Contribution short abstract

I explore the desert as a vertical field of sensitivity, where ground, infrastructures, and sky form a political continuum. From a vertical political ecology, this lens unsettles the notion of emptiness and opens new ways to think socioecological justice amid energy transitions.

Contribution long abstract

This work explores a reading of the desert as a vertical assemblage (soil, ruins, infrastructures, and sky) to examine how the energy transition reconfigures the arid territories of Chile’s Norte Grande. While critical literature has dismantled the colonial fiction of the “void,” a perspective that attends to the vertical dimension of the desert as a field of sensibility where the continuum between soil, infrastructures, and sky becomes a space of value and dispute, aligned with a vertical political ecology is still lacking.

The first scene unfolds in María Elena, a company town shaped by successive extractive cycles (nitrate, copper, lithium, photovoltaics). Here, the community mobilizes a patrimonial language that re-inscribes the desert as industrial archive and cultural horizon, challenging its reduction to disposable spatiality and opening alternative modes of inhabiting aridity.

The second scene emerges in Taltal, where the INNA green hydrogen megaproject seeks to locate near major astronomical observatories. This attempt reveals a conflict that goes beyond the ground: industry projects the occupation of desert atmospheres through luminance and infrastructure, while astronomers and Changa communities defend the darkness of the firmament as a common territorial and spiritual good.

Understanding the desert through verticality and political continuum illuminates how the energy transition not only transforms the surface but also intervenes in cosmological and affective horizons. This perspective offers a pathway for rethinking socioecological justice in desert regions, showing that what is at stake is not only the land but also the skies that sustain and make it thinkable.