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

Green transition has given rise to new conflicts on the construction of energy devices such as wind turbines, hydroelectric power plants, or biogas plants that have been established not least to reduce carbon emissions and mitigate climate change. These devices have been opposed on the grounds of concerns about the quality of life for local residents, economic effects, the impact on the landscape, and others. This chapter addresses these environmental conflicts by examining voices against the construction of wind turbines at specific localities in Denmark as they are articulated on protest sites 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 show that the local space plays out often as a localization of events, issues, and debates which originate elsewhere. In a similar way, the digital appears as a way of (re)digitizing different forms of partly analogous activity. In that sense, 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