Giulio Boccaletti, "The Environmental Republic: Why Citizens Will Save the World" (Princeton UP, 2026)

Summary

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Podcast Summary

Podcast: New Books Network
Episode: Giulio Boccaletti, The Environmental Republic: Why Citizens Will Save the World (Princeton UP, 2026)
Date: August 7, 2026
Host: Mortaza Hajizadeh
Guest: Dr. Giulio Boccaletti

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Overview

This episode features an in-depth interview with climate scientist and author Dr. Giulio Boccaletti discussing his latest book, The Environmental Republic: Why Citizens Will Save the World. The conversation explores the intersections of environmental crisis, political legitimacy, and the republican tradition. Boccaletti argues for a reimagining of environmentalism rooted in politics, collective citizenship, and the practical exercise of democracy, diverging from the dominance of science and moral argumentation in recent environmental discourse.

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Key Themes and Concepts

1. Origins and Purpose of the Book

Timestamp: 01:44–07:35

• Boccaletti, a scientist by training, grounds his work in decades of experience at the interface of public policy, business, and environmental security, primarily around water issues.
• His previous book, Water: A Biography, examined civilization's dialectic with water but consciously avoided using “we” — highlighting the challenge of defining community in the context of environmental crisis.
• The Environmental Republic arose from the realization that global environmental action hinges on the question: who is "we"?
  • “Who is that we? And it turns out that’s a complicated story, but the answer I’ve landed on… is that republican institutions, the republican tradition… is really the best lens through which to understand what that we represent and who we is.” (Dr. Boccaletti, 06:00)

2. Rethinking Republicanism

Timestamp: 07:35–13:33

• Boccaletti clarifies “republic” is not about presidents versus monarchs but about sovereignty lying with the people, balancing individual liberty and collective responsibility.
  • “Republicanism is about a system of governing a society that places sovereignty in the people and balances individual liberty with collective responsibility.” (09:30)
• Draws on Philip Pettit's concept of liberty as freedom from domination — liberty is not absence of interference but the guarantee that no one is subject to the arbitrary will of others.
  • “You’re not free because you’re free to act. You’re free to act because you’re free.” (11:55)

3. The Crisis of the Republic and Environmentalism

Timestamp: 14:57–25:41

• Boccaletti addresses the erosion of republican traditions in the West and sees environmental crisis as an impetus to rebuild civic life.
  • “I think we can use environmental concern as a deep well of political energy that brings us back to engage in politics in a constructive way and shifts the power back towards the ground, towards place, towards community…” (16:00)
• He critiques the environmental movement’s two strategic failures:
  1. Over-relying on scientific authority to drive change, overlooking that facts do not automatically translate into political imperatives.
     • “We cannot assume that from factual truths descend political imperatives… There is no legitimacy, intrinsic political legitimacy, intrinsic to the science in a republican system… Anna Arendt warned us of this in the 1950s…” (17:23)
  2. Using moral indignation as the primary lever of advocacy, which excludes synthesis and compromise fundamental to politics.
     • “Politics is about taking different values, people with different opinions, and finding synthesis… It's not a moral, ethical process. It's not indoctrination, not evangelical… It's fundamentally practical.” (22:00)
• The need for presence and embodiment in politics: Online discourse is no substitute for real political engagement in place.

4. Case Study – Barbados: An Environmental Republic

Timestamp: 25:41–39:06

• Boccaletti uses Barbados — the world’s newest republic — as a case study for how identity, emancipation, and environmental vulnerability (e.g. hurricanes, sea level rise) are woven together.
  • “Barbados’s political tradition… manages to narrate political emancipation through nature, through the description of a nation… there’s this expression, ‘children of the cyclone.’” (31:10)
• The republic is described as the combination of:
  • Voice: Citizen authorship and sovereignty
  • Institutions: The connective “glue” — rules, traditions, organizations
  • Purpose: Collective orientation, “civic pact”
    • “Institutions… are the ways in which we — the rules… traditions and beliefs. All of those are institutions… that connect the local voice to purpose…” (35:35)

5. The Politics and Power of the Ocean

Timestamp: 39:06–49:03

• The ocean exemplifies the problem of governing the global commons, as it lies outside national sovereignty.
  • “The open ocean is not susceptible to property or sovereignty… the exercise of power over non-territorial spaces is… about being able to project and exercise power.” (42:50)
• The reality that environmental management in international spaces ultimately depends not only on shared values but also on the capacity to back rules with enforceable power.

6. Environmental Protection and Coercive Power

Timestamp: 48:01–54:10

• Examines why environmentalists often avoid discussing coercive power or enforcement:
  • Conservation has roots in aesthetics and moral values more than politics.
  • Conservation is often reactionary (“preserve” rather than direct the future), and can reflect top-down power, particularly from Western institutions.
  • “Parks exist if you are able to keep people out or control their behaviors in them… it’s an exercise of domination. I’m not saying it’s bad or good, but it needs to be collective if it’s going to be legitimate.” (53:00)
• Legitimacy in environmental action comes from broad-based, collective decision-making — not just elite technocratic authority.

7. From Distant Apocalypse to Immediate Adaptation

Timestamp: 55:36–63:32

• Environmental crisis is no longer a distant, modelled future — its effects are immediate and material for many.
  • “The experience of the environment is… experienced, it is now right… the change has exceeded the dimensions of our protections, we have to interrogate the present and ask ourselves what to do.” (57:00)
• Societies need to rediscover state capacity for planning and infrastructural transformation — not abandon democracy, but use it to make real, future-oriented choices.

8. Development vs. Sustainability and the Role of Human Freedom

Timestamp: 63:32–70:58

• Boccaletti provocatively argues that development — not “sustainability” as commonly framed — should be the primary purpose of society.
  • Drawing from Amartya Sen, Arthur Lewis, and Bernard Williams, he centers human liberty and the right to be “authors of your life.”
    • “We do need development and growth because that is the route through which we deliver choice and freedom to people… Let’s put people at the heart of what we’re doing, let’s put their liberty as the objective.” (64:50)
• Environmental action is necessary because human liberty is only realized in a functioning material world; but the rights of nature as an independent absolute do not have political legitimacy unless majoritarian.

9. Europe — Testing Ground for the Environmental Republic

Timestamp: 72:23–82:16

• Europe as a Republican Project:
  • Europe’s unique position — a continent striving for unity after centuries of conflict; integration as a response to the failures of nationalism.
  • The European Union, founded in crisis and incrementalism, must go beyond economic union to become a political union.
  • “The environmental concern, the relationship of Europeans to their landscape, to their territory, is the deep well of political energy that we could use to make this happen… that’s what actually brings, I think, Europe together…” (78:50)
• The environment can be a new civic narrative for unity, transcending nationality, religion, culture, or language.

10. Optimism, Change, and the Role of Narrative

Timestamp: 82:16–84:25

• Hope as Practice: Boccaletti is optimistic because he believes history is the gesture of free people, and political narratives can inspire real change.
  • “History, human history, is not a chronology, it’s a gesture. It’s actions of people with free will. We can actually make change happen.” (83:00)
• The task is to create, narrate, and embody new forms of political community centered on place, collective responsibility, and practical governance.

