Building a park, immunising life: Environmental management and radical asymmetry Manuel Tironi a,⇑ , Ignacio Farías b a Instituto de Sociología, P. Universidad Católica de Chile/CIGIDEN – Centro de Investigación para la Gestión Integrada de Desastres Naturales, Chile b Munich Center for Technology in Society, TU München/ICSO – Universidad Diego Portales, Chile article info Article history: Received 18 November 2014 Received in revised form 29 April 2015 Accepted 2 May 2015 Available online 1 June 2015 Keywords: Tsunamis Environmental management Asymmetry Sloterdijk Chile abstract This paper engages in a critical assessment of environmental management as a way of rethinking our co-habitation with earthly powers. Focusing on the post-disaster reconstruction of Constitución, a Chilean costal city severely damaged by the 2010 tsunami, we argue that environmental management theory has not fully recognised that, sometimes, we humans confront excessive forces that cannot be not diplomatically managed or assumed as manageable objects that will readily accept our invitation to compose a common world. Thinking with Sloterdijk’s notions of atmosphere and immunisation, this paper proposes a theoretical programme to re-frame post-disaster environmental management as the creation of life-enabling mem- branes to contain, isolate and immunise human existence from indifferent forces such as tsunamis. More specifically, we follow the technopolitical controversies around the design of an anti-tsunami park in Constitución to draw attention towards two crucial moments of this process: the definition of the park’s composition and the debate around the park’s fallibility. We argue that these moments point to a type of environmental management engaged in the articulation of an immunising atmosphere to secure an inte- rior for human dwelling. Moreover, these two moments specify empirical challenges not fully developed in Sloterdijk’s atmospheric philosophy: the rearrangement of science, politics and materials that is brought along in the process of erecting an immunological membrane; and the bioeconomy of life (and death) that emerges upon the possibility of an immunitary breakdown. In the concluding section we turn to the ecological and ethical challenges opened up by an atmospheric approach to environmental management. Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Making thoughtful decisions about environmental challenges that involve wide-ranging and potentially irreversible conse- quences is of profound importance for current and future human wellbeing. [Polansky and Binder, 2012] As economists Stephen Polansky and Seth Binder remind us, nature, far from keeping a peaceful distance from our political life, has been increasingly challenging it. The augmentation of techno- logical disasters, the geological uncertainty regarding new energy solutions such as fracking, and the almost inevitable consequences of climate change delineate a future in which nature, an adamant force not ready to be tamed, disrupts the project of the moderns (Latour, 1993). In the face of this ‘revenge of Gaia’ (Lovelock, 2006) a renewed interest on environmental management (EM) has emerged in diverse domains. EM can be defined as a set of knowledges and practices oriented towards the purposeful mediation in human– natural relations (Barrow, 2005). And as such, EM has gained a cen- tral place in the governance of social life. ‘‘Environmental threats’’, indicates the United Nations Environment Programme, ‘‘will require new global, regional, national and local responses’’, namely ‘‘rules, practices, policies and institutions’’ capable to re-shape ‘‘how humans interact with the environment’’ (2009). The assem- bling of new market devices for emission trading, the organisation of better and faster post-disaster humanitarian help, or the devel- opment of novel geoengineering solutions such as carbon caption and storage, is just but a few examples of the importance of EM practices to ensure the long-term ecological balance of the planet. These practices, in turn, confirm the entanglement of politics and http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2015.05.001 0016-7185/Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. ⇑ Corresponding author. E-mail address: metironi@uc.cl (M. Tironi). Geoforum 66 (2015) 167–175 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Geoforum journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum