coe015_hathaway-wintereik.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:23] Welcome back, everyone, to the Cultures of Energy podcast, thanks to the Digital and Media Commons at Rice University, thanks to the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences. Sense Cultures of energy reorg. So happy to have you back with us. Here's Simone Ho, who's got sunglasses on in the middle of the day inside a bunker underground.

Speaker2: [00:00:46] It really is just a commentary about my affective relationship with fluorescent lighting.

Speaker1: [00:00:54] All right, let's explore

Speaker2: [00:00:55] That a little. I can't. I just really loathe it. And it's especially bad in here because there is no natural light at all. And so I kind of feel like I can shield myself from it by being behind my very dark and very large black sunglasses.

Speaker1: [00:01:10] Yeah, they're massive. Yeah, those are like, Yeah, the fly. Yeah, they're pretty big.

Speaker2: [00:01:15] So one of the interviews that we're going to be sharing with our listeners today is with Michael Hathaway, whom we had the pleasure of sitting down with in Providence, Rhode Island, and we can tell you some more details about that adventure. But it was under the auspices of a wonderful conference that was organized by Lenore Manderson, who spends half of her time at Brown and half of her time in South Africa. And she is a medical anthropologist, but she has been working on this program called Earth itself, and it's a four year program which with one conference every year and the conferences have a theme. So our theme this year was atmospheres. And then they have a medium. And so this year it was sound, and it brings together a small cluster of of scholars and artists. She's really has really emphasized the artistic part of it, which is really fantastic. So I just wanted to to do a plug for atmospheres and for the great work that that Leonard has been doing at Brown. Maybe put a link to it up somewhere so that people can keep apprised of that. I think there's one more. And it has to do with fire and

Speaker1: [00:02:34] The elements, right?

Speaker2: [00:02:34] Yeah, it's called. It's the four elements, basically. But then using these different mediums like, you know, vision and sound and maybe even maybe some kind of olfactory sense, maybe that's next on the docket.

Speaker1: [00:02:45] Wow. So yeah, and that was really impressive the integration of the arts into the scholarship here and some really terrific pieces. So Michael Hathaway is professor of anthropology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. And for the second part of our I guess we'll call it our secret special bonus double episode.

Speaker2: [00:03:05] It's our Duo

Speaker1: [00:03:06] Pod Duo Pod is Bret Ross Winter II from the IT University of Copenhagen, also an anthropologist, but also working a bit or quite a lot in science and technology studies, interested in infrastructures and interested in energy, and one of the leaders of this very interesting alien energy project that she's going to talk to us about, which Laura Watts, who we've already had on the podcast, also is involved with

Speaker2: [00:03:30] Right and alien energy. It has an artistic component to it. Also, because there's this walking stick tour that you can do where you walk through this pretty industrial energy landscape and then you're connected to digitally to these the stick. And it kind of tells you some narratives and some stories. And she talks about it a little bit, but it's it's a scholarly undertaking, but it's also got a lot of aesthetics and arts involved in it, too. And I think that's one of the cool things that she and her comrades have been working on, and just the name itself is fantastic alien energy. And it's just it's got a lot of potential in terms of thinking about it. Theoretically, you know, where how do we become alienated even from energy? Have we? I think that there's a whole sort of Marxist discussion you could have around alienation and our encounter with energy, the kind of other worldliness of it, how our consumption of energy has in some ways surpassed the limits of Earth, but also has taken for granted in so many ways. Anyhow, it's just, you know, thinking about riffing on alien energy, I think would be a cool thing to do one of these days.

Speaker1: [00:04:46] Yeah, and in a way, I think Michael does similar work or at least these conversations. One of the reasons we wanted to pair these two together is Michael focuses his work on China, especially southwestern China and the sort of shift towards environmental. Like, I don't wanna say it's a movement because I think that's not maybe the right word, but it's environmentalism, environmental practices in southwestern China, and that also is alien from, you know, maybe what we mostly hear about China, which is that it is apocalypse and things like that. And so Brit Focus is on Denmark, Michael Focus is on China. These are two countries that very routinely come up in our debates and imaginations of what energy futures could look like and how energy is going to change. Denmark has always put on a pedestal a little bit. China is often, you know, there's a mix between sort of grudging appreciation for their recent renewable energy shift that's brought down the price of solar panels across the world, for example. But then also this pornography of like dirty, dirty air, dirty cities, things like that. And in their own way, I think both Michael and Brit are helping us to see, you know, guess what? It's a little more complex than that. The realities of energy transition in both these countries are not just the kind of things we see on BuzzFeed, right?

Speaker2: [00:06:10] And so the case of Denmark is not as pristine as, you know, green advocates would like to imagine. And yet, you know, the country has really had set some very high standards for itself and has been, you know, really productive in terms of renewable energy and beginning a really a flood of industrialization around wind turbines in particular. I mean, that's really it's the center of the wind turbine world and has and that's become global, of course. I think the other interesting thing about Michael's field location is that he's not in an urban center and we have so much hear about these, you know, megalopolis of China, and he's working in more rural spaces and places where there's, you know, still a lot of really biologically rich land and and eco spheres and biospheres. In fact, in the book, he talks about how Yunnan province or parts of Yunnan are actually recognized as having some of the most biodiverse ecological systems anywhere on Earth so comparable to like the Amazon. So that's that's pretty interesting. And so people think about perhaps environment and energy and ecology differently and these these conditions than they might in the center of, you know, a smog choked Beijing, right?

Speaker1: [00:07:30] Right. So anyway, without further ado, I think we'll let Michael and Brit take it away.

Speaker2: [00:07:35] Yes, let them speak for themselves.

Speaker1: [00:07:57] All right, so we're here with Michael Hathaway. Thank you so much for joining us, Michael, on the Cultures of Energy podcast.

Speaker3: [00:08:04] My pleasure.

Speaker1: [00:08:05] Happy to be here. So the reason? First of all, we are recording from at the Hampton Inn downtown in Providence, Rhode Island, in the very noisy something or other room. And the reason we're here in town is this really interesting conference organized by Lenore Manderson called Atmospheres, and it's part of a broader series, you said,

Speaker2: [00:08:26] Part of a broader series of four conferences called Earth itself. And so we have a gathering of scholars from different disciplines and doing really different research projects, but bringing it all together around the principle of atmosphere and air and wind and then the medium that we're trying to work with in general, especially from the artistic point of view, is sound. So we are actually embodying and living the conference right here and now as we have a very noisy air conditioner that's creating an atmosphere and also a lot of sound

Speaker1: [00:09:02] In perfect sound, to be sure. But also we live in a world of imperfect air, which gets us to Michael. Your work has focused on China for many years, and when we think about atmospheres and China, at least in places like the United States, normally it conjures these apocalyptic images of people getting married and gas masks and places where you can't see the building across the street because of the smog. Is that your experience of Chinese error, or is this completely just a fabrication to fulfill our anti socialist fantasies?

Speaker3: [00:09:38] Interesting question. Well, I do research in southwestern China and what's in Yunnan province, so it's a place that's bordering the boundaries of Tibet and Bai and Ma, Vietnam, Laos and in that area. When I started going there in the mid 90s, the air was actually quite good. It's a place at the same latitude as Havana, but up seven thousand feet. It's known as the place of perpetual spring. When I was there, for example, the cars were so few. So I had a I was at a university, a forestry university and of the whole university with twenty five thousand people. Perhaps there were three vehicles. Wow just gives you a sense of how things have changed so that, you know, China just, you know, you can see it for cars. And so many things it takes a massive j curve up of automobiles, of industry of all this and I was so I was there for this transformation. But I would say that the places where I typically do fieldwork are out in tropical rainforests up high in the Himalayan plateau and in those places, the air quality is actually quite good. So I feel like we become so obsessed and maybe rightly so with the stories of Beijing and Shanghai and all these major industrial cities. But actually, the experience of China is quite diverse. And there's, you know, it's a vast it's a vast landscape, but we almost overwhelmingly focus on the the air apocalypse, as some people call

Speaker1: [00:11:12] It, or apocalypse. And if it makes you feel any better, you know, the P.S. the particulate levels in Delhi are actually quite a bit higher than Beijing's. Never get the same kind of press, though, so there does something about China specifically here, right?

