Cristóbal 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.

About the lecturer

Cristóbal Bonelli is a Chilean Clinical Psychologist and Social Anthropologist with more than two decades of interdisciplinary experience at the intersection of mental health, ecology, and energy transitions. His research combines psychology, anthropology, and science and technology studies, and is grounded in long-term collaborations with communities, scientists, and institutions to generate knowledge that is both academically rigorous and socially relevant.

Before entering academia, Bonelli worked extensively in public mental health interventions in Chile, Italy, and Spain. He later obtained a PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh, focusing on the intersections between Indigenous communities and public health policies in southern Chile. Awarded a Marie Curie Global Fellowship, he deepened his work on water practices and sustainability in the Atacama Desert, a territory central to the extraction of critical minerals for the energy transition. Building on this trajectory, he now leads the ERC project Worlds of Lithium, which examines how lithium extraction, production, and recycling reshape social and ecological futures across Latin America, Europe, and Asia.