Telling the Right Story: Environmental Violence and Liberation Narratives
Author(s): STEFANIA BARCA
Source: Environment and History , November 2014, Vol. 20, No. 4, 20th Anniversary
Issue (November 2014), pp. 535-546
Published by: White Horse Press
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Telling the Right Story:
Environmental Violence and Liberation Narratives
STEFANIA BARCA
Centro de Estudos Sociais
Universidade de Coimbra
Portugal
Email : sbarca@ces.uc.pt
ABSTRACT
Half a century ago, Silent Spring showed the world how violence against li
and non-living matter, by way of petrochemcial contamination, is relate
violence against humans. This is a fundamental lesson of twentieth century
vironmental thinking, I argue, that environmental historians should carry w
them into the twenty-first. The first part of the paper draws attention on
category of environmental violence. I argue that environmental degradat
and social inequality have common historical roots, lying within the spher
corporate and/or State 'development' policies, premised on the production
sacrifice zones and disposable bodies. Environmental violence, in other wor
acts according to configurations of environmental injustice. In the second p
I call attention on the ways in which industrial development in post-war Eu
has produced certain forms of environmental violence which have deeply
fected human and non-human life in a multitude of places, and offer som
insights into how this could be analysed by environmental historians.
KEYWORDS
Petrochemicals, environmental (injustice, post-war Europe, development
1. UNDERSTANDING ENVIRONMENTAL VIOLENCE
In the February of 1959, while working on the book that was to become
very manifesto of the environmental movement, the American biologist Ra
Carson wrote to her editor:
As you know, it has always been my intention to give principal emphasis to the
menace to human health, even though setting this within the general framework
Environment and History 20 (2014): 535-546.
©2014 The White Horse Press, doi: 10.3197/096734014X14091313617325
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536
STEFANIA BARCA
of disturbances of the basic ecology of all living things. As I look over my
reference material now, I am impressed by the fact that the evidence on this
particular point outweighs by far, in sheer bulk and also significance, any other
aspect of the problem.1
Published in 1 962, Silent Spring showed an astonished public all over the world
the extent to which the toxic elements of modern production had contaminated
the bio-physical environment and all living organisms through the widespread
use of agro-chemicals and domestic poisons, and were a true menace to human
health. Silent Spring was centred on the analysis of industrially produced toxins
and their impact on the chain of life, in which no precise boundary exists
between plants, animals, water, the soil and human beings. What harms other
living beings, Carson suggested, harms humans as well. A simple and intuitive
principle, against which the business world, and the petro-chemical sector in
particular, launched a de-legitimating campaign, based on an imputation of
feminine irrationality that had presumably compromised the author's scientific
objectivity.2
Half a century after the publication of Silent Spring , the significance of
Carson's lesson for environmental history writing, and the Environmental
Humanities in general, is livelier than ever: in his Slow Violence and the
Environmentalism of the Poor , literary critic Rob Nixon acknowledges Carson
as a major source of inspiration for understanding the 'slow violence' of environmental
degradation, i.e. the long-term and often invisible effects caused
by modern 'development' in its multiple aspects: industrialisation, megaprojects,
mining, war, deforestation, nuclear waste and fallout, climate change.3
Focusing on texts by activist/writers (like Carson) from the post-colonial
world, Nixon sheds new light on the environmental history of the global South
in the post- World War Two era.
The permanence of environmental harm and damage, exemplarily testified
by the bioaccumulation in living systems of Persistent Organic Pollutants
(POP), radiations or asbestos fibres, is a crucial concern for environmental
historians, who have learned to trace back those flows of contaminants to their
origins in the factory, the law, the laboratory and the trade agreements that
regulate and organise them into what Chris Sellers and Jo Meiling call global
'industrial hazard regimes'.4 Historically originating in warfare research and
technology, but given widespread diffusion by the availability of cheap oil as
well as by production and consumption politics of the post-war era, petrochemicals
represent the violent arm of 'development'. Associated with virtually
every aspect of technological control over nature - from pharmaceuticals to
fertilisers and pesticides, from plastics to gasoline - they sublimated corporate
