-eight per cent of
the heavy rare earth elements used in the EU came from China in 2020 (European
Commission 2020). Between 2014 and 2017, according to Kalyeena Makortoff,
80 per cent of the US rare earth imports originated from China, who currently
‘accounts for about 70% of global production’ (Makortoff 2019). In a BBC report,
the Baotou mining and processing area is described as ‘hell on Earth’, a terrifying
dystopic industrial environment filled with pollution and cluttered with factories,
pipelines, high-tension wires and artificial lakes filled with ‘black, barely-liquid, toxic
sludge’ that ‘tested at around three times background radiation’ (Maughan 2015, 1).
The reliance on Chinese resources and consequent fearmongering have recently led
to EU and US strategies to diversify supply chains and push new extractive frontiers
elsewhere. In response to China stopping a few shipments of rare earth minerals in
2012 in what was soon politically constructed to be a “supply crunch” triggering
political panic and new investments across the world, attention was directed towards
“strengthening the European rare earth supply chain” (Ahonen et al. 2014) and rare
earths quickly “became ‘strategic’, and ‘vital’ materials crucial to ‘security’, ‘technology’,
and ‘the future’” (Klinger 2018).16
Mined through open-pit, underground and in-situ leaching methods (Haque
et al. 2014), rare earth ore deposits contain ‘low concentrations [of desired minerals]
ranging from 10 to a few hundred parts per million by weight’ and, especially in ionadsorption
clay, are ‘symbiotic or associated with the radioactive elements uranium
and thorium’ (Yang et al. 2013, 133). Rare earth mining and processing, Nawshad
Alexander Dunlap and Andrea Brock106
Haque and colleagues write, tend to be “energy, water and chemical intensive with
significant environment risks affecting water discharges (radionuclides, mainly thorium
and uranium; heavy metals; acid; fluorides), tailing management and air emissions”
(Haque et al. 2014, 621). While rare earth elements are not actually rare at
all, what is rare about them ‘are the places where it is politically acceptable to mine
and process them in a cost-effective manner’ (Klinger 2015, 574).
Renewable energy thus involves socially and ecologically destructive mining processes
with large amounts of tailings that contain heavy metals, toxic and radioactive
wastes, which end up in the air, water, soil, animals and humans. Based on the same
World Bank report, Hickel estimates there will be 35–70 per cent increase in neodymium
– an essential mineral for wind turbines – and for grid battery storage over
‘40 million tons of lithium,” which is a ‘2,700 percent increase over current levels
of extraction (Hickel 2019).
The quantity and intensity of chemicals and toxic materials pouring into ecosystems
are difficult to measure not only because of political but also epistemic reasons
in accounting for full-spectrum environmental impacts. While in theory, Amory
Lovins (2017) points out, wind turbines could be built without rare earth minerals
with geared turbines, in practice this appears not to be the reality for industrial-scale
wind parks – especially offshore wind parks and those in areas of extreme wind.17
Like other industrial enchantments (such as computers and smart technologies),
wind farms continue to require extractivism and generate toxic, radioactive and
later, electronic waste. A ‘3.1 MW wind turbine created 772 to 1807 tons of landfill
waste, 40 to 85 tons of waste sent for incineration and about 7.3 tons of e-waste per
unit’, explain Benjamin Sovacool and colleagues, who estimate that 1000,000 new
wind turbines by 2050 to meet climate change mitigation standards ‘will result in
another 730,000 tons of e-waste’ (Sovacool 2020, 1–19). Recycling capacities are
low and varying between materials, yet retain roughly a 20 per cent recycling rate
(ibid.), which the EU is currently trying to improve. Raw material extraction and
e-waste are absent from much carbon accounting, and thus often invisible in the
climate change debates.