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Notable Quotes

• On the limits of science in politics:
  • “There is no legitimacy, intrinsic political legitimacy, intrinsic to the science in a republican system, in a democratic system… because that is a restriction of the space of liberty.” (17:40)
• On politics and online engagement:
  • “Having opinions voiced on platforms, the algorithms of which are controlled by somebody else, is not politics. It’s entertainment.” (22:50)
• On the role of coercion in environmental progress:
  • “Parks exist if you are able to keep people out or control their behaviors in them. It’s an exercise of domination… but it needs to be collective if it’s going to be legitimate…” (53:00)
• On the necessity of development:
  • “Development… is the instrument through which we liberate the people… If we had that political orientation, we would inevitably have to manage the environment not just in an extracted sense, but also in service of the freedom and prosperity of all citizens.” (64:50, 67:50)
• On Europe’s political potential:
  • “If [Europe] managed [to become a political union], it would be the largest and most consequential environmental, explicit environmental republic in the world and in human history…” (81:40)
• On optimism and agency:
  • “I’m an optimist in that sense. In the sense that I think there is an idea of change. It is possible to do it, and it’s up to us to make it happen.” (82:50)

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Structure & Timestamps

• Origins & Purpose: 01:44–07:35
• Republicanism Defined: 07:35–13:33
• Republic, Crisis, and Environmentalism: 14:57–25:41
• Barbados: Case Study: 25:41–39:06
• The Ocean and the Commons: 39:06–49:03
• Coercive Power in Environmentalism: 48:01–54:10
• From Apocalypse to Adaptation: 55:36–63:32
• Development as Societal Purpose: 63:32–70:58
• Europe and the Environmental Republic: 72:23–82:16
• Hope, Narrative, and Agency: 82:16–84:25

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Final Reflections

Dr. Giulio Boccaletti’s The Environmental Republic offers a provocative reimagining of environmental action as a fundamentally political, not merely scientific or moral project. Through vivid examples, philosophical framing, and practical critique, Boccaletti challenges us to reconstruct our civic compacts around material realities, liberty, practical synthesis, and the collective authorship of our futures. Environmentalism, he insists, is not about purity or distant utopias—it is about the real, messy, contingent work of free citizens governing their “shared home.”

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Transcript

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[Dr. Giulio Boccaletti]

welcome to the New

[Promo Announcer]

Books Network

[Mortaza Hajizadeh]

hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of New Books Network. I'm Mortaza Hajizadeh, your host and today I'm honored to be speaking with Dr. Giulio Buccaletti about his most recent book, a fascinating topic which brings environmentalism and politics together. The book is called the Environmental Republic why Citizens Will Save the World. It's a book bold new conception of the Republic for planet in crisis and Dr. Giulio Boccaletti is an author who's writing on natural resources and secure Natural resources and security have been translated translated into several languages. He has had international leadership position in private and non for profit sectors is a science. He's the scientific director of Euro Mediterranean center on Climate Change, one of Europe's largest research institutions focused on ad science and transition economics. And he was also the author of a very famous book called A Biography. And today he's here with us to talk about his most recent book published by Princeton University Press in 2026, the Environmental Republic. Julio, welcome to New Books Network.

[Dr. Giulio Boccaletti]

Thank you for having me.

[Mortaza Hajizadeh]

It's a fascinating topic and I'm keen to know how the idea of this book came to you and if you, if it's somehow connected to your previous book, which I'm sure it is somehow, but I'll leave it to you to discuss it. Can you just very briefly introduce yourself and tell us about the conception of this book?

[Dr. Giulio Boccaletti]

Sure. Well, I'm a scientist by training, I'm a climate scientist by training, but I've then spent over 20 years working at the interface of public policy and business strategy and economic development. And so I've had a a very broad exposure to issues of the environment. And in fact for quite a large part of that time I focused on issues of water security in a number of different countries. And that was in part the inspiration and the origin of my previous book, Water Biography. And I will say just a couple of words on that because it was in fact the starting point for this new book, the Environmental Republic. The Water Biography was really an attempt at writing a new history of civilization from the point of view of the dialectic relationship that connects us to water. Water is how the climate system expresses itself on the landscape. And over the course of centuries, millennia, societies across the planet have mobilized what Michael Mann would have called the sources of social power. So, you know, the ability to mobilize resources and labor to transform and engineer the environment, to control the behavior of water. And have water when you don't, you know, when it's not raining, you know, avoid floods and protect yourself from floods when there's too much water and swallowing. And obviously, every time you transform the environment, you transform the behavior of the very thing you're trying to control. And so in that sense, I've defined it in that book as a dialectic relationship. Not so much not dialectic in the Hegelian sense, as, you know, some of your listeners might think of, but dialectic in the sense that it is a kind of action and response. Now, that book was interesting, but over the course of writing it, I realized that there was a gap. And the best way to describe the gap was that I wrote that whole book without ever once using the word we. The word we. And part of the reason was that usually, maybe some of your listeners will find this, too. I often get irritated by the use of we as a rhetorical device in academic writing. We know this as if we are in a classroom. And always the question comes to me of who is we? And so in that book, I never used the word we. But as I examined the relationship of different societies across the world to water, it became amply evident to me that the question of who is we? Matters enormously. And in fact, it's inextricably linked to the question of what political institution institutions govern our life together and realize this collective we. And so the Environmental why Citizens Will Save the World is a book that kind of starts with this question in mind of who is we when we say we have to confront climate change, when we say we have to deal with the consequences of changing material conditions? Who is that we? And it turns out that's a complicated story, but the answer I've landed on, and the exploration I've done in this new book is, is that republican institutions, the republican tradition, which I'm sure we'll talk about in a second, is really the best lens through which to understand what that we represent and who we is. So that's kind of the, you know, if you want the narrative version of why I wrote this book. But then there's another. There's another reasonable thesis that I decided to write this book, and that is that, you know, I've been working on environmental issues for, as I said, the better part of, you know, 20 plus years. In fact, if you include my life as a scientist, almost 30 years. And I think we are at a fundamental change, a fundamental shift. We, for many, many years, since 1992, since we agreed the UN, FCC and the other treaties that make up the international architecture, environmental management, we've been in this mode of using science to paint a picture of a distant future that we don't want to go to and try to convince everybody to avoid it. The changes that we're seeing today, the fires in Europe, the heat waves, the floods that hit many parts of the world, all of those are a symptom of the fact that things are now changing and they're changing quite rapidly. And the problem has fundamentally changed. It's no longer just an issue of trying to convince us all not to go to that particular future by reducing emissions, although we have to do that. But we need to deal with a changing environment, a rapidly changing environment. And that challenges our life together in place. And so the answer to that cannot be what we've always resorted to in the environmental community, which is either the authority of science or moralistic argument about who is right and who is wrong. But politics, right politics as the mechanisms through which we together in place, come to a synthesis as to what we want to do and manage our condition, the human condition for the future. So anyway, so that's kind of the rationale for writing this book. It's both a kind of a sequel, if you will, of my previous one, an exploration of who is we vis a vis the environment, but also response to the very disruptive changes that we are witnessing in the environment today.

[Mortaza Hajizadeh]

You have touched upon a lot of important points which I'm sure we'll unpack as we go ahead. I actually wanted to ask you, There was a question I wanted to ask later, but I guess it's best to ask it now. The idea of the republic which you mentioned, in what sense do you use the idea of republic? What do you mean by this republic?

[Dr. Giulio Boccaletti]

So the republican tradition. In fact, it's a very good question because for a variety of historical reasons that I get to into the book, we've sort of lost track of what that means. Right when the United States was founded, that was basically the only republic in the world, or certainly of that size. And you can count cantons in Switzerland as forms of self government. But the general idea was that the republic as a mode of Government as a mode that executes popular sovereignty was really not a suitable form of government for vast territories. Today, 200 years later, most countries in the world call themselves republics, right? Certainly all post colonial states and republics have come in many flavors, to the point that people have the impression that the only thing that distinguishes a republic from, say, a monarchy is that you have a president as opposed to a king or a queen. But that is not what republicanism means. My British friends, I'm half English myself, will hate me for saying this, but in truth, the British state has many, many republican ingredients to it. Most of them emerged out of

