Geography
Document Type
Article
Abstract
The critique of fossil fuel regimes has been a foundational concern for the field of political ecology, in its drives to expose the injustices and harms of energy extractivism and its early warnings of the climate crisis. However, it is increasingly evident that renewable energy sources and their infrastructures will carry their own costs and trade-offs, and that critique, resistance and alternative movement-building are needed to forge a truly just renewable energy transition. This theme issue underlines the many ways in which political ecology is well-positioned to lead critical and engaged scholarship in support of energy/climate justice. In this introduction and survey, we draw on new research collected here to reflect on political ecology's distinctive analytical capacities and forms of praxis for this task. We argue that the collection advances political ecology's intellectual and political purchase on renewable transition in several crucial ways. These include (1) Theorizing Renewables-Driven Land Transformations, (2) Advancing Industrial Political Ecologies of Renewables, (3) Locating Power within Technical and Artifactual Politics and (4) Generating Knowledge and Tools for Just Transitions. We conclude with reflections on further pressing concerns for the field: for example, rising debates over scale, ownership and accountability models within renewable energy justice and democracy movements and critical conversations growing around renewable energy's own extraction geographies and diverse forms of racialization.
Publication Title
Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
Publication Date
2022
Volume
5
Issue
3
First Page
997
Last Page
1013
ISSN
2514-8486
DOI
10.1177/25148486221108164
Keywords
energy geography, just transition, political ecology, political economy, Renewable energy
Repository Citation
Knuth, Sarah; Behrsin, Ingrid; Levenda, Anthony; and McCarthy, James, "New political ecologies of renewable energy" (2022). Geography. 137.
https://commons.clarku.edu/faculty_geography/137
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Copyright Conditions
Knuth, Sarah, et al. "New political ecologies of renewable energy." Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 5.3 (2022): 997-1013.
