The State of Energy

When you flick on a light switch, what do you see? What is happening? Depending on where you are in the world, the electricity illuminating that lightbulb in front of you comes from a particular aggregate of energy sources. If you hail from southwestern Ontario, the energy mix is likely to be a combination of nuclear energy, hydroelectric, wind, natural gas, and miscellaneous renewables including solar and biomass.11“Ontario’s Energy Sector,” Ontario Energy Board, https://www.oeb.ca/about-us/mission-and-mandate/ontarios-energy-sector. If you find yourself in the small island developing state (SIDS) of Mauritius in the western Indian Ocean, that mix is more likely to be composed of non-renewable energy sources (79%), mostly derived from imported coal and natural gas, and renewable sources (21%), mainly in the form of locally grown sugarcane biomass and its discards.22“Energy and Water Statistics—2017,” Statistics Mauritius, http://statsmauritius.govmu.org/English/Publications/Documents/2018/EI1386/Energy_Yr17.pdf.

Electricity is often perceived to be an ephemeral, fleeting substance, and thus difficult to study; it is transient, instantaneous, and notoriously elusive to pin down.33See Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer, “Aeolian Politics,” Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory 16, no. 1 (2015), and Akhil Gupta, “An Anthropology of Electricity from the Global South,” Cultural Anthropology 30, 4 (2015): 555–68. However, as several energy scholars have recently elucidated, electricity—along with its production and its discards—is materially grounded in particular histories and political geographies.44See Antina Von Schnitzler, “Traveling Technologies: Infrastructure, Ethical Regimes, and the Materiality of Politics in South Africa,” Cultural Anthropology 28, no 4 (2013): 670–93; Gabrielle Hecht, “Interscalar Vehicles for an African Anthropocene: On Waste, Temporality, and Violence,” Cultural Anthropology 33, no 1 (2018): 109–41; Gökçe Günel, “What Is Carbon Dioxide? When Is Carbon Dioxide?” PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 39, no. 1 (2016): 33–45; and Gretchen Bakke, The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future (New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2016). Where and how energy is produced matters.

In Mauritius, the local energy supply depends on a socially combustive55I use the phrase “socially combustive” to highlight the charged emotions that surround discussions of energy production on the island. mix of fossil fuels and renewable energy sources drawn from seemingly fixed, material landscapes. One such energy feedstock, bagasse—a fibrous byproduct of the island’s sugarcane industry and derivative fuel used in colonial-era sugar processing—is in the process of being converted into a modern, sustainable biofuel feedstock. This move is driven by the government’s desire to decrease dependency on foreign fossil fuels while capitalizing on increasing demands for a local, sustainable biofuel economy.66“Mauritius Renewable Energy Act 2015,” Legal Supplement to the Government Gazette of Mauritius No. 100, 3 October 2015, http://mauritiusassembly.govmu.org/English/acts/Documents/2015/act1115.pdf. Mauritian state-owned agencies and private enterprise, in particular, have also pushed for local green-energy solutions in line with governmental dreams for national energy security fueled by renewable energy sources. At present, approximately sixty-six percent of the island’s total energy mix comes from combination of bagasse and coal combustion produced by the country’s four sugar-millers turned power-producers, each managing its own thermal power station.77During the six-month sugarcane harvest, thermal power stations generate electricity from bagasse feedstock. Outside of the harvest season, these same thermal stations rely on imported coal to substitute bagasse.

Although the ready availability of sugarcane discards makes bagasse an appealing energy feedstock, the success story of byproduct-to-fuel source is not as green as it is purported to be. While energy generated from bagasse seemingly “recuperates” value from waste, this process obscures bitter histories of sugarcane plantation labour and the energy extracted from enslaved peoples forced to farm it.88Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin Books, 1986); Vijaya Teelock, Bitter Sugar: Sugar and Slavery in 19th-Century Mauritius (Moka, Mauritius: Mahatma Gandhi Institute, 1998). So, how does sugarcane, a commodity crop rooted in colonialism, become converted into a driver of economic growth bound up in dreams of sustainable development?

In order to understand how a nascent green energy sector is shored up by plantation economies, it is imperative that we turn our attention to the material dimensions of power and waste. Discard studies scholar Max Liboiron, in particular, has called attention to the importance of studying systems of waste and wasting as social, economic, and political problems, as opposed to technocratic ones.99Max Liboiron, “The What and the Why of Discard Studies,” Discard Studies, 1 September 2018, https://discardstudies.com/2018/09/01/the-what-and-the-why-of-discard-studies/. Using the analytic of “discarding” instead of waste or wasting, Liboiron further draws attention to the ways that wasted materials, as well as “people, landscapes, futures, [and] ways of life,” are also made expendable as matter-out-of-place,1010Ibid. or matter not readily available for capitalist extraction.