[Mortaza Hajizadeh]

the

[Dr. Giulio Boccaletti]

experience of the Commonwealth or republicanism in the 17th century here in this country in the UK. So republicanism is not about having a president, having a monarch. Republicanism is about a system of government, a system of governing, a society that places sovereignty in the people and that balances individual liberty with collective responsibility. And in the book and in the argument, the idea of liberty is central. In fact, if there is one theme that has to be at the foundation of the republican idea of republicanism is liberty. Right is liberty and liberty. Now, as opposed to, say, justice or as opposed to brotherhood or other things, right? Even though these words have been used in various forms over the centuries, but liberty is really at the heart of it. In the book, I make the case that this idea of having a system that balances individual liberty and collective responsibility is actually not the legacy just of European tradition, right? It's not the product of the modern period in Europe. It's a. Is a form of government that continuously tries to emerge across the world. In fact, I make the case that it is an emergent property of societies trying to govern themselves in place when they face changing material conditions. But the language that we've developed to describe the republic is indeed mostly of the European tradition. The word itself, the republic, is the Roman idea. And there's a kind of healthy school of political philosophy represented in particular by the person, Philip Pettit, a philosopher at Princeton, an Australian philosopher at Princeton, who has inspired many of my ideas of republicanism and liberty. And in a nutshell, the story is this, that liberty in the republican tradition is not what usually liberals or libertarians argue, that is lack of interference from the government. You know, you're not free if you are able to do whatever you please. That's not the definition of liberty that I'm after. The definition of liberty that is the foundation of the republic, as I define it, as others define it, is freedom from domination. It is not a property of actions, it's a property of the individual. Philippe Petit has this analogy that I think is useful to understand what I'm talking about. If you are a slave and you have a master, and the master is very benign and allows you to do whatever you want in the negative conception of freedom in the liberal sense of freedom, in the libertarian tradition, if you will, in the tradition of Jeremy Bentham, you are free because you're basically free to do whatever you want and nobody's interfering with your actions. But in the republican tradition, in the neo Roman republican tradition, you're not free because you have a master, you're a slave, right? Liberty is a property of the individual, not of the actions. So you're not free because you're free to act. You're free to act because you're free. This matters enormously because in an organized society, liberty in this sense implies a commitment of all other people, right? Absence of domination requires institutions, requires mechanisms by which people are able to exercise sovereignty over some portion of their domain and still live collectively in a society. And so that's really the starting point for my Republican journey. I start with that definition of liberty, which is very abstract, if you will. It's a philosophical point. But then I go into very practical implications for what does that mean for a society that needs to confront first order perturbations in its environment, from a changing climate, from changing environment, from changing economic trends and so forth.

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[Dr. Giulio Boccaletti]

So that's what I mean by republic. A republic is a system that enshrines liberty as freedom from domination, as the core principle around which it organizes itself. And from there I derive the components of a republic, which, if you want, I can sort of describe now, or we can come to that later.

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[Dr. Giulio Boccaletti]

Well,

[Mortaza Hajizadeh]

I'm an environmentalist myself, but I'm very skeptical of the way we are heading and I'll ask it towards the end of the interview Again, when I was reading the book, I was just fascinated by this idea of republicanism to bring it into environmentalism. But then I also started thinking about, even from political perspective, the idea of Republic is in crisis. What's happening in the United States, you have the rise of right wing populism, most countries in Europe, in America, over the world. It's not really a question. I'm just thinking loud that from even political perspective we're losing that great tradition of republicanism, Republic, I mean, and we already have a lot of difficulties convincing politicians about the actions they need to take to save the planet. So I'm guessing there's a big challenge ahead even in.

[Dr. Giulio Boccaletti]

Well, I think that's partly why, you know, that's why I've written this book, Montesa, because I think that the solution to that problem in fact rests in facing our environmental challenges as a fundamental question of how do we live together in place. Right. So we're not actually the deterioration of our civic compact, which you lament, Right. Which is the kind of deterioration of our polity. Right. The parasitic behavior of, of kind of a few wealth creators who are actually diminishing the liberty of everybody else by concentrating power and concentrating wealth to the expense of everybody else whilst benefiting themselves from all those investments in institutions, infrastructure that have created the prosperity that we enjoy in rich countries. Right. So this is what's happening that goes hand in hand with the fact that we've lost track of what it means to govern a place. So the reason I write the environmental Republic is I think that we can use environmental concern as a deep well of political energy that brings us back to engage in politics in a constructive way and shifts the power back towards the ground, towards place, towards community, without however kind of falling into the trap of all autarky of localism. Right. So how do you balance these two things? Big national strategy, geopolitics. All the issues that challenges are challenging are challenging our countries and the fact that we want people to have a voice in how their home looks and how their home is governed. And that's the trick, if you will, that the Republic is designed to pull off. And so I think we desperately need to start this conversation. And one of the reasons I've been passionate about writing about this is that I think the environmental movement has made two catastrophic strategic mistakes that are now coming to the fore. I alluded to them earlier, but let me just kind of put a pin on this. The first is to believe that science. Well, I'm a scientist, right? So there's no way in this book you will ever find me questioning what science says about reality. The statements about the climate system, what is happening to our planet, are all true, but we cannot assume that from factual truths descend political imperatives, as many environmentalists seem to suggest. So the argument that says we should just heed the science and do x, Y and Z, that belies a simplistic view of political philosophy. There is no legitimacy, intrinsic political legitimacy, intrinsic to the science in a republican system, in a democratic system. And, you know, Anna Arendt, who is another inspiration for my writing, warned us of this in a book in the 1950s called the Human Condition, where she was concerned about the disproportionate role that nuclear physicists played in deciding policy in the age of the nuclear age, right? And she made the point that you have to be suspicious of language that is not accessible to all, right? Because that is a restriction of the space of liberty. And so that doesn't mean that we should ignore the science, but we need institutions that can metabolize the science and then place it into a true political discussion about what we ought to do. What we ought to do, not what. Well, not what the science says, right? And David Hume told us three, three centuries ago that, you know, from the is, is not derived the ought, right? We can't derive the ought from the is. And this is a trivial point, but it's an important one that many in the environmental community have forgotten. And we can't derive the ought from the is for the simple reason that there is no scientific theory for what we want and that is intrinsic to our notion of liberty, to the idea that people can be sovereigns of their own life, authors of their life in a community. So that's the first catastrophic mistake. And of course, the mistake has become evident, because if you place legitimacy squarely on the science, the easiest way to stop any action is to just question the legitimacy of science, which is what has been happening for the last 30 years. It's very easy to stop actions by just sowing doubt. The famous merchants of doubt, right? And so it is urgent to shift the debate from the ease of science to a discussion about what we ought to do, what we want to do, which is a Values based discussion that is susceptible to political debate, not to scientific analysis. That's the first kind of. The first mistake. And focusing on republican principles and on the institutions of the Republic can help us do that. Right. Republics are designed to intermediate different interests into a collective political program. First mistake. And then the second one is that, and we've seen this over the last decade, I would say Montesso, which is that indignation. This is not specific to environmental debate, but in environmentalism it's become a particular problem that we believe that indignation is an instrument that's useful, that there's kind of moral call to action, the ones that are going to win the day. And the basic argument seems to be the world is divided between those who have understood the science and the right, and those who have either not thought about it long enough, haven't understood the science or lying. And this is not a basis for a republican system of government. You can't assume that you're going to engage your neighbors, whatever the political inclinations are, on that basis. Politics is not, most definitely not about convincing everybody else that you're right. That is a misunderstanding of what the political process is. Politics is about taking different values, people with different opinions, and finding synthesis. Synthesis, right, synthesis amongst them. So it's deciding what to do despite differences. That is what the political process is about. It's not a moral, ethical process. It's not indoctrination, is not evangelical. Right. It's fundamentally practical. And again, the true republican tradition is precisely about creating a balanced set of institutions that helps intimidate that discussion and land on a synthesis. So I hear you. I think there is concern to be had about the future of the Republic and there's a concern to be had about the environment. But I think actually addressing these two things together is the way out of it. And I'll tell you one last observation that I had in writing this book, Montesa, which is that in an age of social media, I mean, this is almost a cliche to start a sentence this way, right? But we are in an age of social media. But in an age of social media, people participate in what appears to be a public dialogue, a political dialogue, but having opinions voiced on platforms, the algorithms of which are controlled by somebody else is not politics. It's entertainment.