Speaker3: [00:11:26] I think that's a great point. And somebody said with the the speaker yesterday, he was comparing China and the US together, the top 10 cities of pollution, and I pointed, made that same point and said if if you compared it to India's cities, that would look quite different. But but for various reasons, and I think in part, it's this interest in talking about the bad earth. Sometimes it's kind of conflated with the kind of ionization of of communism. But even even before communism in China, there was also this sense of this is an exhausted place. This is a place where everything is basically stripped bare. And so there are many stories of famines in the early 1900s about China as a place where people had not managed their resources well, and it was part of the justification of things like the The Pinchot campaign to start the US Forestry Service and to to manage forests differently from China. That was very much this. That's actually been a motivating part. So that's something I'm really interested in seeing the forms of connections rather than just comparisons. Another great point that came up in terms of air pollution yesterday. So Lenore Manderson said, Now you're showing us at the top 10 polluted cities in the U.S. are in California. Could that have anything to do with Chinese pollution and. I think the speaker just thought it was merely a comparison and it wasn't really investigated and I was actually looking into it last night, there's a new study that came out of Berkeley looking at the two point five, you know, levels of the small dust, and it was saying that up to twenty nine percent of that could actually have a Chinese origin. They were trying to track the lead that's in the coal dust and how that moves. And so thinking about it in terms of connections, both in terms of the material objects and in terms of the ideas and and the kind of influences is something that I've really been motivated to do.

Speaker2: [00:13:35] You were also mentioning just a second ago that there's been kind of a citizen science campaign where folks in China, I guess especially in urban China, are doing kind of DIY monitoring of their air quality because they don't trust the government to be reporting the proper amounts.

Speaker3: [00:13:54] Exactly. I find it's really fascinating. And in part, I'm curious why the media doesn't really talk about the Western media. The English language media doesn't really talk about this so much. I mean, you were raising this earlier, this kind of this legacy of of of talking about China and a certain register. And I'm really interested in these folks who say, look at these numbers, it's not only the the kinds of minimum standards, and they've often been quite low in China. That's one thing. But as you say, people are not necessarily believing the data itself. And when the data itself is questioned, it opens up whole other ways of understanding governance. And so one of the the new, uh, talks that went viral and there's a film called Under the Dome we just swept through China was quickly kind of tried to be scrubbed off the internet. But I think this index is this larger, this larger sense of, you know, deep concern and fear and involvement that's quite widespread so that these little packs that are going around where people connect through the kind of Chinese equivalent of Twitter and are pinging in all their reports, and they're looking not just at a city as a whole, but the real intense variability. So they're understanding where usually the government censors would have just been in one key place, so it would give a kind of larger urban score. But they're learning that their neighborhoods, in part through physically due to winds, have an intense variability or the location of a particular factory. Things like that. So I have a sense, too, that just people are taking a lot of things into their own hands, and that's also a story we don't tend to hear. We tend to hear about a kind of authoritarian government that is all powerful, and we don't hear as many stories about kind of questioning of that or activities otherwise.

Speaker1: [00:16:04] So maybe we can just for the benefit of folks who I think are you're telling them something that they really don't hear very often. Maybe we can take a step back and talk a little bit about the environmental wind or what you're calling the environmental wind in China. You know, when when I first heard you worked on wind in China, I thought as somebody who worked on wind power in Mexico, that that meant one thing. As I was reading your work, I realize that's quite something different that you're talking about. So maybe you could start there and talk a little bit, give us a little backtrack, a little context to that sort of the phenomenon that you're investigating in your research, right?

Speaker3: [00:16:35] Sure. Yeah. One thing that I discovered since going to China in the mid 1990s is the way that people both talk about the history, the present and the future in terms of wins. And they don't see these as these kind of separate forces that totally come from outside and determine their lives fully, although it can feel a bit like that, but they also recognize them. These winds kind of metaphorically as created through social actions. And so people talk about these powerful movements like the Great Leap Forward in the late nineteen fifties or the Cultural Revolution, the Nineteen Sixties, and they talk about being swept up by these forces that they were themselves participants in. So, you know, these incredible rallies the to see Mao Zedong when he would come and and you know, people describing it, describing their past in a way of it's it's also, you know, to them, it's still a kind of foreign country that sense of when they were red guards with the Cultural Revolution, or they thought that all forms of utopia were possible. But they said we were swept up in these winds. We we created these winds. We were part of these. And I thought that that seemed like a a very interesting idea to think of. About those kinds of some of those things that we're dealing with in anthropology, trying to think about the ways that affect and the the bodies and how we are brought.

Speaker3: [00:18:08] We're part of these larger social. Dynamic beans, but it seemed like rather than other ways of thinking about history, it was a more embodied metaphor they use this term all the time to to talk about the future. So they say, I feel like I can sense that there is a wind coming so they would try. There was a sense of a kind of everyday alertness to new possibilities that I thought wasn't really part of the the kind of vocabulary and language of the people that I knew in North America. So as an interesting way to to the sense that possibilities were fleeting, opportunities might come and go. But if they were aware of the winds that could actually reposition themselves or maybe their career in relationship to it. And I think we we kind of know that in some rough and ready senses in English language, things like the winds of change. But it's not nearly it's the the Chinese sense is much deeper and broader. And I think conveys a strong sense of the ways that people themselves act to to create social change. And so I then tried to use this metaphor to go beyond just a domestic context, which it is, and to think about how something like social movements. Although I've been leery to use the term, but our moving around the globe so things like environmentalism.

Speaker2: [00:19:49] Yeah, one of the things I thought was really interesting in your book is that through thinking through the metaphor of environmental wins and social transformation that's motivated by people and in collective spirit that you also realize or came to write about the fact that globalization unfolds differently everywhere and that it has these kind of iterative effects. And one of the ways that we often speak about globalization in a popular sense, but also often in an academic sense, is this idea of a flow or a flood is kind of, you know, inundating spaces and and transforming economies and political systems. And but but the wind has a very different kind of effect, right? So there's a there's a term that talks about how wind transforms material spaces, and it's it's inventive, factual, like there's a vent effect so that when wind blows over stones or mountains or brings dust to bear upon material objects, it transforms those objects. And so there's a kind of ineffectual process that that you seem to be finding in China and have been finding over the course of of your research.

Speaker3: [00:21:02] Yeah. And it's been interesting to to think about the kind of physics or physicality of wind and how much that kind of works and doesn't work with the kind of social metaphors. But that's exactly part of what I've been interested in is that the that unlike a flow that submerges all these difference, it's interacting with existing kinds of social landscapes, material landscapes. It has to be different. But and I think anthropologists in part, have often kind of pushed against some of these kind of well, some have against some of these kind of models of increasing homo homogeneity, although certainly there are a number of anthropologists who are still very compelled by that or see kind of the shifting of neoliberalism everywhere in all places and kind of getting into people's bodies and changing them all into neoliberal subjects seem to kind of presuppose that. But on the other hand, I did see a number of anthropologists doing interesting work and other social scientists about kind of what I would call a localization, where they're kind of like different groups are receiving globalized movements, whether it's around, say, conceptions of the body with HIV aids or financial system and then localizing it into their own kind of vocabulary, their own kind of ontology, epistemology and so forth. But what to I was interested in is perhaps the idea of winds also shows how that those are not just ending there in the localization, but then they are kind of co participating ins and that I call what seems like to us as the global. But but it still something in formation, whereas I think sometimes certain presumptions of globalization think it's already kind of formed and relatively set that it's not seen as a kind of historical social dynamic with all of these interesting connections with all these places.

Speaker2: [00:23:22] So you see, I mean, what we read in your work and what we're hearing is all of the potential of wind. And I wanted to just read a couple of sentences here from the text where you say that you're really compelled by the dialogic and transformative aspect of winds like physical winds moving through a landscape. The movement of social winds is iterative. The social landscape is constantly shaped by and shaping the movement and power of the winds. Before we, you know, sort of float off into another topic, I did want to bring up another a memory because apparently you and I were in China at the same time, OK, although in the mass of billions of people, we didn't run into each other. But one thing I remember from a visit to Beijing in nineteen ninety five was a story, and this may be completely apocryphal that it was very important to protect oneself from the wind specifically, and that you must cover the back of your neck in order so that the wind doesn't either infect you with some kind of pathogen or some kind of spiritual malaise. And so that it doesn't also sort of take away any of your sort of life force or or liveliness. Mm hmm. So I wonder if this is a complete concoction or whether this resonates with what you understand in a kind of more folkloric. Way, I guess, about the power of wind and its effects in Chinese cosmology, yeah.

