Taking a bird’s-eye view: infrastructuring bird-turbine relations during wind power controversies

Abstract

In this paper, we explore bird-turbine relations, which are becoming a point of contention in controversies over local wind-farm projects. We conceptualize potential wind farms, together with the planning process preceding them, as a single ‘infrastructural arrangement’ that organizes how environments are known and affected by wind farms. Within the context of this infrastructural arrangement, we trace how two groups – opponents and developers of wind farms – discover birds as potential allies in defining specific bird-turbine relations that will help in either stopping or promoting wind farm projects. We observe two types of bird-turbine relations. In the first, which is present in current environmental regulations and is mobilized by wind farm opponents, birds are considered fragile and endangered by turbines. The second, proposed by a developer, problematizes current regulation through an alternative relationship of co-existence between birds and turbines, according to which birds are more robust and turbines less dangerous. This account of birdwatching leads us to discuss the many forms of politics that occur within or against the infrastructural arrangements of wind farm planning. We find that these politics have important consequences for whether or not wind farm projects are realized and for the way wind farms affect their surrounding environments.