How can we solve the problem?

yesterday I was at the Casa Italiana in Barcelona. They invited me to talk about environmental justuce. There were about 200 people, mostly students from the local Italian High School (yes there is an Italian High School in Barcelona...)

What really struck me were their repetitive questions about how to solve the problems (garbage, pollution, etc.). My discourse was about justice and inequal distrubution of risks and benefits, but their questions were above all about technical solutions to the environmental problems. After all, I was an expert coming from the university and I was supposed to deliver solutions.

I do not blame them for asking me about solutions. Actually, I have enjoyed a lot the meeting and I am very grateful for their invitation. Nevertheless, I am curios about the connections between expertise and democracy and the strong depoliticization of ecological issues. A question might have been: how to avoid environmental injustice? Or they might have questioned the very notion of environmental injustice. But they stayed within the real of the present: how to find a solution to the problem. The causes of the problems and the effects of technical solutions were out of the table.

Probably that lecture is the best demostration that, after all, our project LARES is badly needed. For once, I was really right.