Speaker3: [00:24:55] Well, it's interesting because I've certainly heard things like that and and it's interesting to see all the instantiation of how wind is mobilized, how it's such a kind of a key word of thinking about society, of thinking about health and so many dynamics. I mainly work not with you're probably talking to Han Chinese, and the China is an incredibly diverse place. Also, many people here in North America, Europe, et cetera, don't really know about the diversity of languages. Some linguists think there may be over a hundred languages, and I'm mostly working with other folks that are Dai and Nashi speaking other languages, but also, you know, learning Mandarin, of course, as well in school, and they don't necessarily think of of their bodies as vulnerable and exactly that way. But I've certainly heard that among other, you know, Han friends, and there's also something interesting too about there. There's the idea of the winds that are working inside the body as well. So this idea of a kind of separate corporeal city that we're often, you know, immersed in and maybe more Cartesian framework is also something that's that's different. So I'm very interested in how it works at multiple multiple registers. But this sense of of kind of thinking about what what's going on elsewhere, the sense of vulnerability, but also like what I was mentioning earlier, there's a sense of potentiality as well. So it's not just about kind of individual vulnerability as much as in that one example. That's a good one of of it. Yeah.

Speaker1: [00:26:49] So to get back to the issue of the movement, even if that may not be the best word to describe it, but I'm interested to hear you talk a bit more about how you see or why you see this movement forming. I mean, is it principally, do you think a reaction to an environment that people increasingly view as being compromised or becoming more toxic? Or do you think that it's being driven by a more global sort of recognition and grappling with what we might call the Anthropocene?

Speaker3: [00:27:18] Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Yeah, that's a good question. And it's something that's of course hard to choose one of two dynamics. I mean, I think there are multiple forms going on and that it happens through a kind of a dialogue and exchange and movement and flow. And it's really interesting to think about China and how quickly things have transformed there. So in nineteen seventy two, you had the first kind of representation of Chinese delegates in these international forums. That was not just this kind of Bandung Conference, you know, the the separate group of people outside of the U.S. or Soviet split. And because at that time you had the the instantiation of China instead of Taiwan and the United Nations, and at that time the spokespeople were saying, we do not have a pollution problem. This is not something. This actually pollution is something that comes out of capitalist countries. We do not produce something called waste. This is an impossibility. I found it really fascinating seeing those statements from the 72, but then China has quickly changed its tune on that. I mean, in terms of the forms of environmentalism, just roughly a lot of people focus on either what some people call the browns. The forms of pollution or the Greens. The forms of kind of nature conservation. And so certainly in my neck of the woods, the idea of the concerns around pollution have been relatively late and highly localized, whereas in the cities and as the Professor Tong mentioned yesterday, we've seen a huge demographic shift in in China so that you had in the seventies who had 80 percent of the population in the countryside, only 20 percent in the cities.

Speaker3: [00:29:16] Now it's up to 60 percent in the cities. China used to have a social system that actually disallowed people from moving in the city, so they had the strongest kind of force of separation. So you had these that basically locked people in for generations and to either be in a city person or being a country person, and they developed really different technologies there. What? What you see is really diverse, you see something I mentioned in the book and in my area is that like children are learning new forms of understanding the world around them, that is part of some kind of environmental sensibility. It's not. So in these cases, it's not purely motivated by toxins. It's seeking new ways to understand wild animals, for example. So that's also part of this kind of of green realm. But I really resist a language that's common here and also common there about China being, for example, 20 years behind or 10 years behind, which is in terms of environmental consciousness, which assumes that it's that it's a singular, a singular kind of path. So what I see, too, is people drawing on familiar kinds of frameworks for understanding social desirable futures that make a certain sense. People who have gone through who have been affected by these winds of different social movements who are then incorporating these into their visions for what they want to do. And so there are many ways then in which that some of those dynamics are a bit different than the kinds of environmental education programs that we might get here, for example.

Speaker2: [00:31:13] So what does a day in the life of the environmental winds look like in in in Yunnan?

Speaker3: [00:31:19] And you're not? Yeah. Well, one thing is that you get to see that it's operating at many different levels of society, that there's a new way of kind of, I would say, before the kind of power of these environmental winds, you may have separate kinds of concerns. And one of the interesting things that I was looking at is almost in a way when the environment as such is invented. When all of these disparate things like what you know, people used to talk about water wastefulness in agriculture or soil erosion or the separate kinds of things. But what were the dynamic social historical forces that made people start to think of that as Huang Jing like the environment and environmental thing? And I think that that's part of it. So it's people now you see posters in Yunnan, where about a restaurant that serves what they call a local chicken because people no longer have as much that deep kind of fantasy of the urban industrial food, and they are now worried about the kinds of additives that are brought into the food sources. And so you have a kind of re- like the the speed at which the kinds of the strong fantasies about the modern, clean kind of wiping out of dust and dirt and other things. And now a deep suspicion that I mean even more so than here, that people are living in a kind of contaminated food supply. The air is not so, so bad there, but there's just a sense that people need to seek out other possibilities. So the forms of what we might call environmentalism take so many forms. So in the countryside, for example, it was ways of but they have very few possibilities.

Speaker3: [00:33:29] So for example, I can in spraying the insecticide on the tea. Part of this new consciousness was around just getting a sprayer that was a meter longer to get away from the pesticides. The sense that that was people called it CHO, which means something like stinky but transforming it from something that stinky into something that can affect one's body and maybe even be carried on into the next generation was a different thing. People started to say, Oh, that is too CHO. For women, this is something that men should do. They started to hear in my area where they were kind of creating these new national parks at a really quick speed. It was it was trying to move people out to create a kind of wilderness area to to create something like an, you know, an untouched natural world. But China so, so populated. The US did that with Yellowstone and moved Native Americans out in the eighteen hundreds. Now to see that happening now and the late nineteen hundreds early to thousands in China that. That's a really painful way in which people who have been relocated from a place that's been turned into a nature reserve experience forms of environmentalism, but something I was also interested in too. Or that's not the only story that I saw the rise of a number of folks to these kind of scholar activists that I was interested in, who were trying to mediate these different modes of kind of creating new forms of ideal nature. And we're saying this Yellowstone model is not going to work in China trying to create something different.

Speaker1: [00:35:16] So I wanted to I mean, just to pick up yet another thread of complexity here. Something you mentioned before really resonated with me. I started my field research in the former East Germany, and I remember seeing the lignite fields basically a strip mine fields in the east. And basically, they had the same attitude of, you know, waste pollution toxicity. That's all part of the western world. And also this overriding concern with industrial productivity and the race to catch up and exceed planned, you know, state planning targets and everything like that. I'm sure this has been part of China's recent history, too. And and another, if you will, story we hear all the time about China's authoritarian China, China, the dictatorship of China, the sort of tyrant society. Actually, we've been hearing that story since the Enlightenment. That's a very old story of the Chinese tyranny. But but I guess, you know, one question here is because you're talking about some of these things that are obviously sort of state driven and by state, I mean, upper levels of the state, you know, driven policies. But the other side of your work is also very local engagements, community level. And I think that's very interesting and and must say something about Chinese political culture more generally in this key topic. I mean, how do you see the proportion shifting? Do you think that actually the more meaningful environmental action is happening at the local level, even though they're doing some, you know, in recent years, some pretty amazing things, even at the top level, so that China is now in a weird way. Perversely, almost the argument is something like, well, because the Chinese are authoritarian, they can actually do what we need to do. I know that

Speaker3: [00:36:54] Right. Right, right. Right. Yeah. Yeah, that's a really interesting way to think about it. Yeah, I've seen that over and over again that the only the only way now to really kind of make this major environmental shift that we knew that we need to do on the Earth is through these forms of wide scale change. And certainly, as we saw yesterday, the booming business of wind power and solar. And in one way, China seems like perhaps this new kind of savior. Yeah. And it's really been interesting seeing these kind of local spaces, and it's hard because the local, that local, state, those units are something that I've also kind of had a hard time kind of wrestling with and part I'm looking at this kind of articulation between the countryside and the urban because, as you know, so many people talk about, oh, the global versus the local. And when you have these so-called local people who are also really reaching out to urban folks, there's something there that doesn't quite place them in that kind of prism prison of locality that sometimes assume to be. And that was one thing that I found was really interesting that like in the villages I lived in, they were really aware that they were their status had quickly shifted. I mean, and that's something that's actually very different than a typical kind of Western story. So for a while, during the fifties and sixties, they were so praised for how much grain they could produce. And they were often in these places down along the Mekong River, producing this grain through what's often called slash and burn agriculture, and then to very, very quickly come to this realm in which they were told that they were. That was the most destructive thing they could do.

