Passive and active solar systems at the Himalayan Institute of Alternative, Ladakh @ Ashish Kothari
We live in paradoxical times. As we have discussed in previous iterations of this periodical, the climate crisis has become increasingly visible and undeniable. Yet, the clearer its impacts appear, the further away we seem from finding a real way out of the civilizational collapse that produced it. The illusion of a single world guided by progress and development has crumbled. Today, capitalism no longer sustains itself primarily through production but through the cannibalization of reproduction: devouring, destroying, and sacrificing in order to generate profit. The dialectic of value and waste runs through every dimension of life, revealing sacrifice not as an anomaly or an ‘externality’ but as the very DNA of capitalism. From Gaza—the brutal epitome of settler colonialism and the collapse of liberalism’s promises of multiculturality and recongition—to territories transformed into extractive enclaves –in North and South alike– in the name of a “green transition”, what is at stake is nothing less than the end of the promises of modernity and the waning hegemony of the West.
Yet the decline of capitalist modernity is not cause for celebration. As many theorists such as Nancy Fraser, Mackenzie Wark, Gustavo Esteva and Anselm Jappe have warned, the crisis of this system may lead not to emancipation but to more violent, cannibalistic, and necropolitical regimes. Gaza offers a glimpse of this future, exemplifying what Indigenous academic and activist Kyle Powys Whyte calls an epistemology of crisis: a mode through which capitalism legitimizes new colonial incursions and deeper exploitation of reproductive life under the guise of necessity.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the domain of energy. Nowhere is this clearer than in the domain of energy. Building on the initial discussion we had in issue 15 of this magazine, titled "The Energy Question: From Colonial Modernity to Decolonizing Alternatives", this issue seeks to focus on understanding the way in which energy plays a central role in grasping—and at the same time identifying—pathways out of the deadlock posed by the structural crisis of capitalism. Here, a new “there is no alternative” is imposed through the discourse of a “transition” to so-called renewable energies. Elevated as a global humanitarian imperative, this transition reaffirms—rather than dismantles—the violent frameworks of extraction, militarization, and dispossession that have always defined capitalism. As environmental historian Jean-Baptiste Fressoz (2024) reminds us, the very term transition is a “plastic word”: a malleable fiction born from neoliberal governance. Energy regimes have never been about substitution but about accumulation. Wood gave way to coal without being abandoned; oil was layered on top of coal; and today “renewables” are being added without displacing fossil fuels, whose dominance in absolute terms has remained virtually unchanged for decades. The mythology of a clean break, the idea of an “era” of different sources (such as wood, coal, oil, or nuclear) or a march from “dirty past to green future”, is part of modernity’s ideology of progress.
The fetish of “renewables” obscures the continuity of extractivism, as if new technologies could erase the histories of violence embedded in their infrastructures. Ivan Illich long ago warned against conceiving energy as a commensurable unit—something abstracted into kilowatts, measurable and exchangeable—because such equivalence erases the irreducible abundance of life. Under capitalism, the very category of “renewable energy” turns relational forms of sustenance into scarcity and commodification, enclosing vitality within the logic of accumulation.
This mythology also hides the fact that every energy regime (the way capitalism organizes economy-nature relations) has been forged through imperial violence, capitalist expansion, and social control. Energy is not simply a technical resource; it is a political and spatial project, a means of organizing life and labor. From the steam engine powering colonial plantations, to hydroelectric dams flooding Indigenous lands, to lithium extraction under military protection, energy infrastructures have always been entangled with hierarchies of race, class, gender, and androcentrism. Today’s green transition continues this trajectory, as the global energy regime scrambles for cheap minerals, land and labor in the name of decarbonization reveals that accumulation—not emancipation—guides its course.
Against this backdrop, alternative ways of conceiving life and energy emerge. In Relacionalidad, Arturo Escobar, Michal Osterweil, and Kriti Sharma (2025) propose an understanding of existence that departs from the separations imposed by modernity/coloniality. Relationality names a way of being, knowing, and acting grounded in webs of interdependence between humans, nonhumans, and the more-than-human world. It is not simply about social ties, but about recognizing that life itself emerges through reciprocity, care, and co-creation. Relationality thus offers both an ontology and an ethics: a challenge to mastery, possession, and extraction, and an affirmation of conviviality and mutual sustenance.
