Wind

The Afternoon's Finger

In some places, the dust never seems to settle. Wind finds its way everywhere in Mexico's Isthmus of Tehuantepec, harassing the blue-black feathers of a wailing grackle, raising small stones from the road, insinuating itself against the blades of turbines to make electricity. Isthmus wind, like wind everywhere, is a negotiation between gases that are compelled across space and time by combinations of heat and cold differentials floating over land and sea, pressured shifts in directionality and potency. This is the physicality of the wind, its material life and its ontological being. Wind becomes contoured by objects in its path — mountains and hills, cliffs and stands of forest, buildings and creatures. It also willfully exercises its force upon these things: carving, cracking, pressuring, and leaving its ventifactual imprints. It draws our attention to points of contact and intraconnective incorporations; it absorbs contexts and conditions, and we often know it best through touching (in) it. Wind may be a relief from the heat, a force to struggle against, or a welcome bluster that blows smoke from our eyes.

The force of the wind has long been domesticated by human actors — through the milling of grain, flying of kites, blowing of ships across the seas. But industrial-scale electricity generation and the sprawl of wind parks are unprecedented, both in the isthmus and in the world. Wind is now being taken differently — not as it has been for millennia, but as a renewable "resource," or as "clean energy." As wind is increasingly cast as a valuable commodity, and as its powers are rapidly industrialized, so too does it undergo a reformulation of what it is. Newer evaluations and valuations of wind may not entirely eclipse the ways that wind has been known in the past, but there are, nonetheless, undeniable shifts in how wind is seen to work and for whom. "Wind power" is now designated as a force with the potential to redraft the energetic relationship between humanity and the environment; it has been made to assume a responsibility for global climatological care. Thus, while the wind may have always mattered, it has now come to matter in different ways.

For the ancient Greeks, Aeolis was the god of wind; across the isthmus, it is energía eólica — wind energy — that has come to occupy lands and sky. By definition, aeolian imprints are those effects of wind upon geological and meteorological phenomena. But the winds that create ventifactual contours also shape people and places. In this chapter, I want to explore this aeolian multiplicity, showing how wind and its powers are formed by land, by desire, by technological management, and finally, by the care wind is afforded by some — indeed many — humans. This is a turbulent space. Wind is changed: from element to condition and from an experience into a resource that generates power and its effects. In the wake of wind, aeolian subjects are formed, and wind itself comes to be produced differently through energy aspirations. Aeolian life gets entangled with cosmologies and subjectivities, but it is equally implicated in ethical questions regarding sustainable development. Such refigurations between material, human, and nonhuman worlds require a crafting of political possibilities that move beyond material determinisms and social structural theories that have underwritten the industrializing logics of the past three centuries. Wind's very ontology calls for a "deterrestrializing" of thought.

Pelting

In the town of La Ventosa, wind is a force that cannot be ignored. It comes in gusts and gales. It blows over eighteen-wheel semitruck trailers, and it causes some varieties of trees to only ever leaf and branch in one direction. It plasters clothing against skin, and it will have you momentarily lose your footing; its occasional calm is usually abbreviated. And it is for this reason, in part, that the town of La Ventosa is now completely surrounded by wind parks, in every direction and at the terminus of every street in this little hamlet.

For Don José, wind power has been a boon. Passing through the carport gate that separates his house from the street, he remarks on the quality of the wind at that moment. Knowing that we are not from the isthmus, he is no doubt certain that windward comments are a good way to begin a conversation. He offers that it is not bad today, just average, as he sets about arranging folding chairs on the concrete slab outside his front windows. Somewhere behind the wall is a young woman, maybe his daughter or daughter-in-law, who is preparing plastic cups full of atole, a sugary drink made with corn flour. Don José's home is relatively untroubled by the dust raised by the wind, a dust that saturates seemingly every place in La Ventosa. He lives on a recently paved street. The deed of pavimentación was carried out by the local government in collaboration with a wind energy company that has a park just on the border of town.

Don José, a landowner who has leased parcels of his property to the wind power company, appears to be doing quite well. He has a large gate around his two-story home, fresh with paint. He attributes his relative prosperity to his contract with the company and to the monthly income generated from renting the land on which turbines and roads have been placed. Don José epitomizes the developmentalist dreams of wind power in the isthmus; his swelling wealth is imagined to flow in a trickle-down fashion to other, less fortunate residents — shopkeepers, laborers, and others without windy land. Don José openly shares his story, situating it within a longer history of the town where he has always lived. He is notably philosophical and methodical with his words, and his utterances are more ecological than most. After the atole has been drunk and we have been through our questions about the rise of renewable energy in La Ventosa, Don José turns us again to the wind. He wants us to know that the wind itself has made him strong. Like everyone in the isthmus, he explains, living with "el norte" — the powerful northern wind that whips across the isthmus from November to February — has an impact upon a person. "El norte picks up rocks, pebbles, and sand, and it hits you in the face. It gets everywhere. And you have to stand up against it and keep working and keep going in spite of it," he explains. "It makes you tough and unafraid." Don José is clear about the fact that the turbines on his land and the power of the wind have made him richer. But he also recognizes how the wind has formed him as an aeolian subject, a man who is abraded, contoured, and affectively shaped by wind.

Air and Breath and Everything Alive

The north wind whips through,
in the streets papers and leaves
are chased with resentment.
Houses moan,
dogs curl into balls.
...