Speaker3: [00:38:46] And and that was something that was destroying this precious now not even Chinese, but global resources. Tropical rainforest was just really surprising and stark to to them and made it a lot of difficulties in their life. But it was really interesting to watch how they would negotiate that, how they would negotiate that with people with the Bureau of Forestry to say, OK, we need to go into tea plantations to stabilize. We can or we can now become a people that can show where the wild elephants to live. Because this is a place for some of China's largest herds of wild elephants live, which is also something that most people would never hear about. The fact of this incredible wild animal still surviving in China. So they were really trying to mediate that. But one of the fascinating aspects that. In part, it was due to some of the these kind of scholar activists that I was there pushing was that there was a big transformation around the early 2000s and how local people might be viewed. And so it was in part a way of seeing the environment, not as something that needed to be kind of left untouched, but that especially if they're trying to create habitat for certain animals like the wild elephants that actually human interaction even slash and burn was actually fostering a greater heterogeneity of the forest and actually making elephant food. So is this really interesting shift in this very another, another strong shift in a short time that kind of recast possibilities for local folks to kind of resuscitate livelihoods or make space, make some claims to land in a way that 10 years previously was totally not on the table. So there's and they've been actively involved in in that kind of mediation.

Speaker2: [00:40:53] Every summer, I teach a class that's called the social life of Clean Energy at the University of Chicago. It's a short term intensive class, and many of the students in that class are coming from urban China. And one of the really depressing things that I've heard several times now is that they say one of the things they love most about Chicago is that they could see the sky, the

Speaker3: [00:41:17] Clean air of Chicago, right?

Speaker2: [00:41:19] Exactly that they can see blue sky. And they're just, you know, in wonderment about it. It's really kind of heartbreaking not to reproduce this saga again. But one of the other things that I find in talking to these, you know, young people, students who are, you know, engaged and involved and we're talking about renewable energy. We look at these cases, for example, in Brazil, you know, on the Chicago River and the difficulties with the dams there or we look at solar panels in Nepal and the negotiations that go on around that. And then when we start to look at the Chinese case, in many ways, there is a sense in which an authoritarian government again not to reproduce that, that fable, but there's there's a piece of central, several central governance that allows people to get shit done like they really, you know, these massive tracts of wind farms and incredible solar arrays and three gorges, right? I mean, there's a way in which that form of governance in some ways is possibly the best way for us to make a renewable energy transition. I mean, it may be a brutal form, but in fact, it really does sort of operate to put these infrastructures in place. So I wanted to ask you, is there a way in which in in rural settings where where you've done more of your work? I mean, you were talking about how the expectation was that farmers and these agricultural sites would produce massive amounts of grain, write the rice or the tea, you know, in the case of that crop. Is there a suggestion from government authorities or others that now the job of the Chinese peasant, which I'm putting in scare quotes, is to produce renewable energy? Hmm.

Speaker3: [00:43:11] Interesting. I haven't.

Speaker2: [00:43:13] Is there space now their new resource?

Speaker3: [00:43:17] Yeah, I think that there's been a kind of re conception of the peasant for sure, but I think I don't know if it's around that with natural resources. And it's interesting. I mean, you talk about different forms of, say, renewable resources, and I thought of like what California did with their one million roofs campaign. It's a very different distributed way. So I think there are multiple forms of doing it. I think there there is a sense of, well, I guess, when it's a renewable resource, when one thinks not just of forms of energy production per say, but when one thinks of soil and actually water. So what what we're now understanding is understanding landscapes as forces that both generate the water and shape. It's the pulses of water. And that's been something that China particularly has been dealing with so centrally for millennia, building giant canals far bigger than anywhere else back way way a long time ago. And and as well with the Yangtze River floods of 1997, where you the flood plains, it was affecting hundreds of millions of people. And so. It's interesting to think about when projects are now made, not based on these old kind of governmental provincial boundaries, and that's been very much how things have been, but reconceive of the land is a watershed. And so you have for the first time in Chinese history, these kind of wide scale policies that's based on the lay of the land and as the water and the silt flows down to like places exactly like the Three Gorges.

Speaker3: [00:45:10] So what you what I found there is that it quickly in nineteen ninety eight after this massive dam China created and everything is the world's largest there. It seems right. But like the world's large logging ban and then a ban on what's called steep slope agriculture. So, you know, farmers that are growing their land on the hill slopes and my general area, ninety five percent of the land is mountainous, so that's pretty much all the bottom lands have been taken up millennia ago, and that's pretty much where you need to farm. So that kind of sweeping change and a sweeping change against pastoralism, also where I live, there's a lot of yak herding going on or other other animals up there has meant that it's the emphasis on grain is very, very low, too. As China searches all around the globe now to find new places to farm in Africa, South America, et cetera. So this idea of self-sufficiency that used to be so critical to China's self-image and aspirations is is just totally broken down and change. And so in part, the the many farmers, you know, well over a hundred million farmers who inhabit this upper watershed are now supposed to transform themselves from farmers into stewards of the land for the river itself.

Speaker3: [00:46:42] So it is actually I hadn't thought about it exactly in those terms. So it's not about for solar or wind yet, but in terms of kind of like keepers of watersheds, that is a fundamental transformation. So the government has given people grain instead to say, OK, you retire this land from grazing, you retire this land from farming and we'll give you some supplemental grain. There's a post doc here at Brown that I've been in conversation with for a while, and he's been studying how that's rolled out many, many, many challenges. I mean, can you imagine trying to give, you know, a certain amount of grain that would replace all of the farming and livestock raising to, you know, this huge number of people and do that in in a yearly level? And then when the when that funding runs out, you know what? What will people do? So it's created this this massive transformation in this idea of stewardship. But there are not many ideas about what people will do afterwards so that these are people that have for decades spend some of them. I call them reluctant farmers where they would rather move to the city, but they were kind of kept in the countryside.

Speaker3: [00:47:57] They paid their taxes purely in grain for decades. It was only very recently they could even pay in cash. So they're in a way kind of forced to produce all this grain or something that was celebrated part of this national drive. But some people call China's Green Revolution. There's a new, fabulous book about this kind of time by Sigrid Schmelzer on this Green Revolution Red Revolution, how it's instantiated in China. That's really interesting, but that is that is a big change. And I think the politics of of water and where I am in Yunnan, it's the home of for the great Asian rivers, including what becomes the Irrawaddy and the Mekong and the sea flows through there. So. Um, now new conflicts over dams is becoming a central central issue, and ironically to some people, point out that it the other there's a lot of kind of anti dam sensibility now in the West, and a sense of these mega dams are socially damaging, ecologically damaging and so forth. China is now trying to meet its climate change obligations. And when they have a lot of dirty coal, then all of a sudden the hydropower actually looks like an even more compelling option within the climate change framework. So there's been some interesting tensions happening at the international level with, as you can

Speaker1: [00:49:26] Imagine, some more dams to come. Did you have something you want to follow up on?

Speaker2: [00:49:33] No, I just think it's it's a fascinating transformation in this idea of sort of agricultural folks in rural places going from being grain growers to watershed managers. Exactly. I mean, that's that's pretty fundamental shift.

Speaker1: [00:49:48] So I don't know if you can shed any light on this, but I mean, generally speaking, the way I think China is really fairly recent and very rapid commitment to renewable energy development, whether that's hydro or it's solar has been understood is purely as an instrumental reaction to the fact of really air quality in the first instance, but also a way to create a more sustainable path to a new kind of urban culture. You know, to address, maybe to address to some extent the demands of an empowered middle class that is increasingly international going into places like the University of Chicago and seeing blue skies in the summer and coming back and going, I don't really want to wear a mask over my my, my nose and mouth. But, you know, I also think that those narratives usually are kind of simplistic and maybe in the end, that's what it is. But do you look at this and feel that that's a sufficient explanation for what's happening? Do you see in terms of Chinese and the state's environmental thinking or its philosophy? Is there anything there that I don't know? It echoes sort of earlier confusion or Maoist or any other sort of philosophical principles? Or is it really just a situation of the is terrible? We need to do something really rapidly.

Speaker3: [00:51:08] Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, there are there are a number of attempts to kind of think about how these ideas about nature are drawing off of of of ancient ideas. And that's you see that at the end of one of the popular books about China and the environment called Mao's War Against Nature by two Shapiro, where a number of people are largely blaming a kind of Maoist framework which they they see like the title is as a war against nature. I think it's actually much more diverse than that. I mean, I think that there may be efforts to kind of draw on both Confucianism or even there is a widespread forms of Buddhism, Daoism, et cetera throughout that will be really mobilized because people, it's interesting. People in China are often really interested in crafting something called a Chinese, you know, x or Y like Chinese human rights or Chinese notion of the environment. So they're there. There's a kind of way in which the thinking that anything that kind of comes from quote-unquote outside has to be doesn't make perfect sense within China, as much as there's a kind of deep sense of articulation with the global. But my my kind of reaction to the statement about China is merely doing this instrumentalist. I think, Oh, I'd be interested to note those same people saying that would say the same is true about Germany, which is another kind of world leader or or is there something there that's resonating with more deeply, you know, segmented ideas, as you say, going back to the Enlightenment, but coming through all these different historical formations of this idea of of China? I mean, I find it quite interesting myself to think actually about movements from North America to China and look in terms around religion.

