In early 2023, the total installed global wind power capacity surpassed 1 terawatt (1,000 gigawatts), a milestone announced by the Global Wind Energy Council at its annual report in Brussels, Belgium. This capacity, distributed across wind farms in over 100 countries with China, the USA, Germany, India, and the United Kingdom as leading installers, generates approximately 7 percent of global electricity and avoids the emission of over 1.1 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide annually. The 1-terawatt milestone represented a doubling of global wind capacity in just six years and confirmed wind as one of the fastest-growing energy sources in human history.

The global wind energy milestone coincided with an explosion of climate poetry and eco-writing that situates wind turbines as contested symbols — simultaneously emblems of necessary energy transition and of altered landscapes that displace traditional notions of the pastoral and the sublime. Poets including Alice Oswald, Robert Macfarlane, and Don McKay have written about wind energy infrastructure as part of a broader interrogation of what the Anthropocene does to poetic landscapes and the nature metaphors that have sustained lyric poetry for millennia. The terawatt milestone is a backdrop to the most urgent literary question of the current century: how to write about nature when human intervention is reshaping its fundamental systems.