Inmarsat Oil tanker in advertisement, 1999

The representation of the globe from space has given us an acute perception of our essential solidarity as passengers of a small blue planet lost in the cosmos; and the night vision of planet Earth, with the urban areas strongly illuminated, a clear conscience of the impact on the environment of our current lifestyle, which is leading to the forecasted exhaustion of fossil fuels, while the sun sets on the oil fields. The compulsive consumption of the planet not only affects our energy resources; it increasingly affects the territory, that after the urban explosion is experimenting in many areas an uncontrollable sprawl that litters the landscape with the visual garbage of formless metastases similar in their crushed structure to the dump sites that clog the peripheries; but this cannot be too suprising when even the exterior space is full of orbital junk, with thousands of residual objects concentrated in the closest layers and in the ring of geosynchronic satellites. Ignoring the ecological crisis, our species moves between the agressive geography of the empire and the global terror of the resistant fundamentalists: we wish the globe were in the hands on an old wise man, but it is most probably at the mercy of visionary or genocidal satraps...[+]