Drawing on the experience of the Istmo, the second aspect of wind energy relates
to the social and ecological impacts generated by wind turbines, the result of the
placement, construction, and operation of wind parks. The placement of wind turbines
requires locating suitable land and running tests akin to those published in the
Wind Resource Atlas of Oaxaca. This necessitates negotiating not only the physical
geography of hills, trees, bedrock and ground water but also the human geography
of local political leaders, elites and landowners in the region. The land contracting is
complicated by illegible and contested land relations, such as with ejidos and communal
land.18
Securing land in the Istmo requires various mechanisms, creating at
times contradictory dynamics including limited or selective consultation and benefit
sharing; neglecting economic, cultural and ecological impacts; rolling out wind company
propaganda – or Public Relations – to parade ideas of jobs, individual prosperity
and collective social development; and deploying manipulation, intimidation and
deception tactics led by middlemen (‘coyotes’), to secure land. Once land is secured,
When the Wolf Guards the Sheep 107
construction begins with the clearing of trees, bushes and other plants (including local
herbs/medicines) to build roads, wind turbine foundations and subterranean and
above the ground power lines. Digging wind turbine foundations requires holes that
are roughly 7–14 metres (32–45 ft.) deep and about 16–21 metres (52–68 ft.) in
diameter, depending on the specific geological composition of the land. These holes,
as already mentioned, are filled with large amounts of steel and concrete. Notably,
foundations are much deeper in areas without bedrock, such as the Lagoon Superior
where local fishers claim that foundations were up to 70 metres deep. In the Istmo,
fresh ground water is located 1 to 3 metres below the ground and wind turbine foundations
which replace this water with steel-reinforced concrete foundations. Once
in operation, killing of birds and other animals has been documented (Ledec et al.
2012), along with testimonies of oil leaking into the grazing grass and water wells.
Alterations to the water table, the raising of roads and the constant swirling of the
turbines, farmers report, cause extreme drying and flooding of the land. ‘[E]ven in
this weather my tomato has gone dry – really fast. I am not going to be able to farm
in the rainy season because of the road they made over there is seventy centimeters
higher’, explains a farmer, who compares their land with being ‘inside a pool’.19
Other impacts have been reported in areas where wind turbines are built close
to cities and bodies of water. In towns like La Ventosa, which is nearly enclosed by
wind turbines and draped with electrical infrastructure, people report symptoms
akin to the ‘wind turbine syndrome’ – headaches, tinnitus, insomnia, hypertension
– and other severe illnesses (Pierpont 2009). While this is supported by a range of
studies,20
it requires further investigation. Wind energy development on and/or near
the sea, as in the case of the Barra de Santa Teresa (Barra), digging, drilling and the
use of heavy construction machinery have severely impacted aquatic populations
that are extremely sensitive to electromagnetic currents and lights (Premalatha et al.
2014). Fishermen reported that aircraft warning lights (some that would even mimic
a strobe light) from completed wind parks were pushing the fish farther away into
the Lagoon Superior. For fishermen, this meant having to drive elsewhere to fish,
which fermented, according to a local human rights activist, an ‘inter-ethnic conflict’
that was caused by the wind energy projects.21
Residents from towns recognized
locally as collaborating with and benefiting (however, contentious and disproportionate)
from wind companies are now visiting other towns actively in resistance
against the wind projects – and, consequently, without wind parks – to go fish,
causing fights and conflicts to break out. This happened between as well as within
towns (Dunlap 2018).
Wind park ownership and local benefits are heavily conditioned by neoliberal
structural adjustment policies that favour national and foreign corporate acquisition.
