Search results

Introduction: Hope and uncertain hope -- Wind on land -- How not to fight a wind farm -- The Eden problem -- Energy without stories -- Turbine sublime -- Landscapes of wheat of war -- Vigilance, the new mood of energy -- Latifundios of air -- Just sacrifice, an experiment -- Conclusion: Wind, justice, and compromise.

The art of belonging -- Engineering and its redemption -- Owning Lake Kariba -- Hydrology of hope -- Playing the game -- Belonging awkwardly

ABSTRACTPeople change the climate. Ethnography, however, tends to look past these perpetrators and see only victims. In such accounts, parties vulnerable to climate change suffer, adapt, or do both. To varying degrees, their societies are resilient and may soon make themselves more so. These comparatively cheerful keywords overlook an entire moral field of responsibility, complicity, and culpability. High emitters of carbon dioxide bear the bulk of responsibility for the unfolding catastrophe. How do such people interpret and justify their actions? What ethics and mentalities with respect to the environment are high emitters, their firms, and their governments fabricating? In this article, I address these questions in the context of a society both complicit and vulnerable: the petrostate of Trinidad and Tobago. There, an overlapping set of environmental policymakers and environmentally minded industrialists consider Trinidad—including its oil industry—to be only vulnerable. Their "victim slot" relies on cultural constructions of insular geography, performances in diplomatic fora, and planning rubrics for hazards. In each instance, the slot allows Trinidadian institutions and corporations—including oil firms—to skirt accountability for carbon emissions. Nevertheless, some Trinidadian public figures are beginning to reconsider hydrocarbons in ways both painful and humane.