1. Brooks 1989, p. 247
2. Hazlett 2004; Lytle 2007.
3. Nixon 2011.
4. Erker (ed.) 2014; Langston 2010; Sellers and Meiling 2012.
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537
TELLING THE RIGHT STORY
and State promises of universal wellbeing and liberation from illness, hunge
scarcity and toil, while the pervasiveness and persistence of their disruptive
fects over living systems was long hidden or denied in public discourse. Wh
is more important, the production and marketing of petrochemicals on a lar
scale became functional to specific political agendas, producing certain con
figurations of social relationships that would have been unthinkable in a wo
without petrochemicals. In short, they allowed centralised control (on the p
of corporate and/or State powers) over such diverse and equally fundamen
tal aspects of social life as farming and food consumption, housekeeping an
gardening, transportation and entertainment and personal and public healt
A good number of activities that used to fall within the sphere of individua
control and know-how came to be dependent on high-tech industrial produc
whose real nature was difficult to grasp in its entirety and whose knowledg
and regulation had to be trusted to corporate and State agencies.
From this perspective, POP contamination can be considered as a form o
environmental violence, by which I mean violent acts perpetrated against no
human nature with the aim of (re)producing oppressive social relations and
political control.
Empirical evidence of environmental violence appears quite frequent
in the different fields of enquiry that can be grouped within the category
of Environmental Humanities. Environmental historians have observed it
through the multiple connections between war and environmental devastation;5
the exercise of 'brute force technology' through all sort of megaproject
developments;6 the use of what Paul Josephson calls police coercion and military
repression in order to secure unwanted infrastructures,7 or to allow for
the never-ending expansion of commodity frontiers. Political ecologists have
analysed the production of 'violent environments' through social conflict, accumulation
by dispossession, corporate/State recourse to violence and terror
and political discourse;8 literature scholars have looked at it through the lens of
indigenous, (post)colonial, feminist and cultural minority writers, testifying to
the harm done by 'development' to their land and people.9 On different disciplinary
grounds, but with a converging perspective, law scholars have come to
5. Russell 2001; Hamblin 2013.
6. Josephson 2003.
7. Armiero 2009; Armiero and Dalisa 20 1 2.
8. Peluso and Watts 2001 ; Watts 2004. Nancy Peluso and Michael Watts theorise environmental
violence as the effect of intersecting social relations of production and social fields of power,
and categorise it as physical and symbolic, organised and disorganised, state sponsored and
civic, and combinations of two or more of the above: see Peluso and Watts 2001. This approach
is formulated in opposition to that of neo-Malthusian and environmental security
studies, such as Thomas Homer-Dixon's Environment, Scarcity and Violence (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1 999), representing violent environments as the effect of structural
scarcity and overpopulation.
9. Alaimo 2010; Iovino 2012; Nixon 2011.
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538
STEFANIA BARCA
theorise ecocide - i.e. the destruction or widespread contamination of habitats
- as a crime against humanity.10
In the past few years, environmental violence has emerged clearly as a
major concern for environmental and human rights activists. Human rights
organisations have been documenting the increasing death toll that environmental
activists are paying for opposing the new wave of plunder of natura
resources of the 'developing' world in the neo-liberal era.11 Anti-toxic-waste
activists protesting against the contamination of Campania on the part of criminal
as well as corporate organisations have begun to speak in terms of biocide.12
Indigenous people have described environmental violence as 'The severe and
ongoing harm caused by environmental toxics to Indigenous women, girls,
unborn generations and Indigenous Peoples as a whole'.13
The diversity and omnipresence of environmental violence worldwide call
for a scholarly effort to identify the common drivers and possible strategies o
defence for vulnerable environments and populations. However, identifying
one common 'enemy of nature' has been a rather elusive enterprise. Ecosocialist
authors point to capitalism as a system built upon the interconnected
exploitation of (and thus violence against) both human and non-human nature,
seeing even the Anthropocene - which some have renamed Capitatocene14 as
the ultimate global result of such violent manipulation of nature's laws.15
Albeit correct, such analysis is limited by its inability to account for environmental
violence as realised in and by the 'socialist' world, starting from the
former Soviet Union and China. However we want to understand those systems,
and even discounting their incomplete or subverted version of Marxism
we certainly cannot label them as capitalism. And yet, they have produced
widespread environmental violence, both macroscopically visible, such as in
the exsiccation of the Aral Sea or the siltation of the Yellow River, and diffuse
