Paper short abstract:

The paper takes into account the conception of meteorological agency and political authority of the Huave indian confronting it with the ‘green’ sustainability and climate change policy in the context of the conflicts generated by wind farm projects in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec (Mexico).

Paper long abstract:

In the last twenty years, the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, South-Western Mexico, has become the scene of several wind farm projects that have resulted in growing disputes throughout the region where Huave and Zapotec indians usually fish and farm. The paper analyzes this friction under a cosmopolitics approach with the purpose to achieve a better comprehension of climate change and sustainability from one local perspective.

In the local existential horizon, the agency of meteorological elements takes evidence phenomenologically in the morphogenesis of the landscape. The everyday knowledge, together with the mythical narrative collected among Huave indians, tell of a 'co-agency' between human beings and meteorological elements aimed at shaping the landscape. In this perspective, Huave people refers to the contemporary manifestation of seasonal climate change calling into question moral responsibilities and the local construction of the idea of authority.

This cosmopolitics of natural elements is mirrored in the ideology of unanimity that stands as a moral reference for the political behavior of the authorities and of the communal assembly. The massive installation of turbines seems to threaten this ideology: the wind farm project is conceived as a further factor of vulnerability because it goes together with corruption, factionalism and because it anticipates the loss of food sovereignty linked to the risk that the lagoon ecosystem will be upset in the future. The dramatic consequence is that the renewable industry originally conceived as a response to the climate change, turns out to be unsustainable.