Cristobal Bonelli - Too Much to Digest: Energetic Gluttony at the Atacama Desert

Lecture abstract

Too Much to Digest: Energetic Gluttony at the Atacama Desert
This talk explores the overlapping excesses of fossil and renewable energy infrastructures in Chile's Atacama Desert through the lens of energetic gluttony. Drawing on the moral logic of gluttony — an insatiable appetite without restraint — I examine how the desert becomes the site of both toxic fossil overconsumption (coal burning, environmental damage) and excessive solar energy production that outpaces the region’s infrastructural capacity. Rather than a clean energy transition, what emerges is a layered coexistence of energetic appetites: a surplus that overwhelms, saturates, and ultimately displaces. By revisiting “gluttony” not only as sin but as an analytic of desire, surplus, and neglect, I ask what kinds of bodies, ecologies, and futures are being digested — or expelled — in the name of green energy transitions.