The wind’s owners

Environment, politics, and the unsustainability of the ecologic transition in Sardinia

Abstract

Through the words of the No Thyrrenian Link activists (Selargius, CA), this article aims to investigate local resistance to the proliferation of wind turbines in Sardinia at the crossroads between political ecology and environmental anthropology. Employing the concept of embodied moral authority, I show how it enables activists to redefine the propriety of renewable sources. By putting into dialogue transition-related land grabbing and primitive accumulation, I show the ways in which such transition is masking the same extractive methods so pivotal to capitalism, leaving them unchanged and thus emerging as an attempt to privatize and commodify what, until now, was considered a common good. In this way, I show how my interlocutors redefine concepts around the rightful propriety of land and energy sources. Then, through the description of what my interlocutors call “the Selargius method” for political participation, I discuss the production of democratic practices from below, interpreting local resistances as ways to express moral authority on the land. Subsequently, I show how these practices redefine the very meaning of democracy and political participation, providing a model to rethink the property of energetic resources and their infrastructures. In this way, I provide a description of the ways in which today’s commons are eroded by the market, with dramatic consequences on the food sovereignty and social webs of the populations involved.