Introduction
Green transition has given rise to new conflicts relating to construction of energy devices such as wind turbines, hydroelectric power plants, solar heating systems, and biogas plants that have been established not least to reduce carbon emissions and mitigate climate change. These devices have been opposed on the grounds of concerns about the quality of life for local residents, economic effects, the impact on the landscape, biological diversity, and others. This has led to heated conflicts, particularly among local inhabitants, the media, and municipalities, and also with national authorities, NGOs, and academic experts involved on both sides. The conflicts illustrate that, even if green transition is agreed to be a desirable goal, its realization is not just an instrumental question of implementation, but involves negotiation between different concerns.
The notion of locality or place is central in these conflicts, in a triple sense. First, the conflicts thematically evolve around the possible construction of a renewable energy device at a specific site. The conflicts are about something at a particular locality, not about renewable energy, wind turbines, or solar energy in general. Second, place is often invoked in a more emphatic sense as possessing a special value for a particular group of people, because of qualities of the natural environment, economic development, or personal attachment. Finally, the conflicts are often played out in a local public arena, that is, in the local press or on social network sites, with participants from a specific area as a driving force.
This chapter will address the issue by examining voices against the construction of wind turbines at specific localities in Denmark as they play out on protest sites on Facebook. The Danish experience is of wider interest, since Denmark is among the world frontrunners when it comes to the use of wind energy for electricity supply, both land based and offshore. In 2017, wind turbines produced 43.7% of the electricity supply in Denmark, a share that has increased steadily from 19.4% in 2009.1 Protests against the construction of wind turbines have occurred since the 1990s, but have increased over the last decade, as more of the turbines have been deployed. The Landsforeningen Naboer til Kæmpevindmøller (LNK) (National Association of Neighbors of Gigantic Wind Turbines) was founded in 2009 and lists on its website more than local 200 protest groups, most of them from the Jutland peninsula in the west of the country. As a result of the protests, projected wind turbine projects have been postponed or abandoned by several municipalities. Organizations countering the protests exist as well, for instance the Dansk Vindmølleforening (Danish Wind Turbine Owners’ Association), but these seem to be less vocal in the local debates. Organizations such as Danmarks Naturfredningsforening (Danish Society for Nature Conservation) have generally welcomed wind turbines, but at the same time raised concerns about their placement at particular locations.
Instead of simply dismissing the protest voices as NIMBYism (‘not in my back yard’), it is arguably more productive to examine the arguments and concerns actually put forward (Devine-Wright 2009). This chapter will do so using a discourse analytic approach, focusing on the ways in which the Facebook groups ascribe meaning to environmental interventions at particular locations.
By understanding the protest Facebook sites as issue publics (Bruns and Highfield 2016) and applying a network approach to the public sphere, this chapter pays particular attention to the import and appropriation of discursive material from other public spaces. Operationalized via discourse studies notions of intertextuality and recontextualization, the analysis examines how the Facebook sites bring in a variety of other texts and voices and how the appropriation of these in the digital space helps make sense of controversies over wind turbines.
Theoretical Background
Although climate change and green transition have received considerable attention within the field of environmental communication in recent years (see, for instance, Eide et al. 2010; Stevenson and Dryzek 2014; Hansen and Machin 2015; Painter et al. 2016), conflicts over the erection of environmental energy devices at specific localities have hitherto only been studied to a limited degree. The few studies that do exist consider conflicts over wind turbines (Rudolph 2014; Boon and Reimer 2015; Horsbøl 2019), a hydroelectric power plant (Carvalho et al. 2016), and a tidal power plant (Ko et al. 2011). The studies demonstrate that green conflicts are not limited to a specific geographic area, but can be found at several sites around the globe. However, further studies are needed to explore these conflicts in more depth.
From the perspective of environmental communication, the conflicts are interesting for at least two reasons. First, at a practical level, they seem to pose a significant challenge to green transition, at least given that “[t]his war over ‘green’ concepts will occur more and more around the world in the twenty-first century” (Ko et al. 2011, p. 15). Second, at the level of principle, the conflicts point to the interpretability of notions such as ‘sustainability,’ ‘environmental,’ and ‘green transition.’ The conflicts provide examples of negotiations and struggles over the meaning of these more general notions, in particular over what a fair and just green transition should look like. The practical and principal levels are connected, however, since the struggles illustrate that, even if green transition is deemed to be a desirable goal, realizing it will need to take into account different understandings of what constitute environmental values and how the different values are to be weighed against one another. To realize green transition is therefore not just an instrumental question of implementation, but involves negotiations relating to what it means to care about the environment and how the different meanings can be integrated. Understanding the specific conflicts over the erection of wind turbines, as in the present study, may thus prepare us for dealing constructively with other struggles to come in the process of green transition.
The conflicts over environmental energy devices play out in different public spaces. As one of these spaces, Facebook represents a media format, often referred to as ‘social media’ or ‘social network sites,’ which allows participants to sidestep the gatekeeper function of journalism and communicate directly with a wider public. As such, Facebook offers new opportunities also for environmental communication, not least for individuals or groups which may not have easy access to the news media. However, it is worth stressing that Facebook should not be seen in isolation, but as an increasingly integrated part of the public sphere and its flows of discourse in a ‘hybrid’ media system (Chadwick 2013).
In the public debates on wind turbines in Denmark, a large number of Facebook groups have been formed by protesters at different localities. They confront the erection of wind turbines in a specific area, stressing the consequences for a specific community. As such, they form instances of issue publics (Dahlgreen 2009) or sphericules (Bruns and Highfield 2016), which have a narrower thematic focus and exist on a shorter time span than the traditional news media. However, in tackling their specific issues, they also draw on sources and bring in voices from the wider public sphere. They can therefore be seen in the framework of public sphere conceptualizations that stress connections, networks, and flows between different arenas, rather than events within one public arena (Habermas 1992; Mansbridge et al. 2012; Chadwick et al. 2016). Within this framework of a networked public sphere, it is important to ask how and to what extent different publics are connected, how themes and voices move from one arena to another, and what these discursive exports and imports mean for the specific public arenas. These questions guide the present study.
Tentatively, the protest Facebook groups may also be described as counter publics (Fraser 1990; Kaiser and Puschmann 2017). According to the latter researchers, a counter public “opposes the hegemonic view and is excluded by the mainstream and/or excludes itself from the mainstream to regroup” (Kaiser and Puschmann 2017, p. 373). Whether this is the case for the Facebook groups in the present study remains to be investigated. However, as this study focuses on the communication in selected Facebook groups, the question of an exclusion b...