Antonio Bontempi – from engineering to political ecology

As a postmodern earthling suffering from solastalgia, I fell in love with political ecology after a nonlinear professional journey from building engineering to sustainability studies. This journey has also been one from positivism to critical thinking, from a faith in technical solutions to an awareness of the political nature of environmental and societal dilemmas.

After a Master’s in Building Engineering from the University of Bergamo and two years as a freelance designer in the Italian construction sector, I felt like a fish out of the water: hopeless in front of the pervert dynamics of the urbanization industry, an agent of destruction rather than construction. I had to go back to learning. Happily, I got a full Erasmus Mundus scholarship for a Joint European Master’s in Environmental Studies, through which I built a background in political ecology, ecological economics, industrial ecology, environmental engineering, and sustainability studies, in a broad sense. During this professional turn, I matured a strong interest in political ecology, post-development, and degrowth theories. At the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA) of the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), I contributed to the Global Atlas for Environmental Justice (ejatlas.org) through a critical mapping of hydropower conflicts related to the largest Italian construction company – WeBuild. At the same institute, as project manager of the Erasmus+ project Edu-BioMed, I worked on issues of biodiversity conservation and protected areas. Recently, I got my PhD in Geography at the UAB. In my doctoral thesis, I mapped environmental injustices and conflicts related to both development and conservation projects, and particularly focusing on the role of existing sustainability policy instruments in the struggles against extractivism. 

Throughout my academic journey, I had the opportunity to be a visiting scholar in the Urban Climate Change Research Network team at Columbia University of New York, at Lisbon’s Instituto Superior Técnico, at the Technical University of Hamburg, and the Merida’s CINVESTAV unit, in Mexico. On this latter occasion, I conducted fieldwork to study how environmental law plays in struggles against large-scale renewable energy parks in Yucatán. 

Currently, I am developing an interest in alternatives to technology-as-usual. Particularly, I am exploring the study of what low-tech energy solutions may support more democratic arrangements and lower-impact ways of living. 

Beyond academia, I enjoy spending time with my toddler, writing ecotopian short stories, cooking, playing the guitar, swimming, making friends, and clowning. Being part of a network like POLLEN makes me feel like I’m in a community sharing similar values and sensitivities that help me ease my solastalgia 🙂