The abstract and the concrete

One criticism of my environmental philosophy work, to which I am largely sympathetic, is that it is too much about grand theory and too little about real lived experiences.

Wrapping up our two-day workshop at the Scuola Superiore Meridionale, the contrast could not have been sharper as my talk followed directly after a German PhD student had presented her work on “Fast Techno-Fixes, Slow Repair: Reparative Abundance Beyond the Labour–Climate Divide in Sicily’s Petrochemical Corridor”. Being a site of obvious environmental trauma, Sicily's petrochemical corridor seemed a long way from my vision of a bright ecomodern future (echoing the piece I wrote on conflicting temporalities back in 2020).

While it is easy to see the value of bottom-up approaches, one still has to recognize that they are inherently conservative. Imagine someone going to 19th century Sweden studying smallhold farmers. The intuition of most present-day social scientists would have been to find ways of making poverty slightly more bearable. In reality, mass migration to the United States and large-scale urbanization followed, paving the way for the industrial society that has allowed me to start this morning with a lovely run and a swim in the Mediterranean, completely emancipated from the serf-like conditions that existed back then. 

I guess what I am trying to say is that, sometimes, it is also important to remember the bigger perspectives, and recognize that change – which is often painful in the present – may be absolutely essential in the long run.