Speaker3: [00:53:22] And I remember reading about the kind of dismissing qualities of Chinese Christianity as being about rice Christians and people saying, Oh, they're only doing it because they get the rice from the missionaries. And now where I live in Vancouver, which is just hugely Chinese, you know, just a really large portion of the the the new wave of Canadians are people coming from mainland China. And you know, if you go into the churches down the street, they're hugely Chinese. And now it's the Chinese that are missionaries in the Euro Canadians. So I think that there's a kind of also this kind of long history of seeing. Things coming out of China as being not not fully embodied as being instrumentalists, as just being about material gain and in part that is part of the vocabulary that you hear in China itself. But I. Sense, like a growing number of Chinese intellectuals who are actually worried about China's footprint around the world and having these really interesting discussions about what is now that China is one of the largest dam builders in South America or creating all this agricultural land and taking over and in Africa.

Speaker3: [00:54:37] What is China's role as a kind of global citizen? It's a new space that's developing that for so long, China's been on the defensive saying we are being I mean, a number of them saw environmentalism as a way to suppress their forms of development, to say the West had already developed and become wealthy, and then it was being imposed on China. But I think now that in part, that China has risen to such a powerful position, there's a kind of a greater wealth of voices who are wondering what's going on in China, what's China's impact on the world? So I don't I don't read it. And purely instrumentalist term is certainly an element to it. For sure, it's also part of China, has a huge foreign reserve and they need to figure out what to do with this, and they can no longer fully find avenues for it. I mean, so part of it is around global capitalism, right? So it's not just within China's running, running low and so they're looking elsewhere.

Speaker1: [00:55:34] Well, you can see why, as you say, China is an obscure object of fascination and thus thus we've been really pleased to have had the chance to chat with you, Michael, and to share, I think a lot of really interesting reflections on things we don't know about China and to complexity and to tell us about the rural. And I think that's another filter as we just get a lot about urban China rather than the rural. As you said, it's much more complex. So thank you so much for sharing, for sharing your thoughts with us and your work and hope that the conference continues to go well and anything else.

Speaker2: [00:56:03] No, except that I want to go on a tour of these wild elephants.

Speaker3: [00:56:07] Great. Thanks so much for the conversation. I loved it.

Speaker1: [00:56:16] Today, we're so pleased to welcome Brit Ross, Vinter Ike to the Cultures of Energy podcast, and I just paused on that last name. I was going to say vintage, which would be the German way to pronounce it, but I almost did get it. Did I? Did I get the Danish, right? Oh, that's very good. Anyway, so in German, that would mean Empire of Winter, which is kind of perfect for Game of Thrones return weekend. But, you know, I don't know what it means in Danish. It's a beautiful name, though. So pleased to have you here with us in Houston. I'm going to let somebody take it away.

Speaker2: [00:56:49] Yeah. So, Brett, you're visiting us here in Houston via California, and then your usual home is in Copenhagen, Denmark, which we just heard by the Danish pronunciation that Dominic did so well. And one of the things that many people know about Denmark is that it's a kind of world renowned leader in renewable energy, in particular the production of wind turbines for the generation of relatively clean wind energy, but also just its its energy matrix is at least purported to be, you know, one of the best in the world in terms of renewables. So I think what you know, one of the key questions that we wanted to find out is what is the magic of Denmark like? What makes that work? Are there political forces that have been important? Are their economic resources that come into play? Is there some sort of, you know, national culture that that that's focused on environmentalism? That gives us some kind of insight into why, you know, Denmark has been relatively successful, and then I'm sure that there's been some bumps in the road, too. So if you could tell us something about the success and then maybe some of the challenges that that your country has has faced.

Speaker4: [00:58:05] Thank you so much for that question and thank you for inviting me and having me here. I'm certainly no specialist on wind power, but I do come from Denmark and being at this in this faraway place that Houston is so comfortably far away from anybody who could say that I don't have any expertise in wind, I will happily share my views. And and please do take them as very situated claims to to any truth. You know, I do know a little bit from growing up less than 20 kilometers away from where Vestas had its first production site and where it's still producing, but doesn't have its administrative headquarter anymore. But I think we can come back to that. And what kind of knowledge that you gain from growing up next to an industrial facility like that about what the success might be about Vestas, which is that particular company that is so well famous and that also has a lot of, yeah, that has wind turbine placed all over the world and here in Texas as well. In January, the news was that Denmark now has the world record of having the largest share of its electricity produced by wind turbines or by renewable energy. And and that's that was forty two point one percentage of all our electricity that is produced by by wind.

Speaker2: [00:59:45] Wow. That's for the entire nation.

Speaker4: [00:59:47] That's for the entire nation, which is a small nation. But nevertheless, it's a it's a big deal. Mm hmm. And that's a world record that Denmark is proud of, of course. And and I mean, what's the secret? First of all, there's a lot of wind. There's a lot of wind in the western part of Denmark. That's a good starting point. That's a good starting point. So so that's actually the the natural conditions for for producing renewables, renewable energy out of wind power. Then I should also say that we don't have one grid system for the whole country. So it means that the we we trade a lot of energy. And I think that's another part of the success that there's a very. I think seen from certain points of view, well-functioning trading system that works not only inside of Denmark, but also with the neighboring countries like Norway, Sweden, Finland and and also the northern parts of Germany, maybe England, UK as well. I'm not sure about that. So it means that the energy that is produced can actually be used even if the system is is full of renewable energy. So when the wind is blowing a lot, the excess and the excess electricity can go elsewhere and and be used. And that's one thing that is makes makes this possible. You can say

Speaker2: [01:01:21] And then do they are the backup generators available to access as well? So say you're trading renewable energy to the UK, but the UK has coal fired plants. Does that them come into the matrix in Denmark? So then, yeah, then we have to look at that matrix and a little more complex ways.

Speaker4: [01:01:38] That's right, and especially concerning nuclear because of nuclear nuclear electrons. You could say, even though you can't differentiate them, of course, right? But that's something that. It's really interesting to think about what you know, you want to sell green energy to the consumers and they are pushed. There's a push towards greening the grid by making people aware of what kind of energy they actually buying. But that. Is, I mean, in reality, quite impossible to know. So there are a lot of measuring systems that has to be in place here and also a certain kind of trust between the energy companies and the consumers that I do think we have a lot of in Denmark that because it used to be a monopoly, there weren't any choice to you couldn't choose your electric electricity provider or your energy provider. So so. So we're basically Dong Energy was doing all of it, and now that's being opened up. And now we see the benefits of the old system. When you have marketing, that pushes people to believe that things are green, that aren't necessarily green or that we can't know if it's green. So that's a very, very interesting moment right now in terms of of energy in Denmark and in terms of the energy matrix and how it's it's it's it's it comes to look in the in the future and partly because the system is sometimes overheating. So sometimes there are negative prices. Sometimes producers of green energy must pay for getting rid of their energy, which means that the system is overheating if nothing is being done about it.

Speaker2: [01:03:32] Mm hmm. That's interesting.

Speaker1: [01:03:33] Yeah. Can I follow up? I mean, I had you said something last night, which was really a really interesting point that, well, maybe I won't lead you too much with it, but that Vestas had a had a different history before it became a wind turbine manufacturer. And it seems like, I mean, you know, from our research on wind energy, we've, you know, talked to a lot of people and everyone agrees, you know, wind power and its contemporary sense of really got traction first in Denmark, Denmark were the innovation. I mean, there were earlier things happening in places like the U.S., but once you know, Reagan came and we decided, no, we're going to double down on fossil fuels again. Denmark really picked up the slack and really led into this renewables revolution, which is amazing. I don't it.

Speaker4: [01:04:18] You also mentioned, when did that happen seen from the U.S.?

Speaker1: [01:04:22] I mean, I would say, what would you say the I mean, after the 70s, for sure. But I thought I feel like there was the first like Community Wind Park in Denmark. Is it as old as the 80s or is it the 90s? I can't remember now.

Speaker2: [01:04:36] It could be. I mean, Nassau was developing turbine technology back in the 70s and 80s, for sure.

Speaker1: [01:04:43] Right. But I was seeing the community wind

Speaker2: [01:04:44] Model, the community wind model.

Speaker1: [01:04:46] Yeah, we weren't doing that here. And so I think that was kind of the killer app the Danes had was like this idea of of the technology, plus this new model for developing it that has really reshaped things in northern Europe.

