Spatialities of the energy transition : making earth and justice matter
Résumé
As far as energy production is concerned, energy transition processes aim at accessing, harnessing and transforming resources which are diffuse – such as sun, wind, sea tide, sea current, non conventional fuels .... Because of their diffuse materiality, these resources enjoin us to concentrate them in a way that impacts on our relation with the environment. We purposefully use here the term “concentrate” in a loose sense, to point at the whole chain of operations, spatial and societal organisation involved in the exploitation of these resources.
Our argument starts with the assumption that this is unprecedented and amounts to a major anthropological change: a change in the society-environment relation. The argument is an attempt – we rely on analogies - at taking seriously this proposition of diffuse resources. Concentrating diffuse resources requires us to extensively colonise a diversity of milieus - onshore, marine, underground-, to set up unprecedented scales of operations, to bring spaces into forms of competition and to induce fast pace changes in the environment (Labussière, 2016).
Considered through this lens, the energy transition could be regarded as a large-scale process of spatial colonisation. This, however, would miss part of the point. Energy transition processes are emergent processes: harnessing new energies may endow entities and milieus with new qualifications and potentials (Nadaï & Labussière, 2010, 2013; Labussière & Nadaï 2014). The new qualifications and relations that are set up through these processes are key to the emerging political order. At hand qualifications or representations of milieus (such as endangered or protected species) and societies (such as state, territory and their articulation to landscape, planning and the local scale) do not help us in seizing newness and understanding the re-qualifications and allocation of powers. The whole itself to be colonised is not a given. It is brought into re-composition by the process. The representation of this whole should thus be flexible, amenable to be populated differently.
Diffuse resources are a thus a proposition (in Latour’s sense of an existent to be articulated, Latour, 2004). They are a proposition that is different from the fossil resources - gas, oil or coal - around which modern societies have organised their economy and their politics (Mitchell, 2011). While their diffuse materiality carries the promise of a different political order (A. Lovins, 1977), their concentrating can be achieved in different ways, as witnessed by the many variants of renewable energy developments in place nowadays. Diffuse energy can thus very well be ‘fossilised’ (Raman, 2013) when concentrated, in the sense of being articulated with the actors, practices and interests at work in the harnessing of fossil energy resources. Their materiality proposes, but it rests on us to articulate their proposition. It is thus decisive for us to be able to seize significant differences, differences witnessing of different political orders at work, of different ways of organising the ways in which many different resources (wind, sun, tide but also land, landscape, know-hows, social solidarities, practices of appropriation …) are entering the processes of concentration of new energy resources.
Dealing with differences in re-qualifications of entities, allocation of powers, modes of appropriation, competition between spaces … we need a relational appraisal of space, technology and materiality, an appraisal allowing for entities to endorse new ontologies, for the whole to be re-populated and re-articulated around a new proposition.