at the micro-level of bodily and ecosystem contamination, as in post-Chernobyl
Belarus.16
10. Higgins2010.
1 1 . See Global Witness, 'Deadly Environment: the dramatic rise of killings of environmental and
land defenders'. Report 2014: http://www.globalwitness.org/deadlyenvironment/
1 2 . See http ://www.globalproject. info/it/tags/stopbiocidio/community
13. See 'Indigenous Women and Environmental Violence'. A Rights-based approach addressing
impacts of Environmental Contamination on Indigenous Women, Girls and Future
Generations Submitted to the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues Expert
Group Meeting 'Combatting Violence Against Indigenous Women and Girls', 18-20 Jan.
2012, United Nations Headquarters, New York by Andrea Carmen, International Indian
Treaty Council and Indigenous Women's Environmental and Reproductive Health Initiative;
and Viola Waghiyi, Native Village of Savoonga, St. Lawrence Island, Alaska and Alaska
Community Action on Toxics, Theme 2: 'Contextualizing Violence'.
1 4. See Jason Moore 's website, World-Ecological Imaginations : Power and Production in the Web o
Life: http://jasonwmoore.wordpress.com/20 1 3/05/1 9/anthropocene-or-capitalocene-part-iii/
15. Williams 2010.
16. Agyeman and Ogneva-Himmelberger 2009; Shapiro 2001.
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539
TELLING THE RIGHT STORY
Environmental violence does not recognise conventional divides between
North and South, 'developed' and 'developing' countries, nor between t
capitalist and the socialist worlds. Its effects are socially differentiated an
discriminatory, but in a complex way, following the hidden patterns throug
which societies organise the distribution of wellbeing and social costs. In fac
environmental degradation and social inequality have common historical root
lying within the sphere of corporate and/or State 'development' policies prem
ised on the production of sacrifice zones and disposable bodies. Environment
violence, in other words, acts according to configurations of environment
injustice.
It is not the intent of this paper to attempt to name the thing that is behind
the different forms of environmental violence mentioned so far. I would limit
myself here to noting that probably the greatest legacy of Silent Spring has
been that of showing how violence against living and non-living matter is related,
albeit in complex and often hidden ways, to violence against humans:
this is a fundamental lesson of twentieth century ecological thinking that environmental
historians should carry with them into the twenty-first.
In the second part of this paper, I want to 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.
2. EUROPE, 1950s-2000s: ENVIRONMENTAL VIOLENCE AND THE
QUEST FOR NARRATIVE JUSTICE.
In defining the politics of sustainability for the twenty-first century, history
matters a great deal: sustainability policies that want to be socially just and politically
viable must be based on new, more inclusive and convincing narratives
of what we are used to labelling 'economic development', accounting for the
environmental costs of both industrialisation and de-industrialisation, and their
uneven social impact. Such a new narrative must include an Environmental
Justice perspective.
Environmental Justice (EJ) is a unique conceptual framework for understanding
how environmental costs of production and waste disposal have
unevenly affected human beings along lines of social, spatial, racial, gender
and generational difference.17 Born in the United States as a sociological category
originating from, and interacting with, the civil rights movement, in
the last twenty years the EJ paradigm has acquired a global character, being
adopted by scholars and activists in the so called global South.18 In Europe,
17. Bullard 2000; Faber 1998; Harvey 2001; Merchant 2005.
18. Alier 2003; Carruthers 2008; Sandler and Pezzullo 2007; Schlosberg 2007; Westra 2008.
Environment and History 20.4
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540
STEFANIA BARCA
EJ has made some appearance through pioneering studies focused on the
continent's southern and eastern fringes, where it has proven a powerful instrument
for the analysis of a number of environmental controversies in the
context of their social, ethnic, cultural and politico-economic drivers.19 In addition,
the EJ framework has been fully acknowledged as policy relevant by
the UK Environment Agency,20 and indirectly by the UNECE (United Nations
Economic Commission for Europe) through the 1998 Aarhus Convention.
