“Ban the Burn:” The Trans-Local Struggle against Ocean Incineration

• In Event: “Productive Crossings”: Transnational Activism in a Shrinking World

Abstract

My presentation is based on my upcoming book Smoke on the Water: Incineration at Sea and the Birth of a Transatlantic Environmental Movement (New York: Columbia University Press, 2023). It focuses on the public outcry over ocean incineration, a method for the disposal of hazardous 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. Ocean incineration consisted in the offshore destruction of chemical waste in specially designed ships. When this technology broke through, the governments and the waste management companies that promoted it presented it as a safe way to dispose of PCBs and other ominous organochlorine compounds. This practice, however, had numerous structural ecological downsides. Why, then, did it take so long for it to be sidelined? My answer to this question is centered on the role of people’s mobilization. I argue that the demise of ocean incineration was due to the combination of locally-oriented and transnationally-driven protests, which emerged across the (North) Atlantic from the early 1980s onward, denouncing 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 full environmental risks of ocean incineration and eventually stopped it. In my presentation I will explain which repertoires anti-ocean incineration protesters employed, how they framed their dissent, and what made their campaign successful. I will also emphasize that, at the local level, the most vocal dissenters were women, migrant workers, and other underprivileged groups, while at the transnational level, the most important contributions to the dismissal of the practice came from a few structured environmentalist organizations, which gathered the necessary scientific consensus around at-sea incineration’s incontrovertible unviability.

Author

• Dario Fazzi, Leiden University and Roosevelt Institute for American Studies, the Netherlands