By Dr Paris Chronakis, Department of History
Relevant United Nations’ SDG goals:
Fierce local reaction against windfarms, constructors high up in the mountains working under the protection of riot police forces, violent demonstrations. In the social media, the fight goes on as harrowing images of colossal wind turbines scarring the quaint skyline of pristine Aegean islands circulate widely. In Greece, the long-delayed introduction of renewable energy sources is facing the vocal, sometimes violent, opposition of local civil society, and the celebrated Greek landscape is turned into a battleground.
Meanwhile, global warming is already hitting the country hard. In the arid islands and mountainous mainland, prolonged heatwaves, dry winters, recurrent fires, and a sea life threatened by invasive species, jeopardize the livelihood of the people, themselves inculpated in processing delicate local ecosystems into a globally marketed product, the sun and sea of Greece. Like other southern European countries, Greece is fossil-fuel-dependent, but its governments have recently been touting an ambitious plan to turn the land into a clean energy hub. Why then, the reaction from below? Why would local communities battle against their seemingly own interests?
Part of the answer lies in the misinformation and disinformation widely circulating in social media, and, no less, in mainstream, too. Another, in the common self-victimisation of the locals, based on the deep-seated conviction that rural Greece has historically been neglected by the central, ‘Athenian’ state when not treated as its dumping ground. A strong local attachment regards big external investment with suspicion while the control which a handful of companies currently exert over the lucrative market of renewable energy sources lends further credibility to such views. Moreover, the centrality of landscape in the Greek national imagination - the elevation of Mount Olympus or the Aegean Sea into sites of Hellenism - renders such projects borderline sacrilegious. Nevertheless, material interests matter as much as symbolic investment.
The Greek landscape is nowadays highly commodified and so, for many local real estate owners, the introduction of wind- and solar farms threatens to devalue their property and thereby diminish their share of the tourist pie, even if they mostly manage poor quality ‘rent-a-room’ facilities. Overall, local societies have proven highly adept in appropriating the high rhetoric of environmental concern and adopting the agonistic culture of a decades-old environmental movement. Having succeeded in occupying the high moral ground in the arena of public opinion, they have also been applying heavy political pressure through their parliamentary representatives and have thus often managed to delay the introduction of renewable energy sources. As a result, the ‘real’ environment is left hanging in the balance while conflicting discourses keep calling to its rescue. From a symbol of a greener future, the wind turbine has turned into a menacing sign of environmental destruction and large corporation greed. The Quixotic echoes are hard to miss here.
Engaging the local civil society is therefore key if green energy policies are to succeed. The point here is less about fighting the heavy-handedness of the centralised state and strengthen participatory democracy through the empowerment of weak civil society institutions in the European periphery. Rather, to be feasible, renewable energy production must turn local and local communities be intimately involved in its management.
Following recent cross-European policy trends, the central state should encourage and support local initiatives and thus transform renewable energy production from a foreign incursion (or a ‘theft’ of one’s air and water), into a local, tangible business that will serve local, national, and international needs through its integration into larger power grids. Reconceived as maker of yet another valuable ‘local product’, the wind turbine could therefore be viewed as an organic part of the local landscape rather than an invasive species.
Such change of policy should by default involve undertaking the infrastructural work necessary to expand the capacity of existing power grids in order to connect local energy production plants to them -- currently, the main reason behind the reliance on grand, ‘foreign’ renewable energy contractors and, consequently, of local opposition. Reconsidering the place of civil society therefore requires rethinking the role of the state and the dominant model of economic relations, too. Only then, perhaps, would battling windmills and wind turbines continue to remain the property of Don Quixote alone.