Extractive apprehensiveness: ‘green’ energy infrastructures in post-coalonial England

What new forms of extractivism are occurring in the Global North to support decarbonisation? I answer this through a case study of Winning – a former North East English pit village. I describe how some residents’ umwelts, their experiences and understandings the world, evolved and how regional and national efforts to decarbonise threatened it. Brutality marked coal mining’s history in North East England. Its taskscape transformed rural areas into industrial zones and rewrote both human relations and those with other living beings. Coal also fuelled industrialisation and imperialist expansion, coalonialism, and heated England’s homes. Winning’s colliery shuttered in the 1990s. Some were left only with memories of a lost world. Others adapted their umwelt now encompassed refigured relations with a remediated landscape, the flora and fauna it gathered to it, and the ghosts of what once was. It was now a ‘post-coalonial’ world - marked by what coal had wrought yet not entirely defined by it. I explore how the proposed creation of new extractivist ‘green’ energy infrastructure, a solar farm, stirred up feelings of anxiety as it threatened both residents’ newly established ‘post-coalonial’ umwelt and their relations with the landscape, while exporting the energy generated to elsewhere in England.