On 30 October 2023, RIAS Professor by Special Appointment Dario Fazzi delivered the lecture: “Not in My Ocean: Trans-Local Activism and Environmental Democracy.”
In this inaugural lecture, which formally started a new series on environmental history and issues and served as launching pad for his appointment as the new RIAS chair in Transatlantic and Environmental history, professor Dario Fazzi presented his latest book, Smoke on the Water: Incineration at Sea and the Birth of a Transatlantic Environmental Movement (New York: Columbia University Press, 2023). Fazzi’s book focuses on the public outcry over ocean incineration, a method for the disposal of hazardous chemical waste that was initiated in the late 1960s, developed, tested, and perfected throughout the 1970s, commercialized in the 1980s, and eventually phased out from the early 1990s onward.
Fazzi explained the ominous characteristics of ocean incineration, which consisted in the offshore destruction of chemical liquid substances in specially designed ships outfitted with high-temperature combustion chambers. As Fazzi noted, when this technology broke through, it seemed like a panacea. It in fact heralded the safe disposal of such toxic compounds as organochlorines and PCBs. It also promised to minimize private companies’ externalities and ease environmental concerns. But it ultimately failed to provide an alternative to safely disposing of toxic waste. What does explain, then, such a decline? Fazzi’s answer to this question is centered on the role of people’s mobilization. He argues that the demise of ocean incineration was due to the combination of locally-oriented and transnationally-driven protests, which emerged across the (North) Atlantic and exposed the dangerous and highly exploitative nature of such a practice. It was, in other words, the coalescence of a trans-local movement, one that merged local advocacy with transnational pressures, that uncovered the environmental risks of ocean incineration and eventually stopped it. Fazzi also showed how these peculiar protests emerged in the context of Zeeland, which for years was one of the main battlegrounds against ocean incineration.
The lecture was well attended and was sided with the presentation of the annual RIAS-UCR sustainability essay prize. It was a testament of the vibrant academic community that is coalescing and growing in Zeeland around environmental topics and the central role that the RIAS is bound to play in it.
The invitation to the lecture can be downloaded here.
