Will we change human behaviour if we transform our idea of “energy”?

2021 marks the 35th anniversary of the nuclear disaster of Chernobyl, which took place on 26 April 1986. Considering the event from a philosophical perspective, we will look at the profound connection between different ways of obtaining energy: from burning fossil fuels to distilling biodiesel and splitting the atom. The catastrophe of our century not only lies in other nuclear disasters, such as Fukushima in 2011, but also in our stubborn fondness for and continued adherence to a destructive structure for the production of energy, which is threatening to bring an end to various forms of life on the planet.

Michael Marder is Ikerbasque Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU), having been awarded the degree of Doctor of Philosophy from The New School for Social Research (NY). He is the author of various scientific articles and fifteen monographs, including Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (2013); The Philosopher’s Plant: An Intellectual Herbarium (2014); Pyropolitics: When the World Is Ablaze (2015), Dust (2016), Energy Dreams: Of Actuality (2017), Political Categories: Thinking Beyond Concepts (2019), and Dump Philosophy: A Phenomenology of Devastation (2020), among others.