Atlas of Green Energy Transitions
"In engrossing first-person accounts of the far-flung locales where green capitalism collides with local ecosystems, landscapes, and communities—and interspersed with stunning data visualizations, creative cartography, and photographs of field sites—this atlas vividly depicts, critiques, and reimagines the extractive frontiers of green technologies and renewable energy. An essential resource for scholars, students, and organizers alike."
- Thea Riofrancos,
author of Extraction: The Frontiers of Capitalism
Routledge Press, an imprint of Taylor & Francis, Jan 2026.
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Atlas of Green Energy Transitions is an edited collection of scholars and activists employing immersive first-person narrative descriptions and rich imagery to tell the oft-revealing stories of contestation, exploitation, and complication within the landscapes upon which the world’s green energy transition depends: the unsanctioned cobalt mines of the Congo, the solar farms clearing vast tracts of the Mojave Desert, the scattered e-waste operations of Zimbabwe, among others.
Utilizing the global supply chain as an organizing structure—working backwards from consumption to extraction, and back again—each chapter is framed around an abiotic protagonist crucial for the widespread adoption of renewable energy technologies. Cast as our saviors in the face of climate change, cobalt, aluminum, and the many critical minerals needed for solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicles are explored through the biophysical environments and cultural contexts in which they are extracted, refined, or deployed. In challenge to these descriptive chapters are counternarratives that offer alternatives beyond silver bullet ecomodernism toward complicated futures built on just practices and reciprocity. In grounding all chapters amid host landscapes, the collection cultivates a heightened awareness of land relations and global interconnection. The project thus not only engages the green energy transition, a topic of accelerating importance and topical prevalence, but uniquely exhibits the skills of landscape architectural practice to communicate environmental challenges of global proportions, identify points of interdisciplinary intervention, and craft compelling futures to catalyze change.
The book targets an audience of students and practitioners of the built environment while seeking to inspire the inner designer in all readers.
“An informative and much needed challenge to modern design’s complicity in capitalism and its conceptions of progress and development. Seibert’s Atlas offers compelling resources for rethinking our reliance on ecomodernist approaches to the green energy transition, and directs us towards a future more open to alternative ways of providing for human flourishing and prosperity.”
- Kate Soper,
Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, London Metropolitan University
“Matthew Seibert’s Atlas draws a much-needed pathway out of green energy utopianism by taking readers into those landscapes and their attendant ecologies that have been conscripted into the green energy supply chain. It’s an ambitious proposition backed by richly layered maps, embodied collages, charts, narratives, counternarratives, and a diverse suite of contributors. Both persistently disruptive and optimistic, the book crosses continents to illustrate the scope, scale, and urgency of what has all too easily been framed as simply a “transition.” Still, the book dares to visualize a just, beautiful, and reciprocal green future with clear, tactical framings of our next steps. I dare readers to do the same.“
- Kristi Cheramie,
Professor and Head of Landscape Architecture, Ohio State University
TABLE of CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION: The Dark Side of Green ......................................................................
1. SUN: Solar Farms and a Mojave Desert Under Threat ....................................................
2. WIND: Wind Farms and Deepening Conflicts in Chile's Imposed Transition ...............
3. ALUMINUM: Smelting with Iceland's Melting Glaciers ...................................................
4. PHOTOVOLTAICS: Unpacking the Waste Challenges of a Global Industry ..................
5. E-WASTE: Reclaiming Digital Detritus + Forging a Sustainable Dawn in Zimbabwe ...
6. HYDROGEN: Landscape + Literacy along Canada's Peace River ..................................
7. RARE EARTHS: Extractive Frontiers of Green Capitalism in South Greenland .............
8. LITHIUM: White Gold + Black Geographies of Resistance in Brazil ...............................
9. COBALT: Eating Congo Caviar at the End of the World .................................................
Conclusion: Where Histories are Held and Futures Rehearsed ......................................
COUNTERNARRATIVES .....................................................................................................