Wind parks are incentivized through green economy stimuli (grants and
loans) coming from donor countries and private funds. Two funding sources are
the Clean Development Fund (CDM), and the World Bank’s Clean Technology
and Climate Investment Funds (Dunlap 2014b, 2018/2017), which are linked to
Certified Emission Reductions (CERs) for trading and speculation on the financial
market. This connection to the market has been instrumental to the birth of the
Alexander Dunlap and Andrea Brock108
green economy.22
Wind companies are thus receiving increasing sums of money
from public and private sectors to incentivize investment and profit making from
wind park development, which is justified on the grounds of mitigating ecological
and climate crises. This investment, however, is managed for profit maximization,
turning climate change disaster into a new market opportunity, which becomes
apparent when examining the use of wind energy in the chapter. Additionally, wind
parks are operated by companies investing and working in other industries, such as
Gas Natural Fenosa, a Spanish natural gas company that is the majority shareholder
in the Bíi Hioxo wind park, which had been the source of immense conflict (Dunlap
2018/2017).23
Finally, what is wind energy used for? Wind parks in the Istmo, based on the 1992
electricity law, are formally registered as ‘self-supply’ (autoabastecimiento) (Dunlap
2019). Self-supply electricity is generated privately and reserved for the investors
or co-owners of wind parks, which are transporting electricity on public infrastructure
from the Istmo to Guatemala, Belize, the United States and industrial areas
within Mexico. Wind energy thus powers industrial construction companies (e.g.,
Cementos-Moctezoma, CEMEX), food processing corporations (Grupo Bimbo,
Coca Cola), superstores (Walmart, Tiendas Chedrahui), and mining enterprises
(Peñoles, Grupo Mexico) among others, rather than being used by the people living
surrounded by or near these wind projects. Recently, after nine months of protest
and deliberation between companies and local elites, it was agreed that Eólica del Sur
would pay for three community wind turbines, finance a community centre, and pay
65 million pesos in taxes (Contreras 2018).
Wind energy is supporting and expanding conventional fossil fuel-based industrial
activities, not transitioning away from them. Yet, environmental activists continue
to cling onto renewable energy development in hope of creating an ecologically
sustainable future. We argue, however, that industrial-scale, corporate-controlled
wind energy production is captured by the capitalist grid that sustains and propels
industrial growth and degradation, instead of replacing ecologically destructive
modes of production and consumption. Investments in wind energy to ‘offset’ environmental
damage continue to renew the images and degrading operations of industrial
construction companies, food processing, superstores and mining companies,
which feeds into the myths of ‘sustainable mining’, ‘green uranium’ and ‘sustainable
development’ in general.24
Currently, the ‘sustainable’ possibilities of wind energy have been eliminated by
their operational scale, which reflects not only the existing energy-intensive infrastructure
of industrial systems but also capitalist growth imperatives. Marketing
and Public Relations campaigns – ‘green-washing’ – invisibilize this expansion and
distract from the corporate growth and profit maximization imperatives that legally
force companies to acquire increasing amounts of energy and natural resources. The
latter contradicts and undermines the foundations of renewable energy transitions.
Industrial-scale wind energy as we know it, along with its positive marketable vision,
could not exist without the brutal and flagrant eradication of entire bioregions via
the extraction of iron, copper, coal and other fossil fuel resources – often in countries
When the Wolf Guards the Sheep 109
of the Global South. Wind energy thus not only masks the flagrant destruction of
mining metals, oil and rare earth minerals, reinforcing (neo)colonial trade links but
these ecological damages also remain hidden behind uncritical notions of ‘carbon
accounting’, ‘just transition’ and, in some cases, ‘climate justice’ as there is a lack of
critical engagement with renewable energy infrastructure.
Wind energy turbines appear to be a less abrasive imposition, compared with
coal mines or power plants, even at times when they surround entire towns (as
in La Venta and La Ventosa) and are mixed with farming practices. This image
conceals the global commodity chain and lifecycle on which they are dependent.
While in theory, wind energy is ‘renewable’, and thus infinite, this framing hides
two important facts. First is the limitation of their sustainability due to the need to
replace wind turbines every thirty to forty years (Guezuraga et al. 2012), and second
is the mineral and fossil fuel extractivism that is necessary for large-scale application
of wind energy, which requires large amounts of steel, concrete, copper and rare
metals. This is why renewable energy should more accurately be named fossil fuel+
(Dunlap n.d).
The present use of renewable energy, wedded to capitalist growth imperatives
and powering ‘dirty’ industries, tears up, dominates and reconfigures the Earth in
the image of industrial infrastructure, urbanization and, likely, ‘nature reserves’ – a
dream long theorized by many enlightenment philosophers (Merchant 1983; Romanyshyn
1989; Adams 2014). The more people consent to the industrial regime and
continue romanticizing renewable technologies, the more this dystopian project
advances towards total environmental control.