[Mortaza Hajizadeh]

Right.

[Dr. Giulio Boccaletti]

Politics is about being present with the body. And you know, this representative system of government matters a great deal. It is not a coincidence that in our parliamentary systems people need to be present. Right. And refocusing on the environment is another way of reminding us that we're not brains and sticks looking at screens all day. We live in the material world our neighbors approximate. And the political synthesis we need to pursue is a political synthesis that requires us looking out of the window and talking to people in presence. Because we're dealing with material conditions. Right. We're dealing with material change. And so I think that there's a, you know, focusing on the environmental republic. I'll use this as a shorthand to describe political systems that help us citizens of shared homes deal together with the future of those homes is also an antidote to the forced isolation that's created by this appearance of participating in that public sphere. Right. Sort of Habermas kind of public sphere. But in fact we're simply entertaining each other whilst making money for parasitic rent seekers. I think what we need to do is go back to place, to what's outside of the window and engage with our neighbors on how we manage our shared home. That's the way in which we get out of both problems of managing the environment and mending our civic compact. And I'll close this by saying this. There is a requirement of all of us as we do this, which is not to enter this with the preconceived notion that there is a right way of addressing environmental challenges that has to be the product of the political synthesis.

[Mortaza Hajizadeh]

Right.

[Dr. Giulio Boccaletti]

That is what we have to give up. We have to be able to engage in. In debate and come to a synthesis that is an imperfect second best solution for everybody. That's the secret of political debate. If we're willing and able to do that, then I think we can overcome both the deterioration of our political institutions and make progress on managing our environment.

[Mortaza Hajizadeh]

It was a great answer and I agree with you and I'm glad that you've written this book. It seems that, and you do mention it in the book and you just said it, that I guess a lot of environmentalists have the mistakes they made. They've been focusing for 30 years on building scientific consensus, which is a wonderful thing. But they haven't really focused a lot on that political legitimacy or let's say focusing on how societies actually make legitimate political choices, which is what can solve these environmental problems. And I loved the comedy just made about politics is not about convincing others. You're right, you have people with different political opinions. The important thing is to be able to bring them together and find a consensus or synthesis, as you put it, find a way forward. We have been talking about this environmental republic. There is a good example in your book. You start the book by talking about Barbados. And it might seem that it's an insignificant place, but it's actually a great example of what you call environmental republic. It's a country whose identity is shaped by both political emancipation and also environmental vulnerability. There's this legacy of slavery and there are the realities of environmental issues such as hurricanes or sea level rise. Can you tell us why you think that Barbados is a good example of that environmental republic? Talk about the idea of stewardship and the importance of place in shaping national identity in that place.

[Dr. Giulio Boccaletti]

Yeah, well, I loved delving into the story of Barbados and I chose it for a number of different reasons. Well, the first one, which is the most proximate and is just that Barbados happens to be the most recent state to have chosen to be a republic. And so that gave me kind of the hook to start. But then it turned out to be a good choice for a number of other reasons. I'll just list a few. And you know, as you saw, the chapter quite complex because we. I use Barbados to both introduce the structure of the republic as well as by telling and as well as to tell the story of the idea of the republic over time. One reason I thought it was interesting to start with Barbados is that often in the story of republicanism and therefore in the story of revolution, because that is what, at least in the modern age. In the modern age, in a historian sense. Right. Sort of post Renaissance world republicanism and revolutionary activities go hand in hand and we are all living downstream of Hobsbam's age of Revolution. And. And so there's this story out there that the story of republicanism and the story of revolutionary republicanism is really the story of the American and French Revolution. It's an Atlantic story that is mostly led by Europeans. Whereas in fact, I was convinced in starting this book and now I'm even more convinced. That's a misunderstanding, of course, with language of republicanism and some of the ideas. Machiavelli, Harrington, all these characters in the sort of age of rediscovery of classical tradition are European. But in fact, in practice, the revolutionary story that leads to republicanism is mostly a non European story. Of course, the United States kicks off the most recent realization of this at the end of the 18th century. But then, whilst Europe was kind of struggling with its own revolutionary movements. Those of you who have studied history will remember the stories of not just the French Revolution, but then the 1848s and all the attempts in Europe. And I'd remind the listeners that Europe is still the continent with the Highest number of monarchies in the world to this day. In reality, the revolutionary movement spreads first southward. So the story of revolution really is the story of America and then of Haiti, quite famously, in fact, at the end of the 19th century, Haiti was kind of a promise of the republican movement and more generally. And then in Latin America, where republicanism again makes appearance from Bolivar onwards. And then once we get to the 20th century, at the kind of post colonial world, as European empires disappear, republicanism really does become a movement and a wave that takes over most of the post colonial world. Think of Kwame Nkrumah, think of Jawahar Al Nehru and so forth, so on, right? So first reason to be interested in a place like Barbados is that the Caribbean is an important place for the story of Republicanism in the 19th and 20th century. And then it's a starting point for a reflection on how republicanism actually did spread across the world. And it wasn't through the revolutions that happened in Europe, but it was mostly through the revolutions that happened elsewhere. I'm reminded by the way that, you know, in the line, in the dying days of the British Empire, there was in fact a thriving federalist republican. Well, it was a federalist movement with republican overtones. Even though they never use the word republic in. In Britain, people somehow thought that the federal structure of something like the United States would be an appropriate way of dealing with a more modern version of the empire, which is why we call it. What remains of it is called the Commonwealth, right? Because it was this idea that you could actually construct the Commonwealth, Commonwealth being the sort of 17th century tradition of British republicanism. Anyway, so I think that one of the reasons for Barbados was that the second reason is that islands play an extraordinarily important role in. In the, in the story that we tell of revolution and of republicanism. It's not a consequence, it's not a coincidence that Thomas More's Utopia, for example, is an island, right? Islands. You know, the. Francis Bacon writes of a new Atlantis, an island. Harrington himself, Oceania is an island. So islands, in the sort of political tradition of the 17th century, the age of Sartio Spinoza, of the great republican thinkers of the modern age, islands were laboratories where you could imagine in isolation, societies developing new forms of government. Ben Selim and in fact, often those islands has an integration in those stories. There was a profound integration of technology and nature and the environment, right? There's often the foundation of those stories. And so picking Barbados, whose wealth was basically the product of its environment, right? I mean, Barbados for a while was the great sugar cane producer of the empire. And the wealthy place or kind of wealth producing place seemed an appropriate place. And, you know, the third reason is that Barbados's political tradition. I cite George Lemming. I have, you know, there's a number of Barbadian Bajan thinkers that inform that chapter. But more generally, the kind of literature the Caribbean literature manages to narrate, political emancipation through nature, through the description of a nation. In fact, there's this expression, children of the cyclone, right? Because the experience of cyclones of this overwhelming nature that takes over the island when the tropical cyclone hits was experienced by the European landowners as a catastrophe, but as was experienced by the majority slave population as emancipatory. In other words, there was a superior power to the enslaver that ruled the landscape, Right? And so in this sense, children of the cyclones. And so the political tradition that emerges in the Caribbean and that then actually, for a variety of reasons, the middle of the 20th century becomes part of. With the diaspora, becomes also part of the conversation of the African leaders like Nkrumah and Nyerere and others who bring to independence many of the former colonies in Africa. You know, it seems to me, seemed to me like a deep well of both metaphors and ideas that I could draw on. So that was Barbados. And then, of course, today Barbados is in the leadership of, you know, with Mia Motley, who's the current prime minister, has been leading for a number of years now on the discussion on how we should confront changing climate. And for them, this is a very real problem because small island nations are the first ones in line to feel the changing environmental conditions, right? And so Mia Motley in particular has been very vocal and she's a really powerful orator. So she's done an extraordinary job of taking a small island and actually give it a. Giving it a very prominent voice in international circles on how to confront. How to confront this change. And so use Barbados as a laboratory, if you will, both a historical laboratory and then a political laboratory. You know, the republic in my reading is the combination of three fundamental ingredients. I call them voice, institutions and purpose. Voice meaning the ability to give citizens a voice, sovereignty in being authors of their life. Purpose being the political orientation of civic pact that unites people in a place. And then institutions are the glue that connect the voice to purpose, right? They're the. The ways in which we. The rules. I use institutions in a very general sense. Douglas north, an economist, part of institutional economics, defined them as those human devised constraints that regulate our society. Right. In that sense. So it's not just organizations, but there's also rules and traditions and beliefs. All of those are institutions. And the institutions that connect the local voice to purpose are are a critical ingredient of the Republic. And I use Barbados to illustrate how that island, over the course of centuries managed to develop a sense of voice, managed to develop a sense of institutions, and critically managed to deliberate on a sense of direction on purpose. And as it turns out for small island nation, the environment has to be part of that purpose. Which is why me and Motley spends so much time on it, because they are at risk of succumbing to the changes and so sorry, it's a long answer. Just say Barbados was a very for all these reasons, Barbados was a very good starting point for our journey on Republicanism.