A. Center the Periphery: Or, How to Invert a Mine
B. Circularize the Economy: Designing for Disassembly
C. Overlap Systems: Searching for Symbiosis
D. Reduce Energy, Build Community: The Cultural Project of a True Transition
Matthew Seibert
Kelly Herbinson
Javier Arroyo Olea + Maria Paz Lopez Ponce
Theodore Teichman + Daniel Carmelo
Assia Boukhatmi + Roger Nyffenegger
Vusumuzi Maphosa
Douglas Robb
Billy Fleming
Fitsum Areguy
Ash Duhrkoop
Matthew Seibert + Hugo Kamya
Matthew Seibert + Julia MacNelly
RESEARCH ASSISTANTS:
Julia MacNelly, Marissa Walrath, Joyce Fong, Yujie Liu, Sophia Dreps, Catelyn Southwell
INTRODucTION
The Dark Side of Green
by MATTHEW SEIBERT
As calls grow for transitioning our global economy off fossil fuels amid increasingly devastating climate catastrophes, the landscapes needed to support the green energy transition are exploding in demand, and controversy. In tracking the contemporary developments of such wholesale change, the book’s introduction traces the underlying forces to a system of relations—to capital, to empire, and to our relationship with time itself. In response, this book seeks to (1) reveal the many paradoxes of the green-energy transition through descriptive narratives based in rigorous fieldwork and analytical descriptions, teasing out the dynamics at play across sites of the global green energy supply chain, and (2) creatively chart a new course beyond the dominant modes of relating to the world through counternarrative explorations. As a whole, employing the generative potential of design, the risks of green energy are revealed and roadmaps for new more desirable futures are diagrammed.
01 SUN
Solar Farms and a Mojave Desert Under Threat
by KELLY HERBINSON
The first chapter tells the story of one solar project located in the Mojave Desert of California as a stark example of the paradox of solving one planetary crisis—climate change—by contributing to another: biodiversity loss. The author recounts years of biological fieldwork and the unfolding impacts of the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating Station, a massive renewable energy project that, despite its environmental promise, disrupted critical habitat for the endangered desert tortoise and countless other species. The chapter challenges misconceptions of the desert as barren, instead revealing its hidden biodiversity and fragility. It raises urgent questions about land use, conservation, and the ethics of sustainability, ultimately arguing that the destruction of intact ecosystems, even in the name of green energy, threatens the planet’s stability. Highlighting scientific research on planetary boundaries and biosphere integrity, the chapter calls for a holistic shift in how humanity approaches environmental solutions—one that values life, not just efficiency.
02 WIND
Wind Farms and Deepening Conflicts in Chile's Imposed Transition
by JAVIER ARROYO OLEA + MARÍA PAZ LÓPEZ PONCE
The corporate energy transition has found in Chile a territory in which to empower itself for the benefit of the same pockets that have pushed the population into a climate and civilizational crisis. In this context, the commoditized wind that runs through the Biobío Region has been an object of interest for wind energy companies, who have led progressive conflicts with rural communities that have sought to defend a model of life that maintain a link with the land, water and a family economy that has been altered with the stirring of the large blades that are or threaten to be like their neighbors.
03 ALUMINUM
Smelting with Iceland's Melting Glaciers
by THEODORE TEICHMAN + DANIEL CARMELO
This chapter is an act of care for a landscape the authors once called home. Following the transnational journey of aluminum—mined in Jamaica, refined in Texas, smelted in Iceland, and shipped to Europe—we examine how Iceland became an aluminum hotspot not through mineral abundance, but through its “limitless” hydroelectric potential. However, this energy is far from limitless. Drawing from policy documents, fieldwork, and local energy reports, the authors argue that aluminum in Iceland functions as a mechanism for exporting meltwater, itself a materialization of climate change. They propose the term “climate mining” to describe this commodification of melting glaciers: a chain in which increasing temperatures become electricity, become aluminum, become car parts or aircraft wings. The second half of the chapter turns toward counter-narration. Through personal encounters, interviews with sheep farmers, Icelandic myths, and a close reading of the film Woman at War, the authors explore cultural technologies that model more-than-human relationality. These stories offer fuzzier, slower, and more generous ways of imagining post-glacier life—not as loss alone, but as an opening for co-creation. Our energy futures depend not only on new infrastructures, but also on the kin-making forces already present in the land: in the rivers, the soil, the sheep, and the lichens that will one day succeed the dams themselves.
04 PHOTOVOLTAICS
Unpacking the Waste Challenges of a Global Industry
by ÄSSIA BOUKHATMI + ROGER NYFFENEGGER
This chapter explores the global rise of the solar photovoltaic (PV) industry with particular attention to the sustainability myths that surround – and often obscure – its environmental and social implications. While solar energy is widely acknowledged as a clean, inherently green industry mastering the climate transition, this narrative often overlooks the deeper environmental, social, and economic contradictions embedded in its rapid expansion. Drawing from global trends and regional dynamics, the chapter explains the current linear value chain in the PV industry, characterized by extractive production, premature disposal, and limited end-of-life options. It debunks common myths about the industry’s perceived sustainability, its dependence on global supply chains, and the underappreciated waste challenges ahead. As end-of-life PV systems pile up and material demands soar, this chapter calls for a transition from linear to circular models, emphasizing strategies such as reduce, reuse, and responsible recycling. By interrogating these myths and offering a systems-level view of the solar industry's lifecycle, this chapter invites a more nuanced discussion about what it will truly take to make solar energy the cornerstone of a sustainable future.