REBRANDING EXTRACTION: THE RENEWABLE
ENERGY–EXTRACTION NEXUS
The German Rhineland and the Istmo in Mexico are two very different places, but
both are experiencing a type of natural resource extraction, sharing experiences
and problems in oddly similar ways. A number of notable commonalities and differences
between coal and wind energy extraction emerge. The differences are fairly
obvious: geographic location, cultural context, processes of natural resources extraction
– mining (coal) versus capturing (wind) – Intensities of extractive violence,
and ‘greening’ activities/processes deployed. The commonalities are more interesting
to unpack.
Both case studies present large-scale industrial developmental projects, or ‘interventions’,
that directly rely on extractive industries and fossil fuels at different
stages of their globalized supply chains including machinery, technologies and raw
materials. People, villages and non-human habitats were regimented and destroyed
to create coal mines and wind turbines. Both necessitate the same industrial infrastructure
– transport, electricity and communication. As such, rather than challenge
degrading industrial development and processes of capital accumulation, they
secure hierarchical power relationships and corporate control over (human and
Alexander Dunlap and Andrea Brock110
non-human) nature. Both projects disproportionately benefit a political economic
elite (shareholders and executives), with financial and ideological support from the
public sector and large parts of the ‘public’. State support is inherent to extractivism,
itself a colonial ideology bound to state power (Acosta 2013). Indeed, state power
itself has historically been – and continues to be – built on processes of extraction
(energy production) and associated violence to control ecosystems and populations.
Public support is secured through various social (counterinsurgency) technologies to
co-opt, manage and pacify opposition to state-corporate agendas (Brock & Dunlap
2018). They involve investing into Public Relations, Corporate Social Responsibility
programmes and public–private security partnerships to secure operations in the face
of social fragmentation, environmental degradation and popular protest. Anarchist
political ecology not only remains foundational in challenging the myths of (eco-/
neo) liberalism and nation state development but acknowledges the systemic problems
of hierarchy, extreme divisions of labour and (malicious) competition – rotten
relationships – and recognizes the viral and recuperative approaches to manufacturing
social consent.
The ‘management’ of the various social and ecological impacts serves to hide the
political and extractive violence inherent in both the Rhineland and the Istmo. The
magnitude and implications of extractive violence are immediately clear with coalmining
– ancient forests, wetlands and grasslands full with human and non-human
life are transformed into giant holes, moon landscapes and leaching ponds, causing
displacement, degradation and death. Wind energy, at first sight, appears ‘clean’ in
comparison, with shining metal towers and no noticeable emissions, standing above
a landscape causing seemingly no disruptions (with the exception of dripping oil and
bird corpses surrounding them). The negative ecological impacts are abrasive during
the construction phase; strategic and (relatively) limited compared to mining. The
problems with wind turbines are often related to scale, quantity and placement (e.g.,
distance from houses and sea life) of turbines, neglect of bird and animal mitigation
strategies, as well as energy usage and decommissioning. The result is a type of ‘slow
extractive violence’ that is steady and subtle (Nixon 2011). As discussed earlier,
however, the real extractive violence with wind energy is concealed and exported out
of sight and out of mind, not only in relatively isolated rural regions in the Global
North but also in the Global South, which maintains fewer enforced environmental
and human rights regulations (Szablowski 2007). By concealing extractive activities
needed to construct wind turbines, colonial relations manifest in the export of politically
violent and ecologically damaging extractive activities to the Global South. The
latter enables greater acceptance and complicity among environmentalist, leftists
and other ‘progressives’ who would (hopefully) otherwise condemn this resource
colonialism and unequal ecological exchange.25
Centre–periphery dynamics, with
all of their nuances, still lurk in shadows of wind turbines and other renewable
technologies.
The natural resource extraction sites in Germany and Mexico are linked through
complex greening activities to legitimize operations and impacts. EU legislation
requires biodiversity offsets to compensate for the ecological impacts of renewable
When the Wolf Guards the Sheep 111
energy projects on protected habitat. Meanwhile, in the Global South, renewable
energy projects constitute offsets in and of themselves. In effect, this further ties
nature protection to degradation, and links climate harm through industrial development
in the Global North to renewable energy ‘interventions’ in the South. The
latter thus serve to legitimize, and depoliticize, industrial operations in the North.
