Maintaining to obstruct: Associated milieu and the ecology of fossil continuity

This article argues that the maintenance of the social environment that sustains fossil infrastructures and the obstruction of their phase-out are co-constitutive processes: the maintenance of what sustains the plant is the concrete mechanism through which obstruction operates in the territory. Drawing on five years of research on the Torrevaldaliga Nord thermoelectric plant in Civitavecchia (Italy) and on a private archive assembled over decades by the activist Simona Ricotti, the article reconstructs a long-duration trajectory — the formation of the fossil territory (1952–2001), the coal conversion dispute (2001–2003), and the production of continuity after authorization (2003–2013) — to show how conventions, observatories, compensations, and promises function simultaneously as devices of maintenance and of obstruction. The article advances three contributions. First, it reframes climate obstruction as an ecological rather than primarily agential formation: deliberate strategies are effective because they operate in a milieu already receptive to them. Second, it extends Simondon's concept of milieu associé from the techno-geographic to the socio-political register, and connects this extension to Rippa’s (2024) “environing infrastructure” framework, showing that fossil plants do not occupy territories but actively environ them. Third, it identifies the unfulfilled promise as a temporal device of obstruction: the observatory promised in 1992, invoked in 2002, diagnosed as comatose in 2008, and reactivated in 2015 does not fail but performs — maintaining acceptability by deferring operativity