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.

The Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study that the authors reference and model their call to action around is the worlds' largest scientific effort to quantify trends in health. It is lead by the Institute foe Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington. It began in 1990 as a World Bank-commissioned study and is known for having introduced the disability-adujusted life year (DALY) as a new metric to quantify the burden of disease, injuries, and risk factors (or determinants), and enable comparisons. 

The 1990s were  a turning point for global health structures of governance and knowledge production, which the GBD study exemplifies. Global health experts began increasingly reframing health and healthcare in technical terms like DALY, removing health from public governance in ways that complemented and bolstered structural adjustment policies that were introduced in the 1980s (Janes 2004). As a result of these policies, the size, scope and reach of healthcare delivery and public health services were steadily reduced and downgraded. Anthropologists have been critical of these processes and other perceived failures in global health: the collapse of primary care initiatives fostered at Alma Ata in 1978, the resurgence of selective forms of primary care and vertical public health programs, and the ascendency of the World Bank as the principal health policymaking institution (Janes 2004, 2009).

Janes, Craig R (2004). "Going global in century XXI: medical anthropology and the new primary health care." Human Organization 63, no. 4: 457-471.

Janes, C. R., & Corbett, K. K. (2009). Anthropology and global health. Annual Review of Anthropology, 38, 167–183. doi:10.1146/annurev-anthro-091908-164314

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