Speaker4: [01:04:58] And as always, it's more complicated than that because Vestas, for example, was very benefiting a lot from the California Wind Adventure, as it's called in Denmark. The fact that they could suddenly sell a whole lot of wind turbines to California, I think it was in the eighties, but I'm not sure what came first. It's just to say that I think that power back into having the resources and the courage and the money to do the community model. Hmm. At least it happened in parallel. So where Vestas, uh, that that company, you know, the sort of spirit of the people there is that you can't do anything that costs money. You know, it's a very conscious rural community about, you're not doing, you're not wasting money.

Speaker2: [01:05:55] Ok. Mm hmm. But there's a kind of an ethos of frugality that's careful and frugal. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker4: [01:06:03] So to to. So Vestas had a different history. It was founded in the 1890s by two brothers who were Smiths. I think you call it blacksmiths blacksmith. And they were repairing agricultural machinery, and they were also constructing a machinery for the agricultural sector because agriculture was what was there in the western part of Jutland. So up until the 70s, they had this business of building for the agricultural sector. And a note on that that I find interesting today is that how our politicians, the right wing liberal parties that are in government now often posts, you know, this thing that we can't do sustainability and green transition because it's too expensive. We, however, need to support and subsidize the agriculture because agriculture is our roots in this country and that can be expensive. But moving into a greener future with these industries, you know, we can't. We have to be careful that we don't lose on changing the energy taxes. And that I find very contradictory. When you think about the history of Vestas, for example, where a building wind turbine, which you know, it's not research and development because you wouldn't call it that back then, but the development and design of the modern wind turbine that we have today was so intertwined with experimentation in the in other ion, you know, forms of using iron, for example, for agriculture.

Speaker4: [01:07:55] So I think in the. Does it make sense? Yeah. Ok. Yeah. I'm speculating, but I'm saying that I think there's some hidden history there that is really interesting to think about because it's the same people. I mean, who did made the foundation of what Vestas is today. It came out of a very particular place, a lot of agriculture, a lot of experimentation, a lot of sense of community. But that's also a story that we like to tell today. Sure. But there's something in actually a model in in agriculture that is called the anthills for ening. So the Association of Shares. So I don't know how you would translate that in English, but but all the small farmers did community together, and that could vary. That model has been a model for a whole lot of other sectors and ways of organizing. So that's another place where there's.

Speaker2: [01:09:01] Oh, cool. So there was collective farming before there was community wind. In other words, there was kind of an absolutely kind of a natural transition between the two. You know, one of the other interesting things that you've been working on in terms of your academic work in Copenhagen is questions of infrastructure and environments and how those environments are taken. And so I wanted to ask you about some of the work that you've developed around critiques of a singular global environmental crisis or that, in addition, is fed by the idea of a single global environment as those as though those things can be kind of stitched together this integrated global environment. So I wanted to just read, read something very quickly here from an article that you've published. You say that the idea of an integrated global environment may be effective in some political ways, but that performing the global environment as one in these and related ways may well have proven effective in gaining political attention around matters of pollution, nuclear waste and, more recently, climate change, especially when we think about the Anthropocene as kind of a unified, unitary global environmental crisis. At the same time, however you write, such concepts are also statements about the contested composition of the world in which we find ourselves. They do politics while hiding most of their own economies of scale. So I'm wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about the stakes that are behind, imagining a singular global environment versus thinking of the environment and sort of polyphony of ways or in a multitude of ways? And what are the challenges between both of those sorts of conceptual domains in terms of thinking about environment, environmental futures?

Speaker4: [01:11:08] So in the piece that you're quoting from, which is co-authored with Anders Bloch and Mona Kasuri and Aquazzura, sorry, we we opened with this idea that there's a lot to be gained if we can see at one at the same time the scale making and the thing we're looking at. So what we're suggesting suggesting is that if we look at the global environment, it's a particular form of scale making that we engage in and that we do because there's a reason to do it. It has certain. Politics to it and and we may want to, you know, emphasize that at some points in time, which I think is also the case with the Anthropocene, the concept of the Anthropocene that you it can do a lot of great political work to have that one idea that humans are impacting that now for the first time, humans are having an impact on the global environment. That yeah, on the environment,

Speaker2: [01:12:20] That's really unprecedented.

Speaker4: [01:12:22] Absolutely. Mm hmm. But having that double vision is it's not something we're very used to. It's something that anthropologists train themselves to have. It's sometimes called being reflexive. But I think it's we we there's much more to be gained by expanding a little more on it than rather than think it's it's a way of thinking it's actually. Considering scale making as we are doing it, considering the politics, that kind of double vision is is really helpful not just to analysis, but to any kind of being in the world with the environment, which everybody is all the time. So it's not something that is a trick of the trade for the anthropologists. It's something that I think is helpful for a lot of people to to to to train that double vision and that I'm not sure I'm getting to your question. So. So the other thing, so what happens if we differentiate or dissolve the idea that there's a global nature or a global environment? Well, the benefit from that is that it's a whole new set of politics that are brought into the picture and that that's another kind of scale making that if we think about how things are assembled or knit together in practice all the time, everything being negotiated and and nothing is is universal. Or, you know, it's not the same nature that I see in Mexico as the Mexicans see in Mexico, or that when they look to Vestas in Denmark, all these frictions in the in the global society, it's another form of skin making and brings another vision forward and another set of politics. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. So. I'm not. You know, I'm in favor of of also having different scale making capacities in our projects as as we do our research so that we can tack back and forth between the Universe, Anthropocene and the more, you know, practical everyday nitty-gritty work of making things become an environment.

Speaker2: [01:14:59] Yeah. Mm hmm. Those kind of localized dimensions where that where that really happens in placemaking to right, which has been so important for thinking about energy and thinking about environment. And so it's complicated, of course, because we have global economic systems and in some sense, the sort of shedding of of toxins that happens in a global form. And yet those have localized kinds of impacts and and influences that that have different repercussions in certain communities versus others and. There's a really Mike Davis as someone who's written quite a bit and early on about the Anthropocene and thinking about what he calls the Green Zone and the red zones of environmental destruction because not not all of these effects are evenly felt. And I think that's one of the other interesting things about, you know, being able to move away or be able to zoom in and zoom out on the idea of a kind of unified global environment versus these very particular localized and, you know, directed processes of environmental care or or precarity making. And you know, how it how it impacts different people makes all the difference, right? So those who live in the green zone are, as you can imagine, the kind of gated communities the the northern global elite and then the Red Zone, or these spaces that where you have impoverished populations and environmental justice has not made the inroads that it should. And so it's that's one of the things I really like about this idea is being able to kind of complicate those two, those two domains.

Speaker1: [01:16:43] I mean, yeah, you could even argue that environmental justice can't get into those areas because they need to have lax environmentalism to continue to produce the kinds of energy intensive goods that people in Europe and the United States want. Even as we're working hard to sort of green our energy supply over on the other side of the energy economy, you have the consumption. And to get back to what you're saying, Brit about the idea of like the overheated energy system. You know, Denmark has all of this when that it's converting into electricity, so much so that it's kind of in danger of overloading. Were it not sort of grid interconnected with these other countries, they could take off the supply. I understand. I mean, we, you know, in Texas have a bit of the same situation of an abundance of wind where every once in a while at like two a.m. on a windy night, you're getting paid to use electricity. So in a way, in this model, also, there's a kind of subtle cue sometimes. Well, it's all clean electricity. We should be using more of it. We should we should have an even more energy sort of intensive consumer lifestyle is

Speaker2: [01:17:48] That the 4000 foot instead of a two? Exactly.

Speaker1: [01:17:51] So I'm really curious, how does this play out in Denmark? Are people? Are people sort of seeing the other side of it to that just greening energy supply isn't really enough. That's only part of the the part of it. Yeah.

Speaker4: [01:18:03] Do they talk about the forty two point one percent? That figure is disconcerting for the reason you're talking about because you separate out electricity consumption from general energy consumption, which is what produces the climate change and not the electricity consumption by itself. So if you look at the larger the taking heat and transportation into account, well, it's less than five percent that comes from renewable sources. Ok. Right. So people can feel good about these 42 percent when they hit the news line. But I don't. I'm not sure the public makes the calculation and distinguishes necessarily between electricity and energy on a national scale. So it's a feel good number and it's and about the how to consume. Well, there's a lot of. Effort now in visualizing energy for people in the households. So the target is the individual consumer that that's the one who should change according to the experimentation that is going on right now. There's not much about the companies, there's not much in the public media or in the media about, well, who are the big sinners and where, I mean, how will the politicians address this issue? I mean, the figures are all the time, you know, either the feel good ones, OK, businesses hiring. Everybody feels good about Vestas and green politics and the green transition when Vestas is hiring and when they're laying off people, which I mean, that fluctuates. Of course, everybody gets scared, including the politicians. And oh no, let's not talk about green transition. Let's see if we can, you know, stay a heads above water until, you know, in the next period and it gets all gets very shortsighted. So I think this again, it's about scaling. So the the frames of reference change all the time, and it's hard.

