Preface

The preface introduces the proceedings of the international conference Living Ecosystems. Climate, Ecology, Food and Well-being, held in Agrigento in March 2026 within the Archaeological and Landscape Park of the Valley of the Temples. Taking the setting as a figure of the argument – debating ecological limits beside temples that have outlasted the civilisation that raised them, in the city of Empedocles, who first imagined the cosmos as a living organism – the text frames the conference's guiding question: how to orient technology, and the design that shapes it, towards care rather than domination. Ecology is presented not as nostalgia for an untouched nature but as a problem of making, and the contributions gathered in the two sessions are offered as stimuli and hypotheses open to discussion rather than as settled knowledge.