German coal mine operator RWE not only engages in carbon offsetting in the
Global North and South but also provides biodiversity offsets for German construction
projects, selling ‘eco-points’ generated through nature ‘restoration’ to German
municipalities (Hupp 2016; Brock 2020c). In the case of coal, we see a rebranding
of the ‘old’ fossil fuel regime through such offsetting activities and promises of carbon
capture and storage, fabricating the idea of ‘sustainable coal’ based on emission
reductions and increases in efficiency.
Alternatively, in the wind energy case we see the marketing of a ‘new’ renewable
energy regime. Yet, in their life cycles, at different (and multiple) points in their
supply chains, both the extraction of coal and the production of wind energy retain
a high level of socio-ecological disruption and/or destruction. This situation led
Alexander Dunlap to argue that ‘[a]t best the dichotomy between fossil fuels and
renewable energy is surreptitiously misleading and at worst it is a false dichotomy’
(Dunlap 2017a, 257; see also Kisrch 2010, 2014; Sullican 2013; Brock & Dunlap
2018/2017). A comprehensive comparison of the destructive impacts from coal
and wind, taking into account entire commodity chains of extractive machinery
used in extractive sites, the mining operations themselves (coal, copper, rare earth,
etc.), labour, processing of raw materials, transport, operation, decommissioning
and overall life cycle is still lacking and needs investigation. Anarchist political ecology
helps recognize the various and interrelated oppressions emerging from energy
infrastructure, which includes acknowledging the social engineering and marketing
of these projects. ‘Greening’ is being used in both sites to gain legitimacy, pacify
dissent, and continue business as usual. This greening represents governmentality or
‘eco-governmentality’ (Ulloa 2013/2005), another weapon, or social technology of
governance (Brock 2018), in the toolbox of governments, corporations and police–
military practitioners – counterinsurgents – to manage rural protest and resistance
led by indigenous people (Brock and Dunlap 2018; Dunlap 2017a) but also urban
people protesting and ready to take action to create systemic change for ecologically
just futures.
Both energy technology systems are further linked through the actors and interests
behind them. The industrial processing facilities in Asia, Africa and Latin America
associated with and powered by the fossil fuel economy are themselves producing
essential components for cars, smart phones and industrial-scale wind turbines
(Maughan 2015; Haque et al. 2014). Fossil fuel and mineral companies such as
RWE, Gas Natural Fenosa, Grupo Mexico, or Peñoles buy or construct their own
wind companies and industrial parks, using this energy to expand their operations or
to create consortiums with industrial construction companies, (junk) food processing
companies, superstores and mining companies, depriving local people of their
resources. Not only does this resource colonialism retain a centre–periphery dynamic
Alexander Dunlap and Andrea Brock112
in the securing of raw materials but also in the operation and use of wind resources.
After being exported out of their region, energy is converted and ultimately sold
back to local people in form of processed goods (such as plastic), or in the form of
infrastructural projects. Meanwhile, in Germany, RWE is investing in wind and
solar installations which not only feed into the same grid that is powering coal
extraction in the Rhineland but communicates ‘sustainability’ and social progress
to the population (Brock 2020c). The Rhineland and the Istmo demonstrate the
renewable energy–extraction nexus, which – instead of questioning the destructive
trajectory of capitalist industrial progress – merges the ‘normal’ extractive and the
‘green’ economy to reinforce each other to continue feeding industrial expansion
both materially and financially (Hildyard 2016). This nexus represents an intimate
connection between conventional and renewable energy that not only share the same
industrial lineage and technological continuum but are connected across different
sites through the use and extraction of raw materials, companies and grid networks.
Anarchists know that the state and corporate entities are based on hierarchical
ordering and social and ecological degradation, and their organizational existence
and/or imperative are inseparable from their destructive behaviour – ‘green’ or otherwise.
