After Growth, New Matter: The Chergui Winds and Morocco’s Renewable Energy Future
In northern Morocco, the chergui winds are ubiquitous. Most prominent in the spring and summer, they carry a warm air that travels thousands of miles from the Sahara. When it reaches northern Morocco, the chergui also brings collective experiences of fatigue, dizziness, sickness, and, some claim, hysteria. The causes and manifestations of these symptoms are unknown, lying somewhere between social fact and scientific truth, between folklore and pathology. Nevertheless, the chergui is more than just a physical phenomenon—it also signals an embodied shift in the affective disposition of this region.
These same winds have also created new horizons for Morocco’s renewable energy sector. Since 2000, six sprawling wind farms have been constructed between Tangier and its neighboring city, Tetouan. Wind now provides over 13% of Morocco’s energy—a figure expected to rise to 20% as the country aims to generate 52% of its total power from renewable energy sources by 2030. These projects are part of a broader push to position Morocco as a leader in the so-called green industries, which include sustainable agriculture, renewable energy, and electric vehicle manufacturing. Over the past few decades, Moroccan leaders have made great strides in advancing the nation’s sustainable development, while also seeking to revitalize rural economies struggling with the effects of urban and transnational migration. In northern Morocco, one of the nation’s windiest regions and the site of vast economic disparities, these initiatives hold particular socioeconomic importance.
This paper asks: What modes of being, thinking, and becoming arrive and depart with the wind? The rapid development of Morocco’s green industries presents new ways to conceptualize wind, transforming it from a metaphysical substance to the source of renewable energy. But do the mystical dimensions of Morocco’s winds stand in opposition to the geopolitical imperatives that drive the nation’s investment in the green industries? At the precipice of both environmental and technological futures, what might it look like to embrace northern Morocco’s winds—in all their social and cultural entanglements—as a way out from the productivist logics that underpin the nation’s renewable energy projects?
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