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Abstract
Landscape and birds are an important cause of blocking wind power projects. This paper investigates the question of whether birds and wind power can be part of a same landscape and what type of landscape this could compose. We do so by following birds, birdwatchers and wind power developers in their attempt to compose such a landscape in the South of France. Our perspective focuses on the attachments that animals or landscape might develop or entice humans to develop. We show that the process by which such a wind power landscape is composed engages birds into successive translations, which ultimately translate bird intelligence in composing with the wind into a quality of the landscape. As a result, such a landscape emerges from a net of relations and has a quality which is not necessarily visually readable: it is accountable to the entities which have been brought into representation through/for its making.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their valuable insights. This work was undertaken with the financial support of the ‘Conseil Français de l'Energie’, the French Ministry for the Environment (MEDAD—Program PDD ‘Paysage et Développement Durable’), the French Agency for the Environment and the Energy (ADEME) and the Region Ile-de-France (R2DS).
Notes
1. Deleuze defines this ethology of affect as follows: ‘‘an Art, art of ethics itself: to organize the good encounters, to compose real-life relations, to form powers, to experiment’’ (Deleuze, Citation2003, p. 161; authors’ translation of ‘‘un Art, art de l'Ethique elle-même: organiser les bonnes rencontres, composer les rapports vécus, former les puissances, expérimenter’’. Following Deleuzian aesthetics, it is possible to conceive land-planning as the art of experimenting with new modes of life; see Labussière (Citation2007).
2. Authors' translation of: ‘‘Par affects, j'entends les affections du corps par lesquelles la puissance d'agir de ce corps même est augmentée ou diminuée’’ (Ethique, III, def. 3; Deleuze, Citation2003, pp. 69 – 70).
3. ‘‘with meat, I make my own flesh’’ ; authors' translation of: ‘‘avec de la viande, je fais de la chair à moi’’) (Deleuze, Citation1981).
4. ‘‘nobody knows in advance the affect of which he/she is capable’’ (Deleuze, Citation2003, p. 168), ‘‘what one fish is capable of is not what another fish is capable of’’ (Deleuze, Citation1980) (authors’ translation).
5. The ‘constructive’ notion of ‘site’ underpinning the analysis draws upon Nadaï (Citation2007),Footnote28 in which it is defined as follows: ‘‘The project work suspends the sedimented uses in order to allow for a recomposition of the place under a new spatiality. The site [first] defined as the place subjected to the work of the project, is thus [a temporary and] plastic state of the place which is the place in suspense of its uses.’’
6. Interviews were conducted in French and translated into English by the authors.
7. Horizontal (rolling) thermals are present over the surface of the sea, but gulls are the only birds able to use them for gliding. Raptors and storks only use vertical thermals.
8. The French LPO's current Sauvegarder Observer S'engager 2007 advertisement is reminiscent of this, showing three different figures of engagement in bird protection: protection, observation, engagement. See http://www.lpo.fr/adhesion/sos/index.html (accessed 19 November 2007).
9. The etymology of ‘jizz’ is disputed, but one assumption traces it back to the GISS, meaning the ‘General Impression of Shape and Size of a Plane’, an acronym used by the Second World War aircraft spotters (MacDonald, Citation2002).
10. Emphasis by the authors.
11. Interview with Georges, ornithologist, former LPO staff.
12. Piecemeal projects were set up throughout the 1990s before sustained development came with the implementation of fixed tariffs for wind power electricity in 2000. As of 2003, few wind parks were in place (eight parks, 59 turbines, 43.3 MW).
13. In 2006, this scheme became legally binding through its inclusion in a local Scheme of Territorial Coherency.
14. According to a local mayor's estimate, the French wind power tax amounts to about [euro]20 000 MW/year.
15. French levels of governance do not overlap with the ones usually covered by the Anglo-Saxon terminology. For the sake of simplicity, we use a terminology found in international descriptions of the French administrative organization (OECD, Citation2006): ‘Municipality(ies)’ or ‘community’ refer to the French commune or municipalité, an entity more or less corresponding to the English parish or local government, although it is not a governmental administration in France; mayors or local councillors are their elected representative; ‘department’ refers to the French départment, a sub-regional administrative division; ‘region’ refers to the French region; ‘ministerial fields services’ refers to the regional or departmental administration.
16. Jamie Lorimer provides a very sound analysis of these dimensions. His analysis of bird ‘charisma’ in relation to biodiversity protection in the UK (2007) includes a general description of the affective dimension (epiphany, jouissance) and competence underlying birdwatchers' engagement. His analysis of corncrakes counting in the UK (J. Lorimer, Citation2006) provides an in-depth analysis of the way in which such competence and affectivity are specifically performed in a given case and situation, for instance, by customising ‘good practices’ and tuning into the bird (developing a nocturnal sonic landscape familiarity, re-organizing one's body in order to hear all-around) (J. Lorimer, Citation2008). We do not immerse ourselves into similar aspects in this paper. We underline the spatial dimension and the topology of the observing assemblage, which includes the wind turbines.
17. The terminology used here should be noted. ‘Strategy’ clearly endows birds with a capacity of anticipation, which in turn endows them with a priori agency in the situation. By contrast, the idea of ‘reaction’, commonly used in ‘scientific’ psychology and ethology, has been questioned for its role in reducing animals conduct to non-intentional behaviours and in marking off academic science from so-called amateur observation (Despret, Citation2007).
18. Probability for the result obtained to be wrong.
19. Emphasis by the authors.
20. These and the immediately preceding descriptions are categories of an ethology of affects as described by Deleuze (Citation2003, pp. 65, 167 – 168).
21. Again, this shows that a passerine and a raptor can have much in common in the way they are affected by and cross a line of turbines.
22. In this, our analysis is close to Albena Yaneva's analysis of the process of architectural design (Yaneva, Citation2005). Her case proceeded out of paper models, ours proceeds out of living entities.
23. We do not mean that this is specific to the politics of affects. The politics of forms might also be concerned; by merely reproducing existing classifications, it does not offer possibilities of a new ethos that might be less detrimental to all parties.
24. We borrow this notion to Jamie Lorimer, who develops it in order to capture the way in which non-human entities might influence their perception and subsequent evaluation by human beings:
Nonhuman charisma can best be defined as the distinguishing properties of a non- human entity or process that determine its perception by humans and its subsequent evaluation. In contrast to earlier understandings, in which charisma was understood as an innate, god-given property, I will here outline a more relational approach. Nonhuman charisma emerges in relation to the parameters of different technologically enabled, but still corporeally constrained, human bodies, inhabiting different cultural contexts. (J. Lorimer, Citation2007, p. 915).
25. We borrow the expression from Bruno Latour (Citation2008).
26. Interview with a wind power developer, 10 April 2008.
27. In so doing, this analysis works its way in between representational and non-representational strands of landscape theory (Wylie, Citation2007).
28. For the unpublished English version of the paper, see Nadaï (Citation2004).