Aeolian Enclosures: Wind, Sky and Infrastructural Publics in contemporary Ireland.

The skyline is an involved and entangled thing. The anthropologist Tim Ingold reminds us that from the earliest times, there has been a knotting together of earth and sky. High places, mounds and elevations have been invested with meaning (Ingold, 2007). Drawing upon Heidegger, he notes that there is ‘no life, in short, in a world where earth and sky do not mix and mingle’ (Ingold, 2010). The skyline is a great meeting place, bringing disparate elements together in lines of sight, prospects, views and panoramas, whose ownership is never entirely fixed. Except of course, with the rapid expansion of wind-energy systems and the energy landscapes they produce, this commons is now subject to enclosure. Drawing upon the concept of Aeolian Extraction devised by Howes and Boyer (2016), this paper will attend to the response of various infrastructural publics to wind energy developments related to national targets for renewable electricity by 2020, where an estimated 5,500-6,000 MW of wind generation is demanded. The paper proposes that the manner in which these publics have experienced these developments reveal complex infrastructural states, which speak to tensions at the intersection of the body, place, technology and the sky. Simultaneously they represent the edge of contemporary transformation, often meshing places, skylines and communities with vibrant matters related to financialization, mythology, energy regulation, memory and privatization, playing out at multiple and overlapping scales.