Crucially, relationality is not an abstract philosophy but a lived practice rooted in Indigenous, communal, and insurgent traditions that have persisted despite centuries of colonial violence. To embody relationality is to confront the fractures and separations imposed by capitalist modernity —between nature and culture, body and mind, individual and community—and to nurture practices of reciprocity and pluriversal coexistence. In this sense, relationality directly contests the abstraction of energy into commensurable units, re-grounding it in territory, memory, and the body. Meanwhile, the disorientation created by overlapping crises feeds other, darker currents. Conspiracy theories, climate populism, and eco-fascist narratives channel despair into racist and patriarchal nostalgias. These are not marginal phenomena but political strategies that instrumentalize crises for reactionary ends. Against them, communities around the world insist that energy is not reducible to thermodynamics or to numbers on a grid. Energy is always relation: to territory, to history, to the body, to memory, to language, to autonomy. It is never just supply and demand—it is meaning, resistance and (re-)existence.
This issue of the GTAGlobal Tapestry of Alternatives Periodical brings together contributions that embody this relationality. After a section with updates form the GTA, its WeaversThey are local, regional, or national networks or organizations that connects or consists of multiple Alternatives on different themes/spheres, in an inter-sectorial way. A global network cannot be a Waever, neither a thematic one. It should be a collective process of some kind, rather than only a single individual or single organization. By being a "weaver", they are committed to participate in the GTA, developing ways of dialogue, interconnection, collaboration and solidarity with other Weavers. GTA promotes the interconnection of the Weavers, identifying [[:weavers:criteria|a series common criteria for the weaving of Alternatives]]. Examples: Vikalp Sangam and Crianza Mutua. and EndorsersThey are organizations, collectives or thematic networks that publicly expresses its support to the GTA process and it's approved by it. Examples: [[endorsements:index|Full list of current Endorsers]], the issue starts with Arturo Massol Deyá as he tells the story of Casa Pueblo in Puerto Rico, where an energy insurrection has built community microgrids as a form of sovereignty and justice, far beyond mere technological substitution. Esperanza Martínez revisits the decade-long struggle that led to Ecuador’s 2023 referendum to keep oil underground. She shows how Yasuní has become both a symbol of utopian possibility and a heterotopia of sacrifice, revealing the contradictions of extractivism while opening horizons for defending life and territory. Alex Jensen revisits the notion of appropriate technology, rooted in traditional cultures and principles of sufficiency and cooperation, as a radical counter to the myth of high-tech progress.
From Chile, María Paz Aedo and Gabriela Cabaña guide us across deserts and steppes threatened by “green hydrogen” megaprojects, showing how Indigenous peoples like the chango remind us that “Patagonia is already green.” Madhuresh Kumar, reports and reflects on the seminar series: The geopolitics of energy transitions and emerging sacrifice zones organized by the GTA. In it, Kumar discusses the case of African countries and their struggles where the “just transition” is often disguised as new forms of colonial plunder, and movements are rising to reclaim futures from below.
Other pieces offer grounded alternatives. Neelakshi Joshi and Ashish Kothari describe the situation in Ladakh, where community-led solar innovations and demands for autonomy clash with India’s top-down imposition of mega-projects, raising the fundamental question: who decides the future of energy? Erik Post and Marisol Rosas bring us to the Sierra Nororiental of Puebla, where the Tosepan cooperatives experiment with energía para yeknemilis—energy for good living—through participatory design of social technologies that serve life, not capital.
Finally, in the last two pieces Cristine Dann reviews Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s recent book More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy alongside Adam Becker’s More Everything Forever AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity exposing the deceptive narrative of transition, tracing the continuities of extraction and the fantasies of Silicon Valley’s techno-utopias. Madhuresh Kumar reflects on the conversation held between Galina Angarova and Carlos Tornel, “Reclaiming Energy, Reimagining Power” in a space provided by the Liminality Network which calls for an ontological reorientation: treating energy as commons, memory, and care rather than commodity.
The threads running through this issue are clear. What is presented as an energy “transition” does not dismantle the fossil machine but rather expands it under new guises. Under capitalism, “renewable” does not mean just —it simply renews the cycle of sacrifice and dispossession-. To think about energy is to go beyond kilowatts, beyond the grammar of commensurability, and to recover it as a vital relation with land, body, memory, and community. The experiences gathered here remind us that real alternatives do not come from climate summits or markets, but from territories: in Adjuntas, in Patagonia, in Puebla, in Ladakh, in South Africa, and Palestine. All insist that energy is not an abstract input, but a form of life inseparable from justice and dignity. In this time of crisis of meaning and the rise of new forms of eco-fascism, what is at stake is not only how we produce electricity, but how we produce worlds. May this issue serve to strengthen the conviction that other energies—communal, sufficient, pluriversal—are not only possible, but already alive.
Escobar, A. Osterweil, M. and Sharma, K. (2025) Relacionality. An Emergent Politics of Life Beyond the Human. Ireland: Bloomsbury. Fressoz, J.B. (2024) More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy. Dublin: Allen lane.