Presentation - Dossier "Images of Devastation"

Abstract

There are many reasons why our time is seen as a time of devastation: let us think more broadly about the ecological catastrophe of global warming, which is already beginning to change the landscape around the planet and to produce more and more refugees in the environment, but also locally in accidents such as Fukushima (which reprises Three Miles Island and Chernobyl on a larger scale) or, in the case of Brazil, the progressive (and “progressive-thinking”) destruction of the Amazon, whether to transform the forest into soy and pasture, or to convert its rivers into reservoirs of hydroelectric plants. In the episode of Hurricane Katrina, in the United States, the link between this global devastation and new forms of authoritarianism became clear - which has also been verified, with its own modalities, in the construction of the hydroelectric plants of Belo Monte, Jirau and Santo Antônio, in Brazil.