Speaker4: [01:20:21] For people to know if they should consume because we can consume, you know, oh, it's that it's hard to know, but what I'm saying is that it's your frame of mind. Keep changing both as a nation and as an individual consumer, because sometimes you are told you can, you can spend energy because it's clean enough. And at other times, it's all very moral. And you know, we have to do this because and you as an individual consumer really needs need to change your your behavior. So I think a big problem is the. Fluctuation in what we are doing and what we should do and in the short term and the long term. For example, the the Social Democrat government that was before the government, we have now released a wonderful report in 2011 called Our Common Future Our Common Energy Future, with lots of long term goals and even steps for how to get there. And I mean, beautiful goals about electrification and, you know, taking everything into account how we could be completely fossil free in 2050. But even, you know, the small steps are even, you know, impossible steps. I mean, it looks great in a report and some of the but but they they're completely detached from everything, you know, I love it as a vision. And of course, it's not being ratified now under the new government. So in a way, it's it was a symbolic thing. But but. But good as such, but how to to make the right, you know, set a sort of a goal that is both ambitious and also realistic that involves the right actors, that has the right politics. That does. I mean, it's just really, really complicated. Mm hmm.

Speaker2: [01:22:32] But there was a kind of interesting thing that that occurred in Copenhagen, where there was an art and energy competition that was sponsored by the city itself. I guess for artists or makers, designers of various kinds from around the world, people from around the world were invited to submit a large scale public piece of art. You know, public art installation that would also generate utility scale renewable energy. So how did how did that seems like a very sort of appropriate creative generative way of of rethinking energy? What was the outcome of that particular competition? Did it? Did it happen again? Was it successful? Could anyone come up with the design?

Speaker4: [01:23:23] Uh, anyone could come up with the design, and I think twenty five projects were shortlisted and out of the. I mean, there was a winner, which was a how to say a send send clock. Oh yeah. Type of with solar panels. Um, and and and I mean, it's on the drawing board. It was a complete a conceptual competition, so it's not being built. But the competition is design and art competition is being repeated around the world and it completely escapes me where it's going to be the next time. But the point is that they take an actual place in the landscape. The designers who are organizing it and invite people to to build a site specific utility size piece of art for that site. And it. If it had any effect in Copenhagen, it was really, really something that a lot of politicians could hook onto. For one of the reasons, in my opinion, was that it wasn't very risky. Who can argue against renewable energy plus art when it's not being built? You know, it wasn't controversial, right? At the same time, had it been controversial from the beginning, who would have latched on to it? Mm hmm. So there's an interesting tension between these things, as you also know from your own art exhibitions that you know you want to generate some kind of friction, but you also want to interest people and bring them in so you can't, you know, scare them away from the beginning. And I think that was the paradox of this experiment.

Speaker2: [01:25:15] Why did they not build the actual prototype? That seems kind of ridiculous to not, you know, to not invest some, some effort and some finances into building the thing?

Speaker4: [01:25:29] Hmm. Yeah. It wouldn't have been great. It would have been great.

Speaker2: [01:25:33] Yeah, yeah. So it's a good, you know? Yeah, it's a good idea. In theory, it's too bad that the practice didn't follow.

Speaker4: [01:25:40] Right? One of the pieces is, as far as I know, being built in Pittsburgh. But the there's limited resources when it comes to the actual, you know, building the infrastructure and making it utility size means that it has to connect to the existing infrastructure and isn't that another big onto the issue onto the grid? And you know, it's new. It has to be new. Otherwise, it wouldn't win the competition and it has to have that. Some specs, of course, that they have to live up to. But I don't know if it's plug and play. I mean, if you actually build it. I don't know.

Speaker1: [01:26:24] So we've been asking you all these unfair, huge questions about Danish society and culture and the relationship to energy and especially renewable energy transition. And I think what you've been telling us is that the sort of Danish miracle, if I may, is a little bit more complicated from the inside, looking from the inside out than it looks from the outside in where, you know, people here and the like Bernie Sanders are saying, we need to be more like Denmark, right? This has become a rallying point. Like, let's become more like Denmark. That said, I think, you know, Denmark are doing some incredible things, but you're already pointing to the kind of political complexity of this. Not all the parties are on board. There's oscillation in terms of messages people are getting. And I was just curious. I mean, to get more back more to your work, you know, you and some colleagues started this very interesting project called Alien Energy. Great title. I was just curious to hear more about how you got interested in energy as a topic of research, and maybe you could tell us a bit about alien energy and the sorts of projects that were involved in that research program.

Speaker4: [01:27:27] Yeah, I'm working at the University of Copenhagen and we had a strategic research area around energy futures some five years back, and that was basically the university trying to get together all the scholars working on sustainability environmental issues. And in those conversations, I met Laura Wh-What's, whom we've also interviewed as a potential partner in a new research project. And what brought us together was that we were not interested in smart cities. We were not interested in greening the capital. We were very interested in things happening on the geographical edge. And you've been talking to Laura about Orkney. And the edges that I saw and I found very interesting was, for example, the western part of Jutland, where visitors came from, where the wind is blowing, where there were very strong discourse about these areas being useless, you know, having to shape up to modernity, basically. So you can basically find these discourses that you have in development literature. And I've done some projects in developing countries before and monitoring and evaluation of research of development projects. So I had been a lot exposed to that discourse and I saw that same opposition happening in that small little country of Denmark that you would have these places that were so far away from Copenhagen, even though it was like only four hours drive away in a car and those places in need of development.

Speaker4: [01:29:29] And so the whole discussion between me and Laura would be based on her work in Orkney. So what kind of resources are there in these places and why is it not recognized by people at the centre so-called centre? And what is it that is particular to the environment and the natural resources that are there and about renewables in particular, that they cannot really be moved, that they that it's really hard to transport these things. So it's not that it's not, you know, it is considered valuable, but then it becomes ties into the whole innovation discourse so that, you know, we need innovation, we need prototypes that can go to market. And that's what I'm researching in the context of alien energy. It's these inventors who are, you know, puzzling with, you know, how to harvest energy from ocean waves and how to to transport not just the energy, but also the knowledge and the know. How about these iron constructions that look like spaceships, which we hence the title aliens from

Speaker2: [01:30:44] Aliens

Speaker4: [01:30:45] From and, you know, strange constructions that have landed there in the water and, you know, are both very quickly, very rusty and not at all constructions of of a glimmering energy future, but at the same time, a lot of hope, you know, both from the inventors, but also, of course, from from these. Are politicians that want the green transition is connecting to these constructions, so yeah, so I'm interested in the the quality of the geographical edge as a remote area that is nevertheless at the center of the innovation discourse. Mm hmm. Mm hmm.

Speaker2: [01:31:28] Another project that was under alien energy or that you did with alien energy was the Walking Stick project. Could you tell us a little bit about that and how that worked and what its purpose was?

Speaker4: [01:31:41] We wanted to experiment with ethnographic methods because maybe part of this, you know, idea that if you are critiquing a development discourse or that you shouldn't have, that you shouldn't replicate that in your own methods, that you're going somewhere, you observe. You go back, you write up. You know, you need to complicate and step out of your comfort zone in order to actually find out what's the problem? And decided that we wanted to make an intervention which turned out to be a design of a walking stick that has audio in-built audio where you without a map walk through the landscape you listen to. Laura, what's this poetic rendering of our ethnographic material that James McGuire, Luisa Transept and myself that we generated as part of our ethnographic fieldwork? And we we used the stick both as a comparative device between our different sets of materials and our different field sites, which involves Scotland, Iceland and Denmark. But we also experiment with this idea. Can you actually tell people theoretical things through poetic types of languages? Because our collaborators up in the northern west northwestern part of Denmark in the Danish Wave Energy Center, they were very attached to our idea, but they wanted us to communicate some facts because that's how we normally think about scientists that they. Tell people what's what's up and down in this and how do we how should you how should the public understand what wave energy and renewables in that particular place, what that's about? And we resisted that. And so that was part of our experiment to be in dialogue with our collaborators to say, do they? But, you know, what do you think about? This story about your place and at the same time, making an intervention that is more of an artistic.

