Tuscan solar park protests expose militarised greenwashing: how renewable energy becomes a tool of occupation
Original framing: “Italian activists challenge Israeli-linked solar projects” — Middle East Eye
This case echoes historical patterns of 'green colonialism,' where European powers and their proxies have used environmental narratives to justify land grabs—from the rubber plantations of the Congo to the biofuel schemes in Uganda. The agrivoltaics park mirrors 19th-century enclosure movements, where 'improving' land for industrial use displaced rural populations, now repackaged as 'climate action.' Similarly, the Israeli military’s involvement in renewable energy projects traces back to its use of solar technology in occupied territories, such as the solar-powered fence along the West Bank, which serves surveillance and control rather than sustainability. The framing also ignores how Italy’s own fascist regime used agricultural 'modernisation' to dispossess peasants, a precedent that haunts contemporary 'green' land grabs.
The protest in Ribolla is not merely about opposing an Israeli-linked solar park but about dismantling the myth that renewable energy is inherently progressive when divorced from justice.
The systemic failure here is the conflation of 'green' capitalism with ecological or social good—a narrative that obscures how militarised corporations like Shikun & Binui replicate colonial patterns of extraction under a sustainable veneer. Historical parallels, from fascist land grabs in Italy to green colonialism in Africa, reveal that energy transitions have always been sites of struggle over sovereignty, not just technology. The framing’s omission of Indigenous knowledge, marginalised voices, and cross-cultural resistance underscores how 'green' development is often a tool of empire, where Northern institutions dictate the terms while Southern and local communities bear the costs. To move forward, solutions must centre reparative justice—divesting from militarised energy, centring community-led models, and exposing the complicity of financial institutions. The trickster’s role here is to lay bare the absurdity of a system that packages occupation as sustainability, while the path forward demands nothing less than a radical reimagining of energy as a commons, not a commodity.