05 E-WASTE
Reclaiming Digital Detritus + Forging a Sustainable Dawn in Zimbabwe
by VUSUMUZI MAPHOSA
The technological refuse of our age resists decomposition, accumulating in blighted landscapes and subverting the natural cycles that sustain life. Our pursuit of progress depends on critical minerals (CMs)—often sourced from conflict zones—driving unsustainable extraction and ecological strain. As devices become quickly obsolete, CM demand surges, and e-waste flows from wealthier to vulnerable regions, perpetuating neo-colonial patterns masked as green solutions. In emerging economies, informal e-waste workers prioritize survival over safety, leaving behind a toxic legacy. Africa, for instance, recycles less than 1% of its e-waste, constrained by limited infrastructure and policy. Yet within this digital detritus lies potential: up to 300 tons of gold are recoverable from anthropogenic waste annually, and global e-waste recycling revenue is projected to surpass $244 billion by 2032. A truly circular economy (CE) offers a regenerative alternative—bolstering supply chain resilience, reducing overconsumption, and protecting ecosystems. Grounded in Ubuntuism, a decolonial ethic of interdependence, communities can reframe e-waste as a resource, not refuse. Formalizing operations, closing policy gaps, and embracing restorative systems are essential steps toward aligning technological progress with environmental justice.
06 HYDROGEN
Landscape and Literacy along Canada's Peace River
by DOUGLAS ROBB
This chapter examines interconnected stories of hydroelectricity, fossil fuel extraction, and emerging hydrogen infrastructure through a fieldwork narrative along the Saaghii Naachii / Peace River in northeastern British Columbia, Canada. Set against the backdrop of severe wildfires, the chapter positions fire and smoke-obscured landscapes as a metaphor for the social and ecological costs of Canada’s drive toward renewable energy. Using visual and ethnographic methods, the chapter critically reflects on the paradoxes of “clean” energy, exploring how hydroelectric dams, hydraulic fracturing, and hydrogen fuel production drive processes of landscape fragmentation, displace Indigenous communities, and perpetuate settler colonial logics in Canada’s north. To counteract these tendencies, the chapter advances the concept of landscape literacy, or the capacity to read and articulate nuanced ecological, technological, and social narratives embedded in energy landscapes. Through a detailed analysis of hydrogen fuel’s semantic opacity, the article calls for landscape architects to lead public discourse surrounding energy transitions, making energy systems and their cumulative impacts more legible to diverse audiences.
07 RARE EARTHS
Extractive Frontiers of Green Capitalism in South Greenland
by BILLY FLEMING
This chapter chronicles a field expedition to Narsaq, South Greenland, examining the intersection of climate change, resource extraction, and Indigenous resistance. Against a backdrop of stunning Arctic landscapes, the author and a team of architecture students investigate the environmental and sociopolitical impacts of rare earth element (REE) mining, particularly at the contested Kvanefjeld site. Once decommissioned due to radioactive contamination and strong local activism, the mine is now the focus of renewed interest driven by global demand for minerals essential to the green energy transition. Through immersive fieldwork, including radiation mapping and infrastructure analysis, the chapter reveals the persistent environmental risks and power imbalances between multinational mining firms and Indigenous communities. The narrative highlights how colonial legacies and legal constraints undermine Greenland’s resource sovereignty, while also showcasing grassroots efforts—like the Urani? Naamik! movement—to protect land and health. The chapter underscores the Arctic as both a frontline of climate change and a resource frontier targeted by green capitalism. It advocates for scientific collaboration and technical empowerment of local actors to resist extractive pressures and to envision sustainable futures rooted in sovereignty and ecological stewardship.
