Analyze

Despite the current level of development of communications, which has managed to connect distant geographies in high quality of image and sound, the possibility of traveling and seeing people and places is still an amazing experience. It is therefore not surprising that, despite the crisis that the aviation and tourism industry experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of flights has increased today. However, these trends are in contrast to the climate crisis scenario in which air mobility appears as one of the main contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. It is therefore worth asking, what factors sustain this scenario and invite us to continue to prefer aircraft as a means of transportation? While the reasons for traveling are multiple, there is one central element: the fascination that exists behind travel. This fascination seems to be a constituent part of the human being, driven by the desire to overcome our limitations and soar through the skies in search of new latitudes. But this fascination is also driven through a collective imaginary that has been built and sustained, starting with the story of Icarus and Daedalus, and continued with countless references in popular culture that make us look to the skies and let ourselves be carried away by those desires to have wings and fly. Something that is even deeper in a country like Chile and in a city like Santiago, so far from the rest of the world and flanked by the Andes Mountains, where flying seems to be the only way to expand our borders. It is this imaginary, which seems to raise few controversies in the country, that faces the future that the aviation industry offers us, one that promises to populate our skies with different types of flying artifacts, in an image that however does not seem alien, since it has been fueled by science fiction, becoming established as the obvious path to follow. In the face of this scenario, one of the biggest questions that arises is how this reconfiguration of the skies that the aviation industry promises will be inserted within a climate crisis scenario like the one we live in, in which phenomena such as the change in the migratory patterns of birds appears as a real danger to this imaginary and that already worries the world of aviation. These are the questions that hide an imaginary as powerful as the one that the image I have chosen suggests, and in whose development Chile and its hydrogen have a lot to say and a lot to reflect on. 

Catalán Hidalgo, René. 2023. "(Mis)controlling the Atmosphere: Aeromobility-Meteorology Symbiosis, Implications and Unforeseen Consequences." In 4S Paraconference X EiJ: Building a Global Record, curated by Misria Shaik Ali, Kim Fortun, Phillip Baum and Prerna Srigyan. Annual Meeting of the Society of Social Studies of Science. Honolulu, Hawai'i, Nov 8-11.

Operations of transnational companies are affecting marginalized communities across the globe. As Kaswan had highlighted through examples of Union Carbide’s pesticide plant in India, as well as pollution associated with oil companies in Latin America, the implications of distributive environmental justice in such contexts are apparent yet difficult to address. Across international boundaries law enforcement becomes increasingly difficult, which is at the heart of the problem of my research topic. 

“The “right” scale will depend upon the nature of the harm being analyzed and purpose for which information is being gathered.” (Kaswan, p 29)

“Numerous studies, at a multiplicity of scales, analyze the distribution of a wide variety of land uses, as well as risk: what exposures, with what consequences, do people experience?” (Kaswan, p 33). 

This text builds on concepts of equality, bases for deviating from the core idea of equality, and the multiple contexts that define and shape distributive justice. Kaswan additionally advances the distributive environmental justice by outlining the different contexts, including historical land use patterns, government regulations, infrastructure, and enforcement and the implications that each of these dimensions have on contributing to distributive injustice. 

The main narrative of this text builds on foundational ideas on equality and extrapolates it further to establish how distributive environmental justice, its ideas and articulations, as well as its operationalization, has taken shape throughout the years. To outline these points, Kaswan outlines different cases of environmental disaster, and subsequent government responses, to showcase how government institutions have both upheld and endeavored to address distributive environmental inequality in the past decades.