Anarchist political ecologists know that de-growth is a necessity and that relationships
built on hierarchy, divisions of labour, commodification and exchange are
doomed to redress the system-wide issues and traumas but instead advance agendas
of control through the militarization and marketization of everything, everywhere
and by every means. In the end, whether fossil fuel or wind energy, the industrial
machine expands its infrastructural and fibre optic tentacles, violence and enchantment,
as policymakers and the public alike tell themselves that climate change, biodiversity
loss and ecological degradation are being mitigated (and now adapted to),
while the production of industrial waste and economic growth continue.
CONCLUSION
Fossil fuels and renewables continue to be framed as ‘good’ and ‘bad’, ‘clean’ and
‘dirty’ or as ‘the problem’ and ‘the solution’, even by ‘progressives’ and environmental
justice activists. Outside popular and media discourses, numerous scholars
offer greater specification in types of ‘renewable’ energy generation regimes and the
numerous political challenges confronting their participatory and equitable development
(Burke & Stephens 2018; Newell 2019; Naumann & Rudolph 2020; Brock,
Sovacool & Hook forthcoming). Within the literature on energy transitions and
renewables, however, there remains a strong blind spot, ignoring the murky reality
and rippling effects behind the raw material supply and processing webs of so-called
‘renewable’ and ‘fossil fuel+’ energy generation technologies26
. Said differently, the
unsavoury reality of the renewable energy–extraction nexus remains neglected. In
this chapter, employing an anarchist political ecology lens to examine the rippling
effects of socio-ecological oppression, we argue that this division is surreptitious
and dangerous because it makes the degradation inherent in the contemporary
When the Wolf Guards the Sheep 113
‘green’ industrial system invisible by hiding how it is actually renewing destruction.
Instead, we argue, fossil fuels and industrial-scale, corporate-controlled renewables
constitute two sides of the same coin – inseparable in terms of finance and profits,
actors involved, power relationships surrounding and linking these technologies,
corporate visions, energy uses and resulting inequalities. It is these same actors
that are involved in both processes, linked not only through complex investment
and finance networks and ownership patterns but also through physical processes,
dependencies and shared supply chains. The alleged ‘sustainability’ of fossil fuel+
system necessitates the transformation of environments, fauna, flora and human
life, causing physical, cultural and social disruption, degradation and destruction.
Sustainability, for corporations, governments and many NGOs, not only refers to
financial sustainability but also to the management of popular dissent and insurrection
against the commodification, transformation and/or destruction of human
and non-human lives. While ‘the management of environmentalists is central
to environmental management’ (Levy 1997, 126–147), the green economy, as a
component of the renewable energy–extraction nexus, is also about extracting, and
deriving value from what environmentalists value the most: the process of so-called
‘greening’ itself. In sum, the sustainability employed by the green economy is about
sustaining the arrogant and imbecilic direction of capitalist development, which
includes developing green commodities and markets to the detriment of habitats,
ecosystems and the climate.
Figure 5.4  Land Defenders Continue. Source: Art by Riona’O Regan.
Alexander Dunlap and Andrea Brock114
In this chapter, we hope to have redirected critical attention to the roots of the
multiple social and ecological crises that are intertwined not (just) in tonnes of carbon
(emissions) and industrial waste but in issues of power and control. The power
and control exerted over ecosystems, animals and people to enforce a mode of industrial
and computational development are causing various forms of environmental
degradation, social discontent and disease. Let this chapter demonstrate that the
green economy and its emerging instruments for both ‘old’ and ‘new’ energy systems
demonstrate a continuation of ‘war by ecological crisis’ to control both human and
non-human resources. We hope environmentalists, academics and others will begin
to acknowledge this – with all the difficulties and depths that entails – when confronting
and examining the process of techno-industrial development (figure 5.4).
NOTES
1.	For examples see Greenpeace n.d.; European Commission 2019; 350​.o​rg 2020. For
exceptions, see London Mining Network 2019; Sovacool et al., 2020.
2.	Fieldwork in Germany included twenty-two semi-structured and countless informal
interviews conducted between October 2016 and April 2017, building on long-term involvement
with resistance movements against RWE’s mining activities. Research in Mexico is based
on 123 recorded semi-structured interviews conducted between December 2014 and May
2015, which also included a commitment to the collective resistance movements in the Istmo
region.