Speaker2: [01:34:05] So it was kind of, as I imagined, the walking stick. I haven't experienced the walk itself, but it's sort of like an audio guide that you might find in a museum right where you rent the or sometimes you get the headphones and then you can kind of click through. Is that how it operates so that the the audio is in the stick itself? You carry the stick with you, there's a speaker or maybe headphones, and then it kind of narrates a story of the of the walk that you're taking, which is in this very energetically productive space, right? So you can look out and see these energy infrastructures and how they're operating as you're listening to the poetry, as you're listening to the ethnographic material is

Speaker4: [01:34:46] Exposed to that. It's very clunky. I mean, the walking stick is a birch stick that has come from the national park, which is nearby this harbour town where this the work itself is happening. So it's not like in a museum, simply because walking with that piece of wood is is an intervention on on your experience or as the visitors walk. Because it's heavy, it's heavy. You, you get you, you feel the connection to the landscape through that stick. And that's really important. As important as as, I mean as the poetry. And then you can purchase the six chapters and you can only. Posts as you walk through, you cannot jump a chap twice.

Speaker2: [01:35:41] You can't fast

Speaker4: [01:35:42] Forward, but it's like you will say,

Speaker2: [01:35:43] Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's great. It's a great idea. I love it.

Speaker1: [01:35:47] So I wanted to I wanted to come back again to something you mentioned a little while ago and tie this to what I think is a contemporary and also future research interest of yours, which is electricity. And when you were pointing out this great observation that you know, the 42 percent, which sounds really good, but then when you look at the full energy picture, it's less than five percent. I don't think it's just in Denmark that that we're getting, you know, sort of more and more. Salvation, all attention to electricity, you know, if we could just transition all cars to electric vehicles, we wouldn't have to use oil. We can green the supply of electricity. And so electricity has itself become a kind of a road to salvation, if you see what I'm saying. And I'm not saying that's why you're interested in it. But I just want to say it seems that one of the reasons why electricity is interesting these days is because it is taking on a new valence in terms of energy transition. So what interests you about electricity? Why take this turn? You know, from the work on wave energy and the inventors towards electricity?

Speaker4: [01:36:54] Nice question. Thank you. I didn't want to study electricity. I had the feeling, I don't get it. You know, I don't get physics. I don't get the those processes are alien to me, you know, and but I have to do certain, you know, OK, I don't get electricity and and but it kept popping up in various ways because it's what the public will attach to. It's not what the innovators are interested in. They're interested in in building the devices that can capture the wave and that can convert, convert the wave and the moment it becomes electricity. They're not so interested anymore, but I realized that I have to follow it through a little more because. The kind of electricity that their devices generate is, at the moment, alien to the grid. Interesting because of the price and because of the energy tax and the system's functioning as it's functioning at the moment, they don't get the kind of subsidy that will make the grid accept the wave energy generated electricity. So, you know, it's both a conversion and it's also a break that I see there, and besides the interesting things happening with the offshore wind farms, the generators that are on the beach, that wave energy people hope that their devices can hook onto because those are power stations that are run by the for the district plants and, you know, making those connections. It's just complicated, but it didn't. I mean, from the outside, it seems strange that that's such a complicated process. If you want the green transition, why not make it possible? Right? Yeah. Well, I keep a bike where I let that electricity remain alien. Strange to me.

Speaker1: [01:39:03] I like that idea of alien electricity to that's maybe that's the next project. Yeah, electricity is is super interesting. Also conceptually, as you were saying, and it is sort of it is, you know, an unusual ground for anthropologists to work on human scientists more generally. But in a way, you know, the work we've done on it. You do realize that electricity is sort of always already social. I mean, in how we experience electricity is something that's that's that a lot of generations of scientists and engineers and infrastructure and experts have gone into making, you know, conditioning the electrical phenomena of the Earth in a way that we can experience it, as you know, putting a plug in, then a light comes or flipping a switch and a light comes on. I mean, that's kind of remarkable when you think about it. But then also, as you say, I think electricity is something is is a form of energy that people do grasp. I mean, it's invisible, but there's also instances of visibility. There's a whole set of practices and precautions. We take around electricity that we learn very early on this magical power, and it's so essential to all of the devices that, you know, we consider to be the conveniences and luxuries of a modern lifestyle. So I agree with you. I think it is really interesting to take it into the grid and to look at the grid and to look at the, you know, appliances and everything else that's part of our electric world. So that seems like a great project.

Speaker2: [01:40:34] It's amazing how much we inhabit an electric world. I have an assignment that I've done with students for several years in a class that I teach that's called the social life of clean energy. And one of the things I asked them to do, it's a little experimental, is for them to go and track their electricity usage for 24 hours. So to kind of tune in, have an attunement, right? As Katie Stewart might say, or a kind of an awareness of of how much electricity they're using or encountering as they go about their daily life and to sort of follow that. So to think about the refrigerator, to think about the computer, to think about the lights that are on and to somehow try and track that they have a very hard time tracking it because the the quantity of electricity that we use is very opaque and very difficult to sort of assess exactly what the quantities are. And it's very interesting because if you compare that to, for example, the work that Tanya Winter has done on electricity in Zanzibar and she talks about how, you know, women in the household, for example, are very keenly aware of how you know, how many volts their electric mixer is or their iron, and they know precisely how much, you know, money is being spent on the use of that particular appliance. And I think that that's something that in the quote unquote, you know, modern industrialized West, we really take it for granted and we don't have a kind of awareness about our electricity usage in ways that we might have in the past or that people might in other places.

Speaker2: [01:42:14] So the final bit of this assignment is also for them to go the students to go for one hour without electricity. That means that they can't sit in a room with the lights. It means that they can't be on their iPhone. And you know, this is like a real struggle to go for one hour or 60 minutes. You should look on their face when this comes out. It's like, No, I can't do it. So anyhow, so people do different things and they get out of the house and they go, lay on the grass and they they put their iPhone away. But sometimes they, you know, have a snack like they're eating an Apple. And I say, Well, but didn't that take, you know, some refrigeration provided by electricity in order to keep that apple fresh for you to be able to eat it? So in fact, you were using electricity in some way. When you're eating that Apple or the other one is to think about them laying there on the grass but still clothed and the amount of electricity that goes into manufacturing or, you know, the glasses on your face. And how so, anyway.

Speaker4: [01:43:20] But I think that experimentation is crucial because it's not the fact based. It's not the number of volts that will help us understand anything, you know, and that was the point about the walking stick that it has to be some impediment. And in Denmark, there are power plants who are experimenting with new forms of public engagement. But I think as anthropologist, we can do a lot there to, you know. Maybe complicate a little bit. What it means to to know things, to no electricity, to it's not, you know, I think what is happening is that they are basically exchanging the placards with information with some things that are more entertaining. So yeah, you do the edutainment or gamification that is what is happening, right? But can you like you're doing with with your students, you know, help them think along? Mm hmm. In an embodied way, right?

Speaker2: [01:44:19] To feel it, really.

Speaker4: [01:44:21] That's really a challenge and a great challenge. Yeah.

Speaker2: [01:44:24] Get in touch with our electrons.

Speaker1: [01:44:26] I know. No, and I think that you mentioned early on in the conversation that that this focus on the end consumer, right, and all these smart home technologies, nest and things like that that are meant to help us, you know, average global northern citizens understand our use of energy. You know, have it visualized for us to have us confronted with this in ways that we haven't? As as Sony was saying, I think for for, you know, since basically electrification was stabilized, which is decades here. But now we may be facing this again, a confrontation with the realities of our energy usage on a more daily basis. And I think overall, I think it's a good thing, but I do think you're right for it that to go about this simply as like a technical exercise, because a lot of times there's this idea, well, the information's there, they're going to change their behavior. But no. Sometimes, yes, maybe. But what about habits and understandings and things like that? Practices, you know, the sort of stuff that we care about are actually, I think, really critical for understanding the juncture between the knowledge we might get from smart home systems and how you might actually encourage people to use less energy or to use greener energy and those sorts of things.

Speaker4: [01:45:40] So to not let yourself be subjected to the politicians moods about a company hiring or laying off and or, you know, having some kind of more stable commitment to doing this, you know, regardless that it goes up and down and doing this. I mean,

Speaker1: [01:46:02] The best is we'll call it the Vestas effect from

Speaker4: [01:46:05] This effect.

Speaker2: [01:46:06] Yeah, yeah. Or the nest effect, which is kind of like it's like a nutritional label for energy is what Nest is essentially like. Here's our carbohydrates. Here's your grams of fat. You know, you decide. Here's the information now you can, you know, choose to go your way or not.

Speaker1: [01:46:26] It's a brave new world right here. Thanks so much for coming in. Thanks so much for talking with us for your for your trip to rice. And we're very much looking forward to in the broader sense community here to working with you and your colleagues in Denmark and all you alien energies out there. We want to stay in touch and keep working with you.

Speaker2: [01:46:46] I think we should make some T-shirts.

Speaker1: [01:46:48] Alien energies.

Speaker4: [01:46:50] You're welcome, thank you.