One small story may unearth the rippling effects of such complex relations. In the summer of 2016, in the midst of my doctoral research on “green” energy transitions, I was invited to participate in a Plant Propagation training workshop at the Mauritius Sugar Industry Research Institute (MSIRI). Aimed at budding horticulturalists and retirees, the workshop taught plant grafting techniques, as well as how to care for local varietals and the proper handling of gardening hormones and equipment. During our leisurely tea breaks, I had cultivated a relationship with Michel, one of the long-term administrative staff members, who during tea one day, shared the story of the program’s origins. “You know,” he explained, “at the outset, this program used to be for sugar labourers. It was to retrain them after [the sugar industry] ‘restructuring’…[it wasn’t] for hobbyists.”1111In 2006, the Mauritian Ministry of Agriculture released a report to address what it termed a national crisis in sugar production, called the worst economic threat in the island’s history. The report declared that Mauritius would adopt a concentrated model of sugar production in order to protect the economy from collapse. This action plan aimed at transforming the sugar industry into “sugar clusters” meant to streamline production while diversifying sugar’s potential use-values through derivative products (e.g. molasses, sucrose ethanol, bagasse). Alongside this sugar cluster streamlining came “right-sizing,” the consolidation of the industry’s workforce (MAAS SEA 2006:13). In other words, labourers had been made “redundant” through industry downsizing and needed to be reskilled for other sectors. Such stories are not singular occurrences in Mauritius.1212In Mauritius, agricultural “bust and boom” cycles have been long entangled in the political and economic occupations on the island. Historian Richard Allen (1999) has highlighted sugar barons’ practices of selling off unprofitable landholdings to would-be smallholder farmers during periods of economic hardship—periods later to become known as the grand et petit morcellements.

Submerged in the story of sugarcane are enduring legacies of exploitation, extraction, and discarding. Imagine the intertwined histories of global capital, slavery, and indentureship that terraformed an island thick with endemic ebony wood into mono-crop sugarcane plantation economies. As a thrice-colonized sugar plantation enterprise and enduring sugar producer, Mauritius shares with the Caribbean a long history of raw material production at the service of industrial capitalism.1313See Richard B. Allen, Slaves, Freedmen and Indentured Laborers in Colonial Mauritius (Cambridge University Press, 1999); Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin Books, 1986); Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). The original inhabitants of the island, the ill-fated Dodo bird, were displaced by circulating flows of similarly displaced peoples through processes of enslavement and indenture that were woven into the very fabric of Mauritian society.1414Jean Houbert, “Mauritius: Independence and Dependence,” The Journal of Modern African Studies 19, no. 1 (1981): 75–105. What violence, injuries, uprootings, and upheavals were met out in order for such “Plantationocene” logics to take form?1515Donna Haraway has written that the “Plantationocene” stands in for “the devastating transformation of diverse kinds of human-tended farms, pastures, and forests into extractive and enclosed plantations, relying on slave labour and other forms of exploited, alienated, and usually spatially transported labour.” Donna Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin,” Environmental Humanities 6 (2015): 162. See also Anna L. Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: Princeton University Press: 2015). What livelihoods and ways of living where discarded to make way for this system? What uprootings continue to take place?

Current systems of power extraction do not break from past colonial enterprises, but rather shore up them up. As Christina Sharpe contends, “in the wake, the past that is not past reappears, always, to rupture the present.”1616Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 9. For Sharpe, being “in the wake” means a mourning of, but also reckoning with, the rippling effects of an enduring, far-reaching colonialism; that is, a colonization that does not end with a formalized decolonization but submerges and resurfaces over time. Drawing on anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot,1717In Silencing the Past (1997), Trouillot carefully interrogates the ways that power weaves together certain histories and while simultaneously and strategically unravelling others. Sharpe highlights the ways that the “past” has not passed. Being in the wake is a matter of holding to account how colonialism’s effects reverberate through time, amplifying the enduring injuries against enslaved peoples, their descendants, and colonized environments on a planetary scale.

In moments of such resurfacing, what does it mean when “green” energy systems are built upon the enduring legacies of indentured and enslaved peoples’ labour?1818Often excluded from the story of contemporary sugarcane production is the unaccounted-for agricultural knowledges taken from enslaved and indentured peoples. For Mauritian labour activists and environmentalists, sugarcane’s dirty past greatly problematizes its potential as an ecological and socially viable source of power. Green energy cannot be socially “sustainable” if it is founded upon systems of exploitation and extraction—systems, that in turn, maintain sugar barons’ hold on power. In other words, shoring up a contemporary “green” energy industry in Mauritius cannot be disassociated from plantation forms of power. As Mauritius comes to grips with its energy future, what counts as “sustainable” practice matters. To redress these concerns, several labour and energy activists in Mauritius have aimed to disconnect renewable energy feedstocks from any association with colonial exploitation, specifically wresting it from the control of former sugar baron families—some of whom presently run the sugar mills-turned-thermal power plants in Mauritius.

At present, several environmental groups and labour networks are attempting create more livable futures. Some argue that sugarcane and its discards cannot exist as a socially just, “sustainable” energy feedstock.1919I draw attention to the sociocultural dynamics of “sustainability,” which tend to be overshadowed by the seemingly singular environmental dimensions of sustainable development discourses. The way forward, instead, lies in environmental justice initiatives such as solar energy cooperatives. Other interlocutors have noted that solar energy panels are cost-prohibitive and therefore unattainable for the vast majority of Mauritians.2020Of related concern is the reliance on petrochemicals in solar panel manufacturing processes.

Other activists and industry-stakeholders have argued that bagasse can be an important transitional fuel source that supports smallholder farmers’ livelihoods—and their knowledge—while responsibly utilizing plant discards for energy consumption. In these disagreements, we find underlying refusals2121Carole McGranahan, “Theorizing Refusal: An Introduction,” Cultural Anthropology 31, no. 3 (2016): 319–25. to accept common, fixed understandings of sustainable energy forms—differences that have much to teach us about the contingencies and contexts of power.