3.	Three archetypes of justifying atrocity: (1) subordination to ‘the higher good’ of the
nation, the company; (2) discourses of ‘savages’, ‘racially inferiority’, ‘poverty’ etc.; and (3)
positioning ‘us’, the church, state, company, etc., as ‘saving’, ‘helping’, ‘civilizing’ or ‘educating’
them – the ‘Other’.
4.	For details of harnessing Indigenous labour in Colombia, see Taussing (1987).
5.	See Veblen 2009/1899; Horkheimer & Adorno 2002/1944; Bernays, 1947; Dugger
1989; Herman, & Chomsky 2010/1989.
6.	For the continued relevance of Nazi laws around coal-mining, see Michel (2005).
7.	For the continued relevance of Nazi laws around coal-mining, see Michel (2005).
8.	 See https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=Syr​​​Ciq​_p​​Quo
9.	The company is further involved in the privatization and operation of municipal
electricity, gas and water distribution networks, street lighting systems and other local service
provision. See RWE Group (2015, 89).
10.	 Minister president Armin Laschet in Tagesschau​.d​e, Kraftwerk Datteln soll bis 2038
laufen, 30 December 2020. https​:/​/ww​​w​.tag​​essch​​au​.de​​/wirt​​schaf​​t​/unt​​erneh​​men​/u​​niper​​-datt​​
eln​-k​​ohlea​​ussti​​eg​-co​​​2​-las​​chet-​​101​.h​​tml
11.	 For more examples and further analysis see Brock and Dunlap (2018/2017).
12.	Other offset measures are the newly created ‘bat-highways’ that are meant to serve
as navigating infrastructure for threatened bat species to facilitate their relocation into other
pieces of forests.
13.	 RWE interviews and PR material, for details see Brock and Dunlap (2018/2017).
14.	 For examples, see Oceransky 2011; Juárez-Hernández & León 2014; Howe & Boyer
2015; Friede et al. 2017.
When the Wolf Guards the Sheep 115
15.	 See https​:/​/ww​​w​.let​​stalk​​about​​coal.​​co​.nz​​/futu​​re​-of​​-coal​​/maki​​ng​-st​​eel​​-w​​ithou​​t​-coa​​l/
and Dıez et al. (2002).
16.	 Rare earth minerals and their geological knowledge production, Julie Klinger argues,
have always been politically entangled and deeply colonial, imperial and militaristic. Rare
earth elements became key to industrial and military development from the end of the nineteenth
century onwards, and British, Austrian and German companies quickly came to dominate
production, primarily in India and Brazil. See Klinger 2015 for their political, imperial,
colonial and militaristic entanglements.
17.	 For a detailed and refreshing discussion in the Dutch context see Kiezebrink et al.
(2018).
18.	The ejido emerges from Article 27 of the 1917 Constitution, which provided land
for farmers to use but not to buy and sell. After the 1992 alterations to Article 27 and the
December 2013 Energy and Utility Act, land was allocated for residential and agricultural use
and was governed by local assemblies made up of recognized community members. Article 27
still gave the Mexican state the right to resources underneath the topsoil and to control the
land. Ejidos in Istmo are different from communal land, land governed by the community.
Communal land (social property) is held collectively or shared communally, has no formal
land title and does not have the same level of state involvement and control as ejidos.
19.	 Interview, 13 March 2015.
20.	 See Havas et al. 2011; Chapman 2012; Jeffery et al. 2014; Premalatha et al. 2014.
21.	 Interview, 21 March 2015.
22.	 See Dunlap & Fairhead 2014; Hunsberger et al. 2017; Fairhead et al. 2013; Corson
et al. 2013; Dunlap 2019; Lohman 2008; Sullican 2010, 2013a, 2017.
23.	 Interview, 21 March 2015.
24.	 See Kirsch 2010 2014; Sullivan 2013b; Brock and Dunlap 2018/2017.
25.	 On unequal ecological exchange, see Hornborg 1998.
26.	 While the multi-scalar and industry connections of conventional and green extractivist
projects require further scrutiny, important recent examples are Selwyn 2020; Hund et al.
2019.
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