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Power System Structure
Published in Amitava Sil, Saikat Maity, Industrial Power Systems, 2022
Power plant sites may become sacrifice zones, sealed off from any future land use due to contamination linked to the operation of a power plant. The land impacts of hydropower facilities depend on individual dam design, location and operation. Land use and ecosystem impacts of facilities that use large impoundments can be severe. The dam and reservoir may transform the landscape, obliterate sensitive land resources and permanently alter regional land use patterns.
Lessons from a forgotten fuel: assessing the long history of alcohol fuel advocacy and use in the United States
Published in History and Technology, 2021
A second theme is the usefulness of sacrifice zones to consider the history (and likely future) of renewable energy sources. Energy historian Christopher Jones defines energy sacrifice zones as ‘areas whose environments were forfeited to provide cheap and abundant energy to distant places’. Jones focuses on sacrifice zones for coal, oil, and hydropower production in the northeastern United States.52 But the concept of sacrifice zones is helpful for thinking about which regions and environments are likely to suffer negative consequences from new energy sources. The fact of the matter is that all energy sources, even renewables, create sacrifice zones. Hopefully such zones will be less widespread for renewable energy than they have been for fossil fuels, but we should not fool ourselves into thinking that green energy does not require some ecological sacrifice.
Unfinished extinction and the velocities of capitalist sacrifices in the woodlands of central Chile
Published in Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society, 2021
Marcelo González Gálvez, Fernanda Gallegos, Valentina Turén
For various reasons, some previously mentioned and others that we address later, we think of Santa Olga as a sacrifice zone, an area that has “been offered up for exploitation in the name of profit, progress, and technological advancement” (Hedges and Sacco 2012, XI; see also Klein 2012; Farrier 2019; Little 2017). Supposedly, initially coined to designate sites affected by nuclear activity, currently sacrifice zones are areas that are the “product of an unfettered global capitalism, and their sacrifice is driven primarily by profit-seeking” (Shade 2015, 776; cf. Colten 2012, 91–92). More importantly, they appear as areas “where everything and everyone is expendable” (Hedges and Sacco 2012, XII; see also Reinert 2018). Although this expendability was not evident to Santaolguinos before the fires, it became crystal clear for them during the catastrophe that destroyed their town. While it is possible to state that the establishment of the wood industry in the area was slowly leading it to devastation, via the intense exploitation of the local environment through the common logic of extractivism (Gudynas 2012, 2015), not many Santaolguinos would have agreed with such a stance before the summer of 2017. However, among many things, the fire was also an eye-opener. To them, the fire revealed that their town and its surroundings were nothing but “resources” (Gudynas 2015, 165–169) or, more specifically, “commodities” (Svampa 2013) that had, fundamentally, a primary economic role from an external point of view (Acosta 2013; Gudynas 2015). This revelation was evident inasmuch as the fire itself was overtly understood as a sacrifice. As one of the prominent leaders of the town would state emphatically each time the topic of the fire was on the table: “they let us burn, nobody helped us … they knew this was going to happen and nobody helped us.”5 This idea was also commonly shared by people during the process of reconstruction. The local theory states that there was a plague broadly affecting the trees surrounding Santa Olga, and the fire was an effective economic way of dealing with it, because plantations were insured. We do not want to judge this theory by its veracity, but we are interested in how it triggers, among Santaolguinos, the insight about the expendability of their lives. Thus, in a sense, the fire that destroyed Santa Olga evidences the sacrificial nature “saturated by violences […] that remain nameless, and therefore also largely invisible” (Reinert 2018, 598), that, unknowingly, the town always had. Later, indeed, the rubble after Santa Olga’s destruction was the flagrant evidence of a hidden history of violence and dispossession that was now patently revealed (Gordillo 2014, 258).