08 LITHIUM
White Gold and Black Geographies of Resistance in Brazil
by FITSUM AREGUY
This chapter chronicles a field expedition to Narsaq, South Greenland, examining the intersection of climate change, resource extraction, and Indigenous resistance. Against a backdrop of stunning Arctic landscapes, the author and a team of architecture students investigate the environmental and sociopolitical impacts of rare earth element (REE) mining, particularly at the contested Kvanefjeld site. Once decommissioned due to radioactive contamination and strong local activism, the mine is now the focus of renewed interest driven by global demand for minerals essential to the green energy transition. Through immersive fieldwork, including radiation mapping and infrastructure analysis, the chapter reveals the persistent environmental risks and power imbalances between multinational mining firms and Indigenous communities. The narrative highlights how colonial legacies and legal constraints undermine Greenland’s resource sovereignty, while also showcasing grassroots efforts—like the Urani? Naamik! movement—to protect land and health. The chapter underscores the Arctic as both a frontline of climate change and a resource frontier targeted by green capitalism. It advocates for scientific collaboration and technical empowerment of local actors to resist extractive pressures and to envision sustainable futures rooted in sovereignty and ecological stewardship.
09 COBALT
Eating Congo Caviar at the End of the World
by ASH DUHRKOOP
This essay explores the extractive realities and representational politics surrounding cobalt mining in Kolwezi, Democratic Republic of the Congo, a city shaped by colonial exploitation and now at the epicenter of the green energy transition. Through the lens of contemporary Congolese art, the essay interrogates how art challenges dominant narratives of extractivism, humanizes abstraction, and critiques techno-capitalist ideals. Kolwezi is framed as a “sacrifice zone,” where artisanal and industrial mining scar the landscape and expose workers, including children, to toxic conditions. Artistic interventions, including works by Baloji and the On-Trade-Off collective, render visible the colonial, neocolonial, and ecological entanglements embedded in green technologies. Ultimately, the essay calls for a reimagining of sustainability that reckons with global inequalities and the invisible labor powering our digital and ecological futures.
09 CONCLUSION
Where Histories are Held and Futures Rehearsed
by MATTHEW SEIBERT + HUGO KAMYA
How should competing interests and value systems first be articulated and then navigated in a time of great change and amid a history of exploitation? Within its specific context, Kilembe Mines offers potential universal lessons that cut across many disciplines. Design is one of them. As a powerful tool and practice, design can be employed in versatile and generative ways across “wicked problems,” but, importantly, it is not all-powerful. Any definition of design should acknowledge its role in buttressing or subverting dominant, extractive, and homogenizing power structures. Design is always political because it shapes what is possible and what is excluded from this space of possibility. In conclusion, this volume invites you to consider four relational counternarratives in line with the book’s four sections, or four instructional diagrams that hint at alternatives to the dominant narratives and practices of today. They attempt to embody core principles as explored above and apply them to the subjects and dynamics of the preceding nonfictional chapters: (1) Pluriversality, or the honoring of multiple ways of knowing and designing, that there is no one world but rather a world where many worlds fit; (2) Regeneration, orthe shifting from extractive, linear models to living, evolving, circular systems; (3) Reciprocity, ordesign with interdependencies and relations prioritized; and (4) Temporal Depth, the recognition of deep time, long histories, and future trajectories, privileging repair and adaptation. As such, collectively, landscape is understood not as a site not of expansion, but of generative contraction.
COUNTERNARRATIVES
Holding Histories and Rehearsing Futures
by MATTHEW SEIBERT + JULIA MACNELLY
How should competing interests and value systems first be articulated and then navigated in a time of great change and amid a history of exploitation? Within its specific context, Kilembe Mines offers potential universal lessons that cut across many disciplines. Design is one of them. As a powerful tool and practice, design can be employed in versatile and generative ways across “wicked problems,” but, importantly, it is not all-powerful. Any definition of design should acknowledge its role in buttressing or subverting dominant, extractive, and homogenizing power structures. Design is always political because it shapes what is possible and what is excluded from this space of possibility. In conclusion, this volume invites you to consider four relational counternarratives in line with the book’s four sections, or four instructional diagrams that hint at alternatives to the dominant narratives and practices of today. They attempt to embody core principles as explored above and apply them to the subjects and dynamics of the preceding nonfictional chapters: (1) Pluriversality, or the honoring of multiple ways of knowing and designing, that there is no one world but rather a world where many worlds fit; (2) Regeneration, orthe shifting from extractive, linear models to living, evolving, circular systems; (3) Reciprocity, ordesign with interdependencies and relations prioritized; and (4) Temporal Depth, the recognition of deep time, long histories, and future trajectories, privileging repair and adaptation. As such, collectively, landscape is understood not as a site not of expansion, but of generative contraction.
