Radical environmental transformations in the face of renewed and green destruction, La Guajira, Colombia

Abstract

In La Guajira, Colombia, in the 21st century, coal mining has increased, and wind parks and wind turbines are being planned, which will affect the Wayúu people territorially, environmentally, and culturally. The demands of NGOs, grassroots organizations, and Wayúu leaders seek to position alternatives to extractivism, articulated with energy transition and postextractives transitions’ proposals. Faced with the demands of local processes, companies and institutions also pose energy transitions, which respond to other perspectives and interests, since they continue to be anchored to socio-environmental and structural inequalities and a socioecological fix that reproduce the same effects of extractivism. From the critical debates on green extractivism and the proposals for radical environmental transformation, I analyze the energy transition proposals around an institutionalized governance and infrastructures of inequality. At the same time, I arise from the demands of the Wayúu people to propose that a rethinking of socio-environmental relationships to radical environmental transformations. This transformation will be based on demands of relational environmental justice that take up Wayuu ways of life and reposition human-non-human relationships under other ontologies, and proposals. The work was carried out collaboratively, based on an ethnographic work and interviews with various actors.