While these examples demonstrate the relevance of the EJ conceptual framework
to the European context, much more remains to be done in order to build
a comprehensive analysis of environmental injustice, with which to be able to
re-orient EU environmental policies towards a 'just sustainability' approach.
Since its early inception, the environmental history literature on modern
Europe has shown how, in the course of almost three centuries of industrial
activity, all sorts of poisons and radioactive materials have been buried underneath
European soil and diluted in its water and atmosphere in unprecedented,
unspoken and unimagined quantities,21 affecting the environmental and human
health of past and present European societies.22
Major concentrations of persistent organic pollutants causing carcinogenic,
mutagenic and reproductive risk,23 can be traced throughout Europe as an
effect of both industrial accidents and long-term exposure. Massive industrialisation
following the Second World War has implied a profound restructuring
of ecosystems and human life in them, starting from the workplace itself and
expanding to the industrial site, the local community and the larger environment.
Asbestos, nuclear energy, coal, oil, natural gas, uranium and other
mining activities, chemical industry, industrial farming and livestock-raising
are all forms of production that have been responsible for substantial contam
ination of European territory, seriously affecting both human and non-human
populations. At the same time, both industrialisation and de-industrialisation
policies have created what I call the 'work/environment conflict':24 industrial
and meta-industrial, rural, informal, domestic, migrant, dismissed, worker'
bodies and minds have been the primary interface between economy and
environment; and too often the first victims of exposure to industrial and
post-industrial hazards.
The EJ perspective points to the fact that these hazards tend to concentrate
in the places where the most disenfranchised live and work, accumulating
1 9. Allen 20 1 2; Agyeman and Ogneva-Himmelberger 2009; Armiero and Dalisa 20 1 2; Armiero
2009; Harper et al. 2009.
20. Agyeman and Evans 2004; Laurent 2010.
21 . Adorno and Serneri 2009; Barca 2012; Bess 2003; Cioc 2005; Henry 2012; Lekan and Zeller
2005; Luzzi 2009; Menendez-Navarro 2012; Sheail 2002; Simmons 2001; Whited et al.
2005.
22. EEA2002, 2011, 2012.
23 . Boudia and Jas 20 1 4.
24. Barca 2012.
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541
TELLING THE RIGHT STORY
in their bodies, their homes and in everything alive, sickening their children,
threatening to make appearance in their unborn offspring for generations to
come. Unaccounted for in mainstream history writing, and yet with a life of
their own, these forgotten ecological 'things' are the dust under the rug of
'development'. In some cases of major catastrophe, such as the Vajont dam disaster
(1963) or the Chernobyl nuclear explosion (1986), what is buried under
the rug are human bodies (or what remains of them), together with all living
beings and entire towns and villages. In other cases, like that of the asbestos
tragedy, dust has been so abundantly produced and widely spread as to become
- paradoxically - invisible: a commonly accepted reality of everyday
life, whose material agency is only discovered after thirty or forty years of
continued, apparently innocuous exposure.25
Mainstream narratives of European post-war development (typically emphasising
economic growth, démocratisation and social welfare) say very
little or nothing about this kind of dust. They tend to either under-represent
environmental problems or see them in a positive progressive fashion, as a
declining cost of economic growth and an object of political regulation/securitisation.26
Such narratives are based on the assumption that, to some extent
environmental (and social) costs are inevitable and even worth paying for the
long-term benefit of society as a whole.27 And yet information concerning
massive environmental contamination and public health disasters is publicly
available, not only from the media, but from a variety of sources: national and
EU environmental protection agencies, environmental NGOs, scientific literature,
people's life stories, even company archives. In its 2009 'sustainability
balance', for example, the Italian ENI group mentioned 44 contaminated sites
in that country alone, all referring to mining and refinery activities carried out
by the group from 1953 to present. But what is hidden by the empty rhetoric
of corporate sustainability and 'responsible care' programmes? What 'bar
lives'28 of places and people together lie underneath such rhetoric, asking for
recognition and justice? Why are these people and places nowhere to be found
in our history texts; why do they not have the place they deserve in the official
memory of the European economy? It is time to draw a more inclusive costbenefit
balance of European industrial development in the post-war era - on
including the true costs to human and non-human nature, to culture, to places
It is time to stop oiling the machinery of oblivion29 and start disseminating
'resources of hope':30 memory, recognition and justice. It is time to oppose
25. Allen and Kazan-Allen 2012; Bartrip 2001 ; Johnston and Mclvor 2000.
26. Carreras 2006; Crouzet 2001; Hobsbawm 1995; Inglehart 1997; Judt 2005; Wasserstei
2007.
