Rural-urban interaction: wind turbines as a form of surplus extraction

Back in the late-1980s Robert Potter and I edited a book called The Geography of Urban-Rutal Interactions in Developing Countries (Routledge, 1989; recently republished in the Routledge Library Editions: Urbanization) as a festschrift for our colleague Alan Mountjoy who had retired in 1985. My introductory conceptual chapter summarised various theories that had by then been developed to explain and help understand the ways through which people interacted between these very different kinds of places, the “rural” and the “urban”. It also proposed a framework for new thinking about these issues that focused on linkages (economic, social, political and ideological), flows (such as labour, money, telephone calls, authority and ideas) and interactions (involving things such as capital, families, allegiance and religious activities). The book was a product of its time, and much has changed over the last 35 years – although I am glad to see that I did indeed write about telephones, radios and televisions even back then.

Crossing northern France last weekend reminded me of those arguments, as I saw kilometre upon kilometre of wind turbines stretching across the vast expanses of the farmland of the pays champenois. Some people find these turbines inspiring and beautiful; I do not! However, no-one can deny that they have changed the landscape. What struck me most, though, was that this was yet another very visible, powerful and extensive form of exploition of “the rural” by “the urban”. Little of the energy produced by these turbines will be used in the rural areas where they are situated; their presence reflects the powerful urban demand for electricity, and the imposition of an essentially urban bourgeois ideology that wants to maintain its “culture” with little real regard for the rural environment. The rural is out of sight, out of mind; it is there to be exploited.

There have been numerous studies of the environmental impact of different kinds of energy, but many of these are based on traditional forms of analyses that tend to have an inbuilt prioritisation of the interests of those living in urban areas, and almost always ignore the environmental values of “indigenous peoples” and ethnic minorities. Moreover, insufficient work has yet been done on the environmental impact of the decommissioning of wind turbines, most of which have a lifespan of less than 25 years, and are currently disposed of in landfill sites. With rising demand for electricity, driven in large part by the expansion in the use of digital technologies (see the work of DESC), there will be a dramatic increase in the number of such windfarms, and thus yet further surplus extraction of “the rural” by the “urban”.

Further north in the Nord-Pas de Calais coal mining basin (since 2012 a UNESCO World Heritage Site) it is still possible to see many of the old spoil tips. As elsewhere in the world’s coalmining regions, there has been much landscape reconstruction. Some old tips have been flattened, others have been wooded, and at least one has been turned into a dry ski slope. However, I couldn’t help but think that the despoliation of the rural landscape (and indeed seascapes) by wind turbines in Europe is likely to be very much more extensive than that caused in the past by coal mining. How, though, do we judge and evaluate such thoughts? It is time for a very considerable rethink about the environmental impacts of all forms of energy, especially in the context of the rapid growth in digital technologies. After all, does not the term “Smart Cities” automatically imply that “villages must therefore be dumb”?

Wind turbines in the Conca de Barberà

I have written previously about the landscape implications of wind turbines in the Conca de Barberà, but always somehow hope when I visit this beautiful part of Catalunya that I will not be annoyed by them as much as I have been on previous occasions!  It never works.  I was walking in the hills above Poblet today, and the view across the vineyards and fields, looking across to the snow covered Pyrenees Mountains in the distance were completely destroyed by these ‘urban’ conceptualised and created monstrosities in the rural landscape!  Have to admit that it tempts me to thoughts of how easy they would be to destroy…

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Valuing the impact of wind turbines on rural landscapes: Conca de Barberà

I have been lucky enough to spend a few days walking in the Conca de Barberà county, or comarca, in Catalunya, and was very surprised – and indeed saddened – to see the visual impact of large numbers of wind turbines almost wherever one looked.  The selection of images below gives an indication of the scale of the issue:

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Whilst it was a cloudy day, and the images do not do full justice to the visual impact, especially around the small village of Flores, these pictures do convey something of the dramatic change they have made to the landscape.  Moreover, standing next to them one can also most definitely appreciate the noise impact they have – no longer are these hilltops a place of silent reflection, tempered only by the song of birds and the occasional dog barking in the villages nearby!

This raises very real questions about how landscapes are valued, and the politics of energy.  There have been many attempts to place a ‘value’ on landscape change, but these have mostly focused on somehow trying to calculate an economic cost of the change, often in terms of the loss of income.  Thus, if an area has previously gained an income from tourism, and the landscape change means that this is reduced, then it is clearly possible to estimate such a loss.  Other measures draw on the amount that people would actually pay not to have a change imposed on a landscape.  However, it is actually extremely difficult to place any kind of economic value on the emotional impact of a landscape change.  This area of Catalunya is at the heart of the Ruta del Cister, the triangle of Cistercian monasteries that were built there from the 12th century onwards.  The impact of the wind turbines has completely transformed the peace and tranquility of the landscapes, in a way that no simple economic measure can ever grasp.  Although some people might  think that these human feats of engineering have an attraction of their own, representing progress that no medieval Cistercian nun or monk could ever imagine, I find the juxtaposition of these two cultures concerning and depressing.

Reflecting on this dramatic transformation, I started to think further about the two kinds of power that this transformation represents.  On the one hand, the wind turbines represent the physical power of a new means of producing electricity.  However, each turbine actually only produces relatively little power. Estimates vary hugely, but as a general figure it is often argued that one turbine can produce enough energy for around 500 households a year – depending on the efficiency at which they function.  All the turbines in the images above therefore produce really rather little electricity, but at a very significant change to the landscape.  This transaction reflects a second kind of power, political power, since it illustrates yet another way through which a largely urban population exploits rural areas for their own interests.  This despoliation of the landscape is nothing other than a means through which the urban bourgeoisie seeks to maintain its ever increasing patterns of consumption.

Surely it would be much ‘fairer’ for the environmental cost to be paid by those living in urban areas, by for example constructing new styles of energy efficient housing and taxing air conditioners, rather than destroying the rural landscapes that they rarely visit, either physically or in their imaginations!