Caring about energy transformations: Lessons from the Atacama Desert

The hegemonic energy transition continues to be guided by techno-managerial principles, without questioning the role of caring about energy transformations and broader issues of socio-natural relationships. In contrast, Lickanantay communities in northern Chile have been producing the Atacama Desert as an abundant and sacred ‘desertscape’, offering other ways to understand how to care about the world of many worlds we inhabit. By drawing on these worlds and on anti-colonial frameworks, political ecology, and feminist ethics, this paper contributes to thinking about how Puig de la Bellacasa's notion of ‘matters of care’ (2017) and the Indigenous Andean understanding of vincularidad challenge the ways in which energy transitions are thought and practiced. Based on a year ethnography in the Loa province, the article shows that in contrast to the ‘desolate-scape’ built by colonial capitalism, the ‘desertscape’ offers anti-colonial examples of ‘how to care’ about energy transformations to reclaim and restore a world of many worlds.