Fishes,red sludge,and wind in the Mediterranean. An ethnography of overturnings in the EU energy transition

Abstract

This article takes Sulcis, a Sardinian ex-mining sub-region, as a case study, and aims to place it in a regional dimension, analyzing local attitudes and opposition to EU energy transition policies against a background of industrial and environmental crises. Here the Green Deal-promoted energy transitions taking place involve a whole industrial system of carbon-dependent and coal-fired steel processing, which is the target of a large national plan to convert it into a regional-scale platform for onshore and offshore wind farms. Focusing on local opposition, the article shows a new kind of case study, a transition still in progress, suggesting that spaces classified as peripheral in anthropological studies on energy are in fact new centers of transition. When discussing energy speculation, local opposition likens the mechanisms of landscape grabbing—or seascape grabbing—to land grabbing. Local opposition to mega wind farms is supported by a deeper political opposition, which questions the very legitimacy of European institutions to govern transitions at the local level. Different local temporalities are intertwined in this process, overlapping experiences of dispossession.