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[Mortaza Hajizadeh]

Yeah, you're absolute and I think it makes sense with the explanation that you provided. Why it's a good example of that I'm keen to ask about. I think it's in chapter two that you talk about the ocean and what I found fascinating about that chapter was that I was expecting a story about the ecosystems and why it's important. But you take a different lens to analyzing ocean. It's not a Story about nature, it becomes a story about power. You sort of trace the history of the sea through trade routes, empires, scientific explorations and competing claims of sovereignty. And you argue that environmental governance has often depended not just on shared values, but also on ability to enforce rules. Can you tell us what does history of the ocean can teach us about governing co global environmental issues today?

[Dr. Giulio Boccaletti]

Yeah, well, that's a, you know, it's a crucial story. And in fact, incidentally, I start that chapter talking about Greenland and roots around Greenland. You know, this was long before President Trump dreamt this idea that he wanted to contest the, you know, sovereignty over green. So it's a kind of a nod, but I think telling coincidence because in the end I think this is one of the kind of key issues. And talking about the oceans is a good way of talking more generally about our responsibility towards the commons. Commons is an overused word. We come from three, four decades of international governance that was mostly seated in the United Nations. And in terms of environmental governance, as I said earlier, we have these three treaties, the UNFCC Treaty on the Climate Change, the Convention on the Biological Diversity and the Convention on Justification, which were the product of Rio in 1992 and which have formed the architecture of the global commons, if you will. And the underlying belief, if you will, is that there is a system of government, supranational system of government, that allows us to, to govern together the places that no one owns. Right. Because the open ocean is not susceptible to property or to sovereignty by having this system of rules. And what people Forget is that 1992 was just after the fall of the Soviet Union and we were working under the auspices of this sort of Pax Americana, right, where we had for a period a single global hegemon which, like the British Empire of the end of the 19th century, sort of ruled the waves. And people took this to be basically a law of nature, but in fact it wasn't and it isn't. And the last couple of years have really shown the degradation and the unwinding of that system of global governance. And so where does that leave us? And the ocean, which is a contested space, is a good place to think about this. And in terms of the. One of the big challenges of a Republican story is that inevitably it becomes territorial. Right, so you're having a conversation about the nation now. You could imagine there's a utopia that has interested some people over the years, famously H.G. wells, the science fiction writer, right, who believed that we should aim to have a global federal government. Kant himself, sort of went into that, in that direction, in a sense. But today the reality is we are a collection of independent territorial nations. And what kind of defines them above all is their ability to exercise their sovereign will. Hopefully, if they're a republic, the popular sovereign will within their territory. I make the point, by the way, in the book, I mean, it's an interesting point, but the legal etymology of the word territory is, is not terra, meaning land, but is to terrorize, right? This is derived from the digesta, the commentary to Justinian's civil law. And it's an important tradition because it tells us that territory is defined by the ability of the state to remove people and to defend collective interests. Now, the reason I focused on the ocean as the first space in which to test these ideas of republic is that the ocean specifically is not subject to territorial control. I mean, the first 12 nautical miles are, but beyond that they're not. And so it really asks the question of how do we achieve outcomes in the ocean? The ocean is two thirds of the planet. If we seek environmental outcomes, there are no environmental outcomes without having environmental outcomes in the ocean. So how do we deal with this? And it's really an opportunity to come to the recognition that whatever happens, there's going to be a negotiation between powers. It's the exercise of power, right? I mean, the open ocean is to this day ruled by maritime law. Derived from Grotius, the Dutch legal scholar who defined the thea as free. Freedom of navigation comes from there. But in the book. I won't belabor the point now, but in the book I drawn a number of other traditions, including that of Paolo Sarpi, who was a legal scholar of the Venetian Republic in the 17th century, who makes the point that in the end the exercise of power over non territorial spaces is not so much an issue of defining ownership as it is a procedural and operational definition of being able to project and exercise power. And another way of saying it is that we can talk about the right rights of nature, the rights of places to be preserved, or the rights of humanity to a shared heritage, for example, the bottom of the ocean. But any rights comes with somebody's obligations to be able to enforce them. And that may be one of the biggest blind spots of the environmental movement, which, you know, in the last 20, 30 years has been often associated with, with a sort of universalist pacifism. But the reality is that in the world of competing states and competing private and public interests, there has to be a balance of powers. And so I draw on the kind of geopolitical Tradition from that. And, you know, there's ample literature on this from the 20th century. Some of it's obviously of somewhat difficult origin, but nonetheless, it's what I draw in that chapter. And so it's a good test, as I said, Mora, for the ideas of Republic. The place that we don't live in, the place that we don't control, how do we deal with that?

[Mortaza Hajizadeh]

And when I was reading that chapter and just now also when you were talking about it, I was reminded of a book, it's on completely different topic, about transatlantic slavery. But I did a podcast with the author, and he made a very good point that history is usually made on the sea, but it's unfortunately not, because it's not land, it's not that territory. It's not really recognized, it's not seen, it's not really written about that much. And when I was reading your book, I think that was a perfect example of how you explore history and how the world and history is made actually at the sea.

[Dr. Giulio Boccaletti]

Yeah, no, for sure. The sea is a challenging political space because it's not subject to the sovereignty of individuals. So, for example, I mean, Fai, famously, you know Jules Verne, when he writes 20,000 Leagues Under Sea, and he writes of the Nautilus. The captain of the Nautilus is called Nemo, right? No one. No one is captain of the ship because there was this sense that the sea is anarchy that derives again from this tradition of. Of Grotius and others. But then at the same time, when Carl Schmitt was writing about power in the 20th century. Carl Schmitt is a kind of complicated character for his association with the German Nazi. But he was a prominent constitutional scholar and reflects on the role of the Thean of the British Empire, the Leviathan versus the behemoth, which is the territorial empire in that time, the analogies between Rome and Carthage, all these things were kind of quite, quite popular. He precisely makes that point. Right. He used the sea as the exploration of political power precisely because it's the place where we're not.

[Mortaza Hajizadeh]

Right. Another part of the book that I enjoyed, and again, I had lots of questions when I was reading it, was when you make this argument, and I think you had a kind of. Maybe I've had to assume that that was the case. But anyhow, it's kind of an uncomfortable argument, I guess, for some environmentalists. And it's the argument the environmental protection really depends on coercive power. And I'm sure this is not the language many environmentalists are comfortable with because they tend to imagine environmental progress coming from awareness, consensus, voluntary cooperation. I think it's one of the mistakes that they have made. But you point out that when you're talking, for example, about high seas, marine protected areas, fisheries, international agreements, rules only matter if someone has the capacity to enforce them. Why do you think environmental movement has been reluctant to grapple with this reality?

