Telling the Right Story: Environmental Violence and Liberation Narratives

Abstract

Half a century ago, Silent Spring showed the world how violence against living and non-living matter, by way of petrochemcial contamination, is related to violence against humans. This is a fundamental lesson of twentieth century environmental thinking, I argue, that environmental historians should carry with them into the twenty-first. The first part of the paper draws attention on the category of environmental violence. I argue that environmental degradation and social inequality have common historical roots, lying within the sphere of corporate and/or State 'development' policies, premised on the production of sacrifice zones and disposable bodies. Environmental violence, in other words, acts according to configurations of environmental injustice. In the second part, I call attention on the ways in which industrial development in post-war Europe has produced certain forms of environmental violence which have deeply affected human and non-human life in a multitude of places, and offer some insights into how this could be analysed by environmental historians.

Dangerous assemblages: Salts, trihalomethanes and endocrine disruptors in the water palimpsest of the Llobregat River, Catalonia

“…Regarding salts in river water, modern isotopic techniques allow elucidating the source of salinization ("natural", or related to mine tailings or fertilizers, see Otero and Soler, 2002) but, as we will show, historical social movements and accounts had long before warned about their different origins and denounced its perils. In taking issue with the arguments that naturalize pollution, we concur with Barca (2014a) that scholars should engage both with natural sciences -especially research on Public Health -and environmental humanities if they wish to unveil how narratives of environmental and human health degradation have been silenced and therefore contribute to deconstructing regimes of truth that have sustained processes of ecological degradation. A next step, as advanced by Engel-Di Mauro (2014) for the case of soil science, could be for political ecologists to reclaim the study of waters, soils or the air from the hands of positivist science.…”

“…The historical struggle against potash mines and the unveiling of salt pollution and THMs in drinking water not as a natural process but as an outcome of specific accumulation practices represents an example of these conflicts. Considering the long exposure times to THMs, the impact of these components in the health of Llobregat water users could be characterized as a process of slow violence (Nixon, 2011) or environmental violence (Barca, 2014a). The 1930s struggles against the impact of potash mines were wiped out by the dictatorship but reemerged after Franco's death.…”

Doing environmental humanities: inter/transdisciplinary research through an underwater 360° video poem

“…First, the context in which environmental humanities has come about has meant that researchers working in the field tend to call for and foster exogenous and instrumental kinds of interdisciplinary research (see Little 2017). Such calls explicitly connect interdisciplinarity to overtly political ends, such as rectifying improperly balanced power relationships (Adamson and Davis 2016;Barca 2014;Hutchings 2014). This political stance taken towards interdisciplinarity in environmental humanities sets it somewhat apart from that within ecocriticism, given ecocriticism's quasi apolitical beginnings (Heise 2006, 505-6).…”

The politicization of ill bodies in Campania, Italy

“…By this, we mean interrupting mainstream organized narratives through counter hegemonic storytelling, and the sabotage of toxic narratives 2 (Wu Ming 2011), particularly those which reproduce or silence injustice (Barca 2014). Methodologically, adopting a guerrilla narrative approach implies a commitment towards the co-design and co-production of knowledge and the recognition of storytelling as a fundamental tool in this process.…”