P[10]The Metabolic Sublime

In this interview, Rosa Martínez discusses the current ecological transition project from an institutional point of view, deconstructing it as a political project working at multiple scales, a multi-sectoral industrial project, and a socio-cultural project. The interviewee also presents the current blockages to this process as well as strategies necessary for its advancement.

Alvaro Campos presents a thermodynamic review of the characteristics and potentialities of fossil and renewable energies. He also provides a critical view of how the latter are being implemented in the territory, with a particular focus on the massive electrification project based on megaprojects and high voltage interconnections.

In this interview, Alicia Valero introduces the concept of ‘exergy’ as a tool to measure the material capacities of the planet. She presents a non-exhaustive list of critical raw material peaks for the current energy transition project, and recognizes the impossibility of total circularity due to the thermodynamic principles of entropy and dispersion. She also calls for a change in our relationship with waste and the creation of new economic indexes that go beyond growth as a paradigm.

Marco Armiero provides a critical vision of the anthropocene as a concept and presents some alternative constructs such as the capitalocene, the plantationocene, and in particular, the ‘wasteocene’. He explains that the term refers not so much to the ‘age of waste’ but to the series of socioecological relations that define which objects, territories, and people are disposable through the extraction and separation of ‘the other’. He calls for the generation of alternative narratives that make these wasted people and places visible.

Alberto Mataran presents a parallelism between contemporary energy production practices, rural-urban relations, and global north-south power relations. He explains how this can help us make the leap from the visualization of existing territorial conflicts in our own territory to global conflicts beyond our borders. He suggests that bioregional design can help balance these conflicts by combining the design of countryside and city and their energy, agricultural, and waste systems.

In this interview, Juan Infante takes us through the quantified material ‘consumption footprint’ of national agrilogistical systems during the 20th and 21st centuries. He focuses on the elements externalized to other territories and reviews the material balance, or rather lack of material balance, between the “input” and “output” of traditionally exploited territories.

Lydia Kallypoliti deconstructs the history of ecological design and critiques the paradoxes in the field of sustainability. She provides a critique of both the idea of closure and closed systems as design tools for physical and information spaces, and the idea of extreme interconnectivity as a chimera that hides the inability to establish explicit connections.

Jennifer Gabrys presents an environmental conception of global computing technologies that puts specific focus on the types of sensitive mechanisms and how the interactions between humans and sensing infrastructures during and after their useful life can create new conceptions of participatory citizenship.

The Escombreras terminal of the Port of Cartagena is the gateway for 14% of the LNG (Liquefied Natural Gas) entering Spain, which has 35% of the European storage capacity and the largest network of regasification plants on the continent, a symbol of the fossil paradigm that is trying to reinvent itself as a sustainable milestone with the construction of the largest hydrogen electrolysis plant on the Iberic peninsula. According to Repsol, the promoting partner of the initiative, the plant will reach 552 MW of installed capacity to produce renewable hydrogen in 2025 and 1.9 GW in 2030. This capacity represents almost 50% of the Spanish government’s commitment.

La Mula Solar Power Plant is a photovoltaic mega-project of 493.74 MW of peak power that covers 1,000 ha belonging to the municipality of Mula in Murcia (Spain). It was built by Cobra (ACS Group) and inaugurated in July 2019. At its opening, it was the largest photovoltaic power plant in Europe, surpassing the Cestas Solar Park in France. Today, in March 2023, it is still the second biggest photovoltaic plant in Europe, after the Nuñez de Balboa plant in Badajoz, with a peak power of 500MW.

60% of the vegetables consumed in Europe are grown in 35,000 hectares of solar greenhouses located in Almeria and the coast of Granada. With a yearly production of 4.5 million tons of fruit, El Mar de Plastico is arguably the most recognisable agrilogistic hub within the Iberic Peninsula.