[Dr. Giulio Boccaletti]

Well, there's a couple of reasons. And by the way, I mean to be clear, I was the chief strategy officer of the largest conservation organization on the planet, right? And worked at in conservation for almost a decade. And so I have a sort of internal point of view to this. Excuse me. And I suppose there are two aspects to this. The first is that the reality is that the conservation movement is born out of fundamentally an aesthetic, more than, you know, today we use the language of science, right? But in reality it's about a commitment to a kind of nature. You know, we talk a lot about charismatic species, we talk a lot about beautiful forests, we don't talk a lot about bacteria. Right now biological diversity is all the above. Including in fact is dominated by things we don't see. But there's really the sense that it's a narration, it's about the other, it's about something else where we are not. It's protecting the thing that's devoid of humans. And as a matter of fact, I've been involved in the production of a number of documentaries and one of the natural history documentaries. And one of the things you realize when you are involved in those productions is that there is a conspicuous absence which is us, right? You see these movies which are documenting animal behavior and after a while you conclude that if an alien were to use those to reconstruct what happens to the planet, we wouldn't be in it. And they're really just a construction, they reflect an idea of nature that's entirely cultural and constructed. And so if you take this as an aesthetic values based story, then again you go back to my point that people have using morality more than politics because you create an absolute out of nature, whatever that may be. You know, I come from Italy. Italy is an anthropos, is an anthropic landscape. There's nothing in Italy that's nature separate from people, right? I mean, everything has co developed and co evolved between people and ecosystems. So one reason for the environmental movement's reluctance to engage in this question of trade offs and enforcement and coercion is that, you know, there's this belief that what we're talking about is an absolute, a pre Political absolute that is not susceptible to debate. That's a mistake. And it's a mistake that is born out of the misunderstanding of its origin. That is the first point. The second point is that conservation is actually ultimately quite a reactionary activity it wants to preserve. You know, the clue is in the name. And you know, this becomes a real challenge when the environment itself is changing at the pace that we're witnessing. And when we therefore have to ask ourselves, well, what do we want the future look like? We have to, you know, we always are environmental engineers. Human societies have always been environmental engineers at heart, for the simple reason that stationary, sedentary societies are not a fact of nature. They're product of volition. And so conservation, the conservation of spaces and ecosystems, freezing them in time, taking them out of history and into something different, is a profoundly reactionary activity at a time when we actually do need to decide what our future collectively looks like. And then the third point about coercion is that if you look at the origins of the environmental movement, now there are different stories, and I want to make a bundle out of very different traditions, some of which are indigenous to CO countries that are very far from the West. But the reality is that from a monetary, financial and resource perspective, the environmental movement today is dominated by Western organization, and in particular by Western organizations funded by rich people. It's not a bad thing or a good thing, it just is, right? But the result is that you become blind to the fact that you exercise power. The reality is that parks exist. If you are able to keep people out or control their behaviors in them, it's an exercise of domination. I'm not saying it's bad or good, but it needs to be collective if it's going to be legitimate, right? And that is a challenge if you can't get an environmental agenda out of a legitimate popular process. So for all these reasons, right? I mean, you have to face the reality that sometimes environmental conservation is not legitimized by popular will. And that's okay. Democracies can make mistakes with hindsight, right? But the environmental movement struggles with this idea. And at the same time, if you do have an environmental agenda that is the product of a legitimate sovereign decision, then it is entirely obvious that part of implementing it is also exercising coercive power, which is the prerogative of the state is prerogative of public institutions.

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[Mortaza Hajizadeh]

When, when we were talking now, you just, you were talking about what should we do for future. I think you, you kind of had a future focus, perspective. And in the book and I'm glad that it came up in the book as well. When I was a teenager, when I heard and I'm talking about 20 years ago, let's say 20, 25 years ago, when I heard environmental, environmentalists talking about it or when I heard reporters or scientists talk about it, they always talked about the future. And to me it was a distant future challenge that needs to be addressed now. But nowadays, I guess when we talk about environmental, I don't think we're talking about the future. Especially in the past seven or eight years. Maybe I live in Australia. I think it was in 20, just before COVID a year before COVID there were these huge, huge bushfires here in Australia. And the smoke travel even to New Zealand. And examples of this are so common. Flood, drought. I don't think we're talking about future anymore. And again, in your book you discuss that it's what should we do when that future arrives earlier than we expected? How do you think political institutions or our institutions in general, even environmentalists, should adapt to this? Because we're not talking about future anymore, we are talking about now.

[Dr. Giulio Boccaletti]

Well, so, yes, no, I mean, I think that. So you're right that there is a rhetoric of the apocalyptic that has entered the language of environmental debate and discourse, which takes a very distant future, either as I said at the beginning, as a way of convincing everybody not to go there. You know, we will destroy the world if we don't do X, Y and Z. And therefore it becomes a motivational tool. But it's not actually a prediction, a projection of what's going to happen. It's a long term horizon or it's a sort of utopia. Right? And all of these are sort of shrouded in ethical language. Now. At the same time, you are perfectly right that the experience of the environment is now no longer modeled by computer models or imagined, but it is experienced, it is now right. And it has been for a while. And if you didn't live in Australia, but he lived in Ethiopia, this wouldn't be a mystery. I worked in Ethiopia for a number of years and you know, variability of the climate system, let alone climate change, are clear and presentation have been for quite some time because there is no layer of infrastructure, institutions that had been built to protect the population from that variability. So change is a fact of life. And when the change changes, as it is doing now, it becomes even more evident. What's happening in places like Australia or the UK or America or Europe is that for a while the defenses and infrastructure that we built in the 20th century and the management practices that we had adopted in the 20th century had been enough to contain the impacts of those changes. So changes were happening, but they were being contained. And so we didn't see them. Right. It drained less, but we had big enough reservoirs to carry us over to the next rainfall and so forth. Now that the change has exceeded the dimensions of our protections, we have to interrogate the present and ask ourselves what to do. But this is where I think it is still about the future. And in fact, in a way, our governments have lost the ability to plan for the future. Because what you now need to do, therefore, is to ask yourself, okay, I therefore need to invest in the landscape, I may need to build new infrastructure, I may need to change the infrastructure I have, I may need to adopt different management practices. But what are all of those actions in service of? They're not in service of defending the present by Definition, they're the things you do which hopefully will defend whatever future you're constructing. But it's not a remote future. It's the next 10 years, the next 15 years, the next 20 years. It's the planning horizon over which governments have always made kind of infrastructural decisions. You're from Australia. The Murray Darling used to be a flooding river. It has been heavily engineered over the course of the 20th century to become a narrow desert river with large infrastructure. Right. And institutions that manage its environmental flows. And there's a water market. Right. I mean, there are all these infrastructures that are meant to convert natural changing hydrology into hydraulics functional for a modern country like Australia. Now, all of that is going to fail because the variability of the natural system is exceeding the dimension of the planning that was made 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago. So now we need a new plan. How do we do that? Right. And this function, this function of planning, you know, we've kind of lost the habit of doing it. Not in developing countries because they are still trying to construct their futures, but in kind of rich, wealthy modern societies. We sort of relinquished that downstream of the Washington Consensus. We sort of came to the belief that basically everything in modern life can be managed through markets that allocate efficiency, resources. And so all we need is regulation and we just need to regulate our way through these markets, delivering what we want. Well, when you're trying to take an entire country and changing it and taking it from A to B, where the material conditions from A to B are very different, you need the state. That doesn't mean you need a Soviet style form of planning. That doesn't mean that you need to give up on democracy. That's a classic mistake that people make when they admire China for its ability to build the infrastructure of its future. That is not a prophecy of autocratic systems. That's a prophecy of systems that plan. And democracies can plan too. That's what the Progressive Era or the New Deal of Roosevelt did in the US at the beginning of the 20th century. That's what Italy did after the Second World War. That's what Australia has done when it was constructing its own park of infrastructure with all the mistakes and all the problems that that caused, but nonetheless it transformed its present to build the future. We need to do that again. And that's what needs to happen. So it's a recalibration of this, I think of the future from a distant future that has an ethical and moral apocalyptic value to approximate future over the next 10, 20 years, which is the future of responsibilities. The future where the decisions that we make today have real impact on people's lives in 20 years time.

