Localizing Environmental Conflicts: Facebook Groups as Intertextual Sites for Local Protest Voices

Abstract

Green transition has given rise to new conflicts related to the construction of energy devices such as wind turbines, hydroelectric power plants, and biogas plants, primarily developed to reduce carbon emissions and mitigate climate change. These devices have been opposed on the basis of concerns about the quality of life for local residents, economic effects, the impact on the landscape, and many others. This chapter explores these environmental conflicts by examining community voices against the construction of wind turbines at specific localities in Denmark as they are articulated on protest sites housed on Facebook. By applying a network approach to the public sphere, operationalized via discourse studies notions of intertextuality and recontextualization, the chapter pays particular attention to the import and appropriation of discursive material from other public spaces. The findings reveal ways in which the local space performs, often as a localization of events, issues, and debates, discourses that originate elsewhere. In this way, the impact of the digital on environmental conflict is a way of (re)digitizing different forms of partly analogous activity. Therefore, the meeting of the digital and the local can be understood not as the connection of two separate realms, but as the intertwining of two types of connectivity.