In December 1997, representatives of 192 countries gathered in Kyoto, Japan, and signed the Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, committing industrialised nations to binding reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. The Protocol's targets created powerful incentives for investment in renewable energy, particularly wind power, and triggered a decade of accelerating wind turbine installation across Europe, North America, and Asia. The Kyoto Protocol marked the moment when wind energy shifted from a niche technology to a mainstream component of national energy strategies worldwide.

The Kyoto Protocol accelerated the cultural salience of climate change as a subject for contemporary poetry, inspiring a wave of eco-poetry and climate writing in the late 1990s and 2000s that engaged directly with wind as both threatened natural resource and technological solution. Poets including Juliana Spahr, Craig Santos Perez, and Don McKay addressed the politics and aesthetics of atmospheric change, situating wind energy within wider meditations on human relationships with the natural world. The Protocol's language of global responsibility and future generations entered the rhetorical vocabulary of climate poetry.