new paper out on visions for sustainability

with Giuseppe Barbiero

The word “impact” entails the idea that something is already into the world and it is “pressing” against a target.

The idea is then to divert our focus from the possible targets and the consequences of the impact, to the impacting object itself, considering the driving forces that bring it into being and determine its trajectory.

In other words, we propose to suspend for a moment the scenario of the future developments, risks and promises, and ask in what kind of world a specific technoscientific product – a genetically engineered, fast-growing salmon – has a meaning that justifies the scientific and economic effort of actually fabricating it, proposing to sell it and being confident that someone will buy it.

These issues have to do with how we collectively value the salmon at stake and therefore with it’s quality: as a living being embedded into a net of socio-ecological systems, as a technoscientific commodity, and as food.