From ’Mythical Arcadia’ to ’wind turbine dump’: sacrificing past and future in Greece’s de-lignification

Environmental scholarship has documented the distributional, procedural and recognition failures attending renewable energy transitions. Less attention has been paid to how the materiality, historicity and temporality embedded in environments through decades of extraction shape the experience of subsequent transitions. This article presents the case of ‘de-lignification’ at Megalopolis, Greece, where six decades of lignite coal mining and burning are being replaced by industrial wind energy development on culturally and ecologically significant mountain landscapes. Drawing on ethnographic interviews and archival research, I deploy sacrifice as a sensitizing term to argue that the green transition operates as a double sacrifice: first desecrating the sacredness that the community produced through its adaptation to the lignite era, and then extending expendability into ancient environmental and historical terrain. Three structurally produced ‘futural orientations’ – anticipating decline, rusting expectations and deep time speculations – reveal the inseparability of the political-economic dimensions of energy transition from the material, historical and temporal dimensions that environmental sociology has undertheorized. The case demonstrates that transitions from sacrifice zones to green sacrifice zones produce forms of harm that exceed the registers environmental scholarship has most thoroughly documented.