Oil in Sicily: Petrocapitalist imaginaries in the shadow of old smokestacks

Abstract

By describing the long trajectory of petrochemical industrialization in a Mediterranean area in southeastern Sicily locally known as the triangle of death, this article discusses how the widespread, long-term, and nearly invisible nature of everyday forms of catastrophe generate effects that at times are even more insidious than a major disaster. Indeed, like the fumes rising from an industrial smokestack, oil culture seeps into the imaginaries and epidermises of the people for whom petroleum represents both a blessing and a curse.

Conceptualizing and Capturing Outcomes of Environmental Cleanup at Contaminated Sites

“…Th e slowness and multiple sources of pollution make it diffi cult for activists to muster allies and support. Similarly, in Italy, contamination from petroleum refi neries is made invisible in part by its slow nature (Benadusi 2018). By engaging with continuities in cleanup struggles, these articles illustrate the diffi culties in achieving eff ective pollution management and positive postremediation social outcomes.…”

Oil refining in Sicily: A critical perspective looking to the future

“…As put it by an anthropologist concluding a recent research on the long trajectory of petrochemical industrialization in southeastern Sicily “for Sicily's people, petroleum represents both a blessing and a curse.”…”

“…As put it by an anthropologist concluding a recent research on the long trajectory of petrochemical industrialization in southeastern Sicily "for Sicily's people, petroleum represents both a blessing and a curse." 19 Feeding and upholding modern society, oil "is crucial not only for driving the energy services of modern society, but also as basic feedstock for producing polymers." 20 Out of the five conventional commodity thermoplastics (polypropylene, polyethylene, polyvinyl chloride, polystyrene, and polyethylene terephthalate), polyethylene is produced in Sicily at an industrial plant in Ragusa receiving the ethylene feedstock from a 400 000 t/a plant at Augusta petrochemical site.…”

Il monitoraggio ambientale come “dispositivo” politico e “costrutto” socioculturale. Una proposta interpretativa e operativa a partire dalla città di Taranto

“…Oltre al discorso pubblico altamente normativizzato propugnato dalle Arpa, in molti territori italiani si è venuto radicando un controcanto, vale a dire un corpus multivocale di istanze che rappresentano le alterazioni ecologiche con modalità dissimili, ibride, che pur intrecciate in qualche modo a quelle ufficiali risultano dotate di una specifica identità e riconoscibilità (Mazzeo 2014(Mazzeo , 2017Alunni 2017;Bachis 2017;Ravenda 2018;Benadusi 2018Benadusi , 2019. In questo caso, a popolare lo spazio pubblico sono forme di narrazione extraistituzionale, che in prima approssimazione è dato definire "informali", oppure "ufficiose", o "di strada" (Irwin 1995;Tesh 2000;Petryna 2002;Allen 2003;Corburn 2005;Lerner 2006).…”