[Mortaza Hajizadeh]

You're right. Yeah. Then again, I live in Australia. I'm originally from Iran myself. And it's been a long time. I haven't been home. But whenever I go back home, I do remember when I was a kid, things were quite different from an environmental perspective. Now the city that I was born and grew up, it's. It has completely changed. And it's one of the reasons, is main environmental reason, it's kind of dry now and it's impacting the cityscape there as well. But anyhow, that's a different thing. Let's go to chapter seven. I think it's in chapter seven, that's where you say that development and not sustainability should remain the central purpose of society. So that might be a surprising argument to environmentalists for some listeners. Again, that would sound almost heretical because you are an environmentalist anyhow, and environmental debate is often framed around limits, restraint, degrowth, let's say. Um, but you're drawing. And again, and you're drawing one of my favorite authors, Amartya Sen's idea of development as freedom. Can you talk about that? What, what do you mean that. Why, what do you mean we should focus on development rather than sustainability? I mean, that should be the purpose of society.

[Dr. Giulio Boccaletti]

Yeah, I think. I mean, so, absolutely. I mean, first of all, you know, I. I have to confess, I have a human prejudice. I care about people more than I care about anything else. Um, and I think that our civic compacts are about delivering to each other the promise of being able to be authors of your life. That's the fundamental principle. That's why I start from the definition of liberty that I gave you. It's at the end of the day, the story of the human condition, in my view. And not just in my view, of course, but it's the search for a space of liberty in which you can be author of your life, it a community. And that's what we're here, we're here to do. And so if I put that at the heart of what we are, of what we are doing, then, you know, the 20th century has been an extraordinary century in many ways, because it's been an emancipatory century. It's been a century during which more than in any other, more people have enrolled in the promise, have been enrolled in the promise, emancipatory promise of having political agency and being authors of Their life. It's not perfect, it's not uniform, but it's been. The projects of 20th century Modernism in a way is driving human development in order to increase freedom. Arthur Lewis is an economist from the 40s and 50s who accompanied Kwame Nkrumah when he became the leader of Ghana, of a free Ghana. And Arthur Lewis wrote one of the first books on economic development. And he made this point which I always found very compelling, which is that wealth is not important because it increases happiness, it's important because it increases choice. Right? And it's about that choice. It's about choice in the sort of liberty sense. And that's then the work that Amartya Sen does. And in fact, as you, I love his writing. And when he wrote Development as freedom, that is what. Development as freedom, Right, Development as freedom. It's interpreting that point that Arthur Lewis made all those years ago. It's saying that it is the instrument through which liberate the people. Now then we can have a long discussion about equity and about distribution, about how do we ensure that this is broad based development as opposed to extractive and where wealth is concentrated in just a few hands. That's a very important discussion to have. But that's different than saying we do not need development and growth, we do need development and growth because that is the route through which we deliver choice and freedom to people. And so the question is not, I mean, at some level this is a banal point, but therefore, if you believe all of that, then we have to put human development at the heart of what we're trying to do. And the question for environmentalist is not should we do that over protecting the environment or should we? You have to choose between environmental outcomes and others. As you know, as I said earlier, as Bernard Williams, I have a human prejudice. Let's put people at the heart of what we're doing, let's put their liberty as the objective and then be confident in the belief which I have and I have on empirical grounds, that in a world that is changing at the rhythm that it is changing today, the functional role of ecosystems in delivering that freedom is important. Right? So a world that delivers that freedom is also a world that will deliver some functioning ecosystems. That does not mean that we can commit to the aesthetic idea of nature that some people have. Because that aesthetic nature, unless it's majoritarian, doesn't have political legitimacy. And it can't really be enshrined in civic compacts, because civic compacts are about the rights and responsibilities of people, not of things that are not people. And again, you know, in the book, I spent some time also on this question of the rights of nature, which we can come back to. But so, so I agree it's, it's, you know, to some it will be surprising, and to, to some it will be anathema. But I am, you know, having worked in economic development for over the years, knowing just how many people still are unable to be authors of their own life on this planet, including in our rich countries, and knowing that in some cases that space of freedom, that space of liberty is actually contracting even in wealthy countries, suggests to me that that should be what we put at the heart of our action. And then we just have to ask ourselves, what is the role of governing territory and place? I mean, if you. Let me just say this as last point. If you, if you worry that the environment will be left to one side, remember that that freedom, that liberty, happens in a place in the real physical world, not a screen of an iPhone, right? So having a home in which you can prosper is an important part of that mandate. And so I'm actually fairly confident that if we did commit, if we had that political orientation, we would inevitably have to manage the environment not just in an extracted sense, but also in service of the freedom and prosperity of all citizens, including those that live in the landscape itself.

[Mortaza Hajizadeh]

And I guess when we talk about environmentalism, I'm going back to the beginning of your response. You said, yet they have a bias towards humans. We want the environment to work for humans rather than just the environment being out there. I could be controversial, but what I mean is that it's. Without humans, I don't think we're even current environment. So I perfectly have sympathy with your perspective.

[Dr. Giulio Boccaletti]

Well, and also, Matisse, if you think about, I mean, you mentioned Iran earlier. I mean, we tend to forget that at this point. Dipesh Chakrabarti wrote a really wonderful book on this question of kind of history and changing climate. And one of the points he emphasizes is the idea that this separation between environment and humans is kind of somewhat pointless in a planet where we touch everything. Like there is nothing on this planet that happens that we don't touch. And that should remind us that the environment, our landscapes, are a symptom of our history. Iran being an obvious example of this. Right? This is a place that's been transformed literally for thousands of years. Successive generations have written their story on their landscape, setting the stage for the benefits and challenges that would face the subsequent generation. Failures in that environment are not just failures of climate change. The flavors, of governments, of institutions. What happens to water resources in Iran right now is a symptom of a Republican failure. That is in fact an interesting example where a state is called a tougher republic. But in many ways it's failing on those dimensions that I lay out in the book. And so the separation between kind of the environment and the human is spurious. I'm not just making a cultural constructivist point. I'm saying that it is a, you know, the environment is the parchment on which we write our story. And each generation has the right and responsibility to write its story to set the stage for the future.

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[Mortaza Hajizadeh]

You're absolutely right. And I've actually recently ordered a book. I think it's called this the lion and the sun, which is an environmental history of Iran. I mean, history of Iran from an environmental perspective. But you're right. And you know, most of the countries in that region. They've always grappled with this idea of lack of water and drought, and they came up with different ways of preserving that. But, well, in 21st century, right now it's a global problem. Now it's much more challenging for those countries. I just have a couple of more questions to ask, and one of them is obviously European Union, and that's towards the end of the book, the final part of the book. You describe European Union as perhaps the largest and most ambitious republican project in the world, but one that is also under enormous challenges and pressures from climate change to energy security, to migration and war and political fragmentation. I'm keen to know why. Do you see Europe as an important test of the environmental republic idea? And, and can the environment become a genuinely unifying, let's say, civic narrative for Europeans? Yeah, I'm KE to know your thoughts on this.

[Dr. Giulio Boccaletti]

Well, so a few things on this. I mean, I think, first of all, you know, I started this conversation by saying that the fundamental question for me was, who's we? When we say we should do this, who's we? Right. And I am European. And so the we for me is Europe. And so in a sense, I wanted to close the book on that in part because I, you know, go around the world. I talk about the European intellectual tradition, but I also talk about Asante. I talk about Australia itself, you know, in the voice referendum, I talk about a bunch of different experiences across the world, China. But in the end, I'm most legitim, legitimized to talk about Europe because I am a citizen of Europe and because that is my political community. So I felt I should talk about that. Europe is also, in a way,

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[Dr. Giulio Boccaletti]

at the end point of a long journey to try and wrestle this question of what a republic should look like. It comes after the republican experiences of kind of post colonial countries. Right. It comes to this question after, in a sense, after India, after Iran itself. Right. It's a continent that's been divided by war, by culture, by all sorts of things for centuries. It started its journey towards federation as a political unit, as a political entity in those years of 1848 when many countries across Europe were wrestling with emancipation and trying to defeat the forces of reaction, they failed. So we ended up with exporting empires whilst not resolving the political tensions we had at home subduing them with wealth. Those then came to fore at the beginning of the 20th century.