27. Barca 2011.
28. Agamben 1998.
29. Nixon 2011.
30. Williams and Gable 1989.
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542
STEFANIA BARCA
the logic of 'the greater common good',31 refusing the human sacrifice that it
makes necessary, together with the sacrifice of some disposable place and its
ecosystem, and to offer support to the struggle of environmentally and socially
disenfranchised people, of past, present and future generations - the survivors
of Vajont, the 'dismissed' of the Black Country, the children of post-Chernobyl
Belarus - against memory loss and narrative violence. It is time to ask: what
stories are there to be rescued? What changes need to be made?
There are two forms of narrative violence that matter to environmental
justice: first is the act of silencing crucial information, hiding evidence,
suppressing stories so that they do not turn into judicial enquiries, monetary
compensation or pieces of legislation. This is the narrative violence perpetrated
by corporate and governmental powers, often with the help of the media
and of normal science, against environmental activists and the powerless communities
that are usually the victims - even directly targeted as such - of some
environmental crime. The act of silencing, however, presupposes that something
has been spoken of. It is an open repression against voices that have
somehow managed to be heard. But how to describe the simple unacknowledgment
of things that - no matter how materially real for one person - have never
made it to someone else's perception? This second form of narrative violence
is the violence of not even looking for the things whose existence our narrative
structure does not allow us to accept. This is the case with the macroscopic
absence of environmental injustice from mainstream history narratives about
Europe - especially about western Europe, for the former Soviet bloc enjoys
a rather higher acknowledgment of environmental devastation on the part of
most scholars. And yet, an incredible amount of evidence on environmental
contamination and destruction, its perpetrators and its victims, can be gathered
from a variety of sources, if only one cares to. Thus, the reason why historians
do not look in that direction cannot be understood in scientific terms, such as
a lack of evidence or of sources. Its explanation must be pre-scientific, it must
lie with some profound, unspoken assumption, that orients and conditions the
historian's very choice of what is to be searched. This second form of narrative
violence is one that - because unacknowledged - turns against the perpetrators
themselves, for it makes them blind.
The point is, however, that societies need scholars who are capable of seeing,
for it is them, ultimately, that will turn individual facts and memories into
collective narratives, with the power of educating future generations, giving
them a sense of what needs to be changed and why. That is the reason why
Environmental historians should engage with a stronger ethical commitment,
a sense of what is needed in order to give European societies a better history one
capable of accounting for that huge amount of environmental devastation
and related human suffering that has yet to be told, understood and accorded
some justice.
31. Roy 2002.
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543
TELLING THE RIGHT STORY
In so doing, EH should interact not only with the natural sciences (and with
Public Health science in particular), but also with the rest of the Humanities,
with the aim of deconstructing those particular narratives, or regimes of truth
that have shaped our way of thinking about the ecological crisis, for this is
the only way to liberate the cultural forces necessary to build a more sustainable
future. Narratives can be powerful tools of deception but also of
empowerment. Counter-hegemonic narratives have been instrumental in the
construction of alternative regimes of truth, legitimisation of knowledge and
potentially, liberation - thus we should aim at uncovering those counter-narratives
of resistance to environmental destruction that can be found in individual
and collective memories, social movements' self-representation, fiction and
non-fiction literatures and other forms of creative expression related to issue
of environmental (injustice. What is at stake is the enlargement of our ability
to seize the social and cultural complexity of the current environmental crisis
and, consequently, our ability to think a more inclusive and just environmental
politics.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Research for this article benefited from EC funding under the Marie Curie Ac
Initial Training Networks - FP7 - PEOPLE - 201 1; contract No. 289374 - ENT
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