Abstract
The paper reflects on the ecological transition from a political perspective. An attempt is made here to reassess Alex Langer’s approach to ecology through the lens of ‘conversion’, examining the implications of his legacy for a new vision of citizenship. A suggestion is made to consider what could be the alternative to a ‘symbolic’ take on the ecological transition, retrieving a few indications from Peirce’s pragmaticist philosophy.
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Notes
- 1.
Acknowledgments: I wish to thank Andrea Borsari for the invitation to join this volume, as well as two anonymous reviewers for the comments on a previous version.
- 2.
Significantly, in 2015 the expression ‘ecological conversion’ has been officially introduced into the Magisterium of the Church with the second encyclical by Pope Francis, Laudato si’. ([5]: §6, III).
- 3.
He personally bore the brunt of such a stance twice: first, in the 1980s, his application to move his post of high-school professor from Rome back to Bozen/Bolzano was frozen; subsequently, in the 1990s, his political bid to run for mayor of Bozen was struck down by a court decision—all of this because he lacked the ‘declaration of linguistic belonging,’ upon which the ethnic census is premised.
- 4.
As concerns the latter, see in particular Langer [8].
- 5.
Elsewhere, I have elaborated on the notion of interiority with reference to Elias Canetti’s work, which raises very similar questions (Brighenti [2]).
- 6.
As of 2022, France, Spain and Italy have environment management ministries where the word ‘transition’ appears explicitly.
- 7.
A typical example is the widespread use of extremely toxic glyphosate-based herbicides in industrial agriculture. The dangers to human health posed by glyphosates are widely documented by medical studies. In 2017, Italy voted against glyphosates in the European Commission, but when the ban did not gather enough support, failed to implement a national law to prohibit them; in 2019, France passed a law to forbid these products, but waived the ban since the beginning of the pandemic in 2020 as a means to ‘support’ farmers; more generally, the large majority of European countries does not even have a phase-out calendar for glyphosates.
- 8.
Pierre Bourdieu had, in his sociology of habitus, pointed out something similar, although from a different perspective: according to Bourdieu, what habitus makes possible, and ‘naturalised’, is social domination.
- 9.
The latter thesis is, specifically, what the theory of tipping points suggests [9].
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Mubi Brighenti, A. (2024). Inhabiting the Ecological Conversion: Experiments in Diavolution. In: Borsari, A., Trentin, A., Ascari, P. (eds) TEMPORARY: Citizenship, Architecture and City. TEMPORARY 2022. The City Project, vol 4. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36667-3_5
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