Graduate Student, University of California, Irvine
Contributor, Platypus, The CASTAC Blog
About Nandita
Nandita Badami is a graduate student in Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. Her research considers the politics of sunlight as it gets enrolled into modern regimes of energy in India.
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Contributions to Platypus, The CASTAC Blog
View all of Nandita's posts on Platypus, The CASTAC Blog.
Description/Classification/Threshold: Experiments with Renewable Energy Taxonomy
This is not renewable energy: Nor is this some clever, Magritte-esque meta-commentary on how it is impossible represent or think about renewable energy separate from the technologies that harness it. No, it is simply an issue of taxonomy: hydropower is only counted as “renewable” some of the time. This is confusing, because if the term “renewable” has any meaning, after all, it is first and foremost a description of a process, one that specifically refers to the fact that the natural resource from which said energy is produced either does not significantly deplete upon use to begin with, or can be easily replenished within a human time scale. Hydropower, harnessed through the most abundant substance on our “blue planet”, seems to easily fit the description, which makes the exception worth exploring. (more…) (read more...)
Counting on Zero: Imaginaries of Energy and Waste in the New Green Economy
When the Indian government promoted the large scale introduction of solar energy for powering traditional charkhas (wooden wheels used to spin khadi or homemade cloth) in early 2016, the fabric was rebranded “zero carbon” and sold as “green khadi.” Few journalists covering the new development seemed to notice that khadi in its original form was already zero carbon: woven on wooden spinning wheels without electricity or additional machinery, the production process of khadi is inherently environmentally friendly. The rebranding of khadi as “zero carbon” in the face of its waning popularity marks a decisive cultural shift away from traditional frameworks in which the cloth has historically been given importance. Khadi has historically represented the overthrow of colonialism, the virtues of labor, and the mantra of self-reliance popularized by Gandhi during the freedom struggle. In the early twenty-first century, however, khadi is being rebranded for an environmentally conscious global market. The invocation of (read more...)