From Camels to Panels: Renewable Subjectivities in Israel’s solar energy frontier

Keywords: new political ecologies, renewable energy, decolonization
Session Type: Virtual Paper
Day: Wednesday
Session Start / End Time: 4/7/2021 03:05 PM (Pacific Time (US & Canada)) - 4/7/2021 04:20 PM (Pacific Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 40

Abstract

Efforts to green Israel's desert have been a part of a territorial project with a climate management side in the ongoing ethnic conflict over lands in the region. Colonial discourses, equalizing Judaization with ecological improvement have served to erase the resilience and sociability of the Negev Bedouins and legally deny their entitlement to lands. Bedouins lifestyle, is often conceived as a threat to the desert progress, and as “unrecognized" the Bedouins have been deprived infrastructures and rights that may connect them to the land.
These ethnic-territorial conflicts have produced uneven geographies of climate vulnerability, in which energy poverty is a salient factor. This paper explores what is being generated beyond energy itself, by the emergence and informal use of solar panels in unrecognized Bedouin communities in the Negev. The paper draws first on Political ecologists' concern with the way social subjectivities are constituted through struggle over natural resources within a context of territorial conflict. Specifically, we look at ways in which indigenous and gender identities transform with the introduction of solar panels to villages, and how they articulate with new environmental subjectivities. Second, we ask how energy projects are connected to Bedouin struggles over other resources such as water and land. Lastly, the paper explores the value of looking into renwables in the margins: in what way the informal Bedouin use of solar panels transform the notion of the desert as a Zionist - capitalist frontier, and how the concept of frontier is granted new meaning in the process