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[Dr. Giulio Boccaletti]

I mean, if you listen to interviews of the late Bertrand Russell, he says nobody at the end of the 19th century could imagine what happened in the 20th century. It seemed impossible. This was a globalized world. People were talking about human rights. They were talking about the rights of the press, political freedoms, the liberal society. And then it all came crashing down. And I start that chapter with the analysis of those Italians who were exiled on the island of Ventotene, who then ended up writing the Ventotene Manifesto, which is the founding document of the European Union. And one of them was Eugenio Colorni. You talk about Amartya Sen. Amartya Sen's wife, Eva Colorni, was the daughter of Eugenio Colorni. So there's also this kind of interesting historical connection between all these characters. And I don't actually think it's a coincidence. I think this question of republicanism is very present in a particular strand of thoughts in political philosophy and in Europe. And so Spinelli and Colornia Rossi write this manifesto. And they start this manifesto by asking exactly the question, what went wrong? How do we go from a globalized world, one that had achieved so much wealth and rights and freedom of the press and freedom of speech, and how do we lose it all in the matter of 20 years? And it's an interesting and somewhat troubling read with the lens to the present. Right, because you mentioned earlier the rise of the. The return of fascism and the Bentotina Manifesto is an important read at this time. And one of the things that they realized is that at least in Europe, part of the problem was that national territories, competing national territories, were susceptible to these forces. And once they let them in, it's contagious. And so that took over Europe. And so they actually argued for a political unification, something that Victor Hugo had said 100 years earlier, right, in 1848. I mean, people have been pining for United States or Europe ever since they saw the United States of America. That experience, as I told you earlier, traveled to the Caribbean and south and across the post colonial world, but never actually made it to Europe. And then after the Second World War, it's been sort of the topic of conversation. And at the beginning, it was conceived as a political project with a common defense, for example, which is a topic that's very present now, right, With a common market, with common rules, with a common law that would supersede parts of national laws, still a federal republic. Right. So something that would respect the individual nationhoods, that would respect local authorities, but that pooled collective resources together, much like the United States had done in the previous centuries. That project never actually came to fruition because partly at the beginning, because there was a resistance by a number of countries, the French, the Germans, to that political unification. And the founders of Europe, Jean Monet in particular, which is a hero of mine in many ways, was an incrementalist. He felt, as did the foreign minister of France at the time, Schuman, who was the political sponsor of this project alongside Adonauer and de Gaspari and others, they felt that Europe wasn't ready, that it wasn't ready for a political union and that they should take individual steps. And the first step was an economic union, a market union, right? And that's where the European Community first and the Common Market then, and then finally the European Union arose. But out of this unification of markets, markets for capital, for labor, for people. But what we're seeing today is not enough. And Europe is struggling. Considering that 20 years ago Europe, the European Union, had the same size economy as America and today is 50% smaller. We know that Europe is struggling economically and does not have an industrial policy. It actually hasn't managed to construct truly integrated European markets. So it's struggling, and it's struggling because in reality, this can't be just an economic union, it has to be a political union. And in the book, I both make this point and say that the environmental concern, the relationship of Europeans to their landscape, to their territory, is the deep well of political energy that we could use to make this happen. Because it is the route through which you balance a collective project at a European level, but with a connection to place, which is what actually makes Europeans part of a common project, not Christianity, as some would say, not culture, not heritage. I mean, Europe is a place that's been invaded a gazillion times from all parts of the world. So it's not. It's not historical and cultural, but it's geographic and environmental. That's what actually brings, I think, Europe together, the relationship to place. Now then, in the book, I go on to actually suggest some practical ways of doing this, because I think that political union as a construct is still far away. But over time, the European Union has experimented with partial integrations along specific vertical. One example happened in 2010, 2011, when the sovereign debt crisis, when Europe pooled basically its credit through the European Stability Mechanism. And so in the book, I make some suggestions as to how European practice could actually move closer to that Republican federation. If it managed, it would be the largest and most consequential environmental, explicit environmental republic in the world and in human history, because it would show that there's an alternative to the increasingly autocratic Chinese state, and there is Also an alternative to the increasingly autocratic exercise federal power in the United States. And so for that reason, I single out Europe as an important place not of hope. I don't want to talk about hope. Hope is a practice for me. It's not a state of mind, but I think it's a place where we could actually do something that makes a difference to the rest of the world.

[Mortaza Hajizadeh]

One final question. It's. And it's a very subjective, broad question. How optimistic, or maybe pessimistic, allude to this one? Are you about the direction of environmental movements? Movements, let's say, in Europe? Do you think they have started to change? Do you think they've started to take more notice of how they can make political choices or how they can convince politicians rather than repeating the same mistakes they've been doing in the past 30 years?

[Dr. Giulio Boccaletti]

Yeah, I mean, I think I've written this book not to diagnose the state of the world, but to offer an idea of change. And so I'm an optimist in that sense. In the sense that I think there is an idea of change. It is possible to do it, and it's up to us to make it happen. You know, history, human history, is not a chronology, it's a gesture. It's actions of people with free will.

[Mortaza Hajizadeh]

Right.

[Dr. Giulio Boccaletti]

We can actually make change happen. And so I come from that perspective in that sense. I think what I observe in the environmental movement more generally, but also in Europe specifically, is a thirst for meaning, for a story that can carry. Can carry us through to a better future. Right. I mean, that sounds rhetorical, but I think it's actually true. It's not just about efficient delivery of services. It's not just about the economy, stupid. It's also about narrating a story of how we get from A to B. And my sense is that the environment, if we define it as the place in which our civic compact happens, then is an actually a very powerful source of energy for mobilizing people to help their neighbors, to help their communities, to help their places, to help their homes. So in that sense, I am optimistic. Certainly it won't happen if we don't do anything, but that's kind of why I'm writing these things, because I hope that it can at least inspire somebody else to act.

[Mortaza Hajizadeh]

I know that you recently published this book and takes a long time to write a book, but is there any other project you have started you're thinking of starting?

[Dr. Giulio Boccaletti]

There are many, many projects. I mean, one of the things I should say is that since writing the book and as I was finishing the book, I started writing. I'm Italian, as I told you. I started writing plays in Italy and I've been working with a company at the National Theater in Italy to stage plays. I think theatre, I mean, this is a longer conversation. We have time, but the theater is important here. It was important for the Greeks, it was important for today. Because having people in presence with their body, witnessing actions of other people, does something to our brain. Catharsis exists. And I think theatre is a very powerful way of opening people's minds to a conversation in a way that's different than just debate. Theatre is political. We've always known this. I'm not saying anything radical here, but I think at this point time when we are trying to help people imagine a different future, imagine themselves in it as authors. I think theater has an important role to play. And so I've been working a lot on that. I also have new book projects, but I'll announce them when they're ready.

[Mortaza Hajizadeh]

Great. Thank you very much for taking the time to speak with us. I really enjoyed talking to you and I really hope that more and more people, especially environmentalists and also politicians, read this book. Thank you for your time and hopefully, hopefully we should be able to speak to you soon again about your future works.

[Dr. Giulio Boccaletti]

Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.

[Podcast Host/Closer]

Thank you for listening to this episode of the New Books Network. We are an academic podcast network with the mission of public education. If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend and rate us on your preferred podcast platform. You can browse all of our episodes on our website newbooksnetwork.com Connect with us on Instagram and BlueSky with the handle ebooksnetwork and subscribe to our weekly Substack newsletter at newbooksnetwork.substack.com to get episode recommendations straight to your inbox.

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