Shaped by Power. Alpine Geographies of Climate Change

Abstract

As a piece of larger research which focuses on the relation between the exercise of power over water resources, the contribution examines the current environmental exhaustion of the mountain landscape resources exploring the multiplicity of processes of rationalization of the territory and the interplay of socio-transformation of the alpine area. It seeks an understanding of the territorial, implications of the politics of exploitation of water, focusing on the energy spatial project deployed along the Piave river. Bisecting the region through a valley-section, it describes how its embedded dynamics of production (energetic, of agriculture, of abstraction) are closely entangled, and consequentially dependent upon, the ecologies of specific spaces, often seemingly disconnected or remote. In the current frame of increasingly worsen climate conditions, this contribution attempts to question the social, political, institutional and ecological dynamics that the machinic landscape entails across the territory, would it be urbanised or rural.