AUTHOR BIOS
Fitsum Areguy is a writer, researcher, and cultural worker living in Southwestern Ontario. He is the co-founder and project director for Textile, a hyper-local arts collective in Kitchener-Waterloo.
Ässia Boukhatmi is a researcher at Bern University of Applied Sciences and the Technical University of Berlin. Her research focuses on investigating digital technologies to foster the circular economy transition in the European photovoltaics industry.
Daniel Carmelo is a scholar, storyteller, illustrator, landscape designer, and creative technologist originally from the piney woodlands of east Texas, currently based in Charlottesville, VA. His work explores cultural technologies for sensory connection and attunement with land. Daniel holds an MLA and MUEP from the University of Virginia, a BS in Communications from LeTourneau University, and is an alumnus of the Wright-Ingram Institute Field Stations Program (Iceland).
Ash Duhrkoop is a PhD candidate in Art and Architectural History at the University of Virginia specializing in twentieth-century and African art, with an interest in ecocriticism.
Billy Fleming is an interdisciplinary scholar of climate justice and the built environment at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture, and founding co-director of the Climate and Community Institute, a progressive think-tank focused on the political economy of the climate crisis. His research focuses on clean energy supply chains, social and abolitionist movements in rural landscapes, land-based practices of carbon management, and the communities they transform.
Kelly Herbinson is a Mojave Desert biologist and conservationist currently serving as the executive director of the Mojave Desert Land Trust. She spent 12 years working as a field biologist with the endangered desert tortoise, only pausing briefly to pursue master’s degrees focused on her two other passions: ant behavior and nonfiction writing.
Hugo Kamya, PhD, is a professor in the School for Social Work at Smith College, Northampton. He is a psychologist, clinical social worker, and couple’s and family therapist. He lives and conducts his clinical practice as a narrative therapist using stories and storytelling in Arlington, Massachusetts.
Julia MacNelly holds a Master of Landscape Architecture from the University of Virginia (UVA). Her research focuses on the way in which material management can give broader insights into the planetary-scale issue of climate change. Before attending UVA, she worked with a community land trust and land bank in Richmond, Virginia, engaging with land stewardship and affordable housing development. With a multidisciplinary art background, Julia sees landscape architecture as an opportunity to creatively engage with questions about equitable development, ecological stewardship, and land access.
Vusumuzi Maphosa is Director of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) at National University of Science and Technology, Zimbabwe, holding a PhD in Information Systems. He leads ICT strategy implementation and postgraduate supervision. An accomplished researcher, he serves on journal editorial boards and holds leadership roles in IEEE, ISOC Zimbabwe and CSZ. His expertise spans AI, data mining, and ICT4D.
Roger Nyffenegger is a PhD researcher on Circular Business Models in the solar industry at Maastricht Sustainability Institute and Bern University of Applied Sciences. He contributes to the EU-Horizon projects CIRCUSOL and RETRIEVE, as well as Swiss PV Circle, and holds a double degree from HSG St. Gallen and HEC Paris.
Javier Arroyo Olea is from the Biobío Region, Chile. He is a professor of History and Geography, holding diplomas in the areas of Memory and Environment and the author of works that address various processes of the Chilean dictatorship and post-dictatorship. He is a member of the editorial team of Resumen.cl and of the Latin American Observatory of Environmental Conflicts (OLCA).
María Paz López Ponce is a Chilean environmental biologist from the University of Chile and holds a diploma in Environmental Education from the Alberto Hurtado University. Since 2017, she has worked as an environmental educator and, since 2020, as a researcher at OLCA.
Douglas Robb is an Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Calgary. His research centers on the production of just and inclusive climate futures, spanning topics of energy landscapes, critical resource studies, and degrowth. Doug’s work is grounded in place-based methods of drawing, writing, and designing, with a focus on rural and Indigenous lands across western Canada.
Matthew Seibert is an Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Virginia. His research and teaching challenge dominant modes of knowledge production with specific attention to our relations with our host landscapes. This he sees as the first, fundamental step in a theory of change towards a just, more promising future.
Theodore Teichman is scholar, landscape designer, and soundscape composer, originally from the arid shrublands and sprawl of inland California, currently based in Charlottesville, VA. Their research explores a queer ethics of care for novel hybrid ecologies through centering the latent agencies of materials and landscapes. Theodore holds an MLA from the University of Virginia and a transdisciplinary BSA specializing in soundscape studies from Carnegie Mellon University. They are a Fellow of the Leifur Eiriksson Foundation, and an inaugural Fellow of the tranSci Lab at the University of Virginia.