ESA Conference 2009 – Lisbon, 2-5 September
RN8 - Disaster & Social Crisis
Session Remembering and Forgetting Disaster
Remembering the Seveso disaster. The controversial construction of a
“discreet memory”
Laura Centemeri
Senior Researcher
CES/OSIRIS – University of Coimbra (Portugal)
- DRAFT*-
In the grass which has overgrown
causes and effects,
someone must be stretched out,
blade of grass in his mouth,
gazing at the clouds.
— From The End and the Beginning by
Wislawa Szymborska
Introduction
The paper aims at addressing the issue of how disasters are collectively
remembered. In particular, I’m interested in exploring the often controversial
link existing between the “public memory” of disasters (Jedlowski, 2001,
pp.387-388) and the collective memory of the communities victimized. More
precisely I’m interested in exploring the enterprise of memory creation in
terms of a decentred and pluralist enterprise (Gray and Oliver, 2004, p.3),
taking place at different scales
The case I’m going to discuss is that of the Seveso disaster (Italy, 1976), a
dioxin contamination affecting a densely populated area, provoked by a small
chemical factory (ICMESA) owned by the Swiss multinational Roche1. The
Seveso disaster has become a symbol in the European public sphere of the
struggle to regulate industrial activities. A European Directive meant to
address industrial risk was issued following the disaster and named after
This paper is a work in progress and it is presented in a draft version. Comments and
criticisms are welcome. E-mail contact: centemeri@ces.uc.pt
*
This paper is based on my PhD research on the social responses to the Seveso
disaster (Centemeri, 2006). Data have been collected through analyzing official
documents, secondary literature, videos, interviews to key actors, and an ethnography
in the community of Seveso during the period September 2002- June 2004.
1
1
Seveso2. In the meantime, Seveso has become with other localities, in
particular Chernobyl, a sort of “symbolic place” usually evoked in order to
signal those events that have contributed to the awareness of our societies
turning into “risk society” (Beck, 1992; Larrère and Larrère, 1997).
At the same time, the event of Seveso and its aftermath have been marked by
harsh political controversies and by an absence of agreed upon forms of
commemoration, in particular at the local level. This absence has gone with the
existence of different interpretations of the event. At the one hand, Seveso has
been regarded as a “false alarm”, even if a useful one. “There were no
fatalities following the accident- –unlike other accidents that followed”, said
Stavros Dimas, responsible for the environment in the EU Commission,
commemorating in 2006 the 30 years after the accident3. In fact, at the
European level, the Seveso disaster has been framed as a “disaster of
information” (van Eijndohven, 1994) which helped in highlighting the lack of
information about industrial hazardous productions as a major cause of
vulnerability in our highly industrialised societies. Quoting again Dimas, “the
reason for this particular accident becoming such a symbol is because it
exposed the serious flaws in the response to industrial accidents. The disaster
brought home the need to combine industrial development with the protection
of our citizens and the quality of the environment.”.4
At the other hand, Seveso is considered as a case still open, since
epidemiological studies are underway that are confirming long term dioxin
health effects, although not as catastrophic as it was excepted back in the
70’s. In this respect, the case of Seveso has been defined by Patrick Lagadec
(1981, p.31) as an example of a radically new kind of accidents our societies
are confronted to, whose consequences “are inscribed in the long term and are
no more instantaneous”. These accidents challenge traditional ways to
understand damage, reparation, responsibility.
The “plasticity” of the event of Seveso can be explained if we consider two
aspects. First of all, the uncertainty of dioxin health effects. Second, the
absence of a voice coming from the community more directly affected by
dioxin, that is, the absence of the voice of dioxin victims. No association of
victims emerged at the local level. Compared with the animated controversial
public discussion over the disaster, the silence of the Seveso community has
been for years a loud absence.
In 1982, the first EU Directive 82/501/EEC on the major accident hazards of certain
industrial activities – so-called Seveso Directive – was adopted. On 9 December 1996,
the Seveso Directive was replaced by Council Directive 96/82/EC, so-called Seveso II
Directive. This directive was extended by the Directive 2003/105/EC. On the process
that brought from the disaster to the directive see: De Marchi, 1997.
2
3
Stavros Dimas, Member of the European Commission, Responsible for Environment,
“Seveso: the lessons from the last 30 years”, 30th Anniversary of the Seveso accident,
European Parliament, Brussels 11 October 2006. Web document accessed at
http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=SPEECH/06/588&format=H
TML&aged=1&language=EN&guiLanguage=en
4
The absence of “fatalities” joint with the successful recovery of the territory explains
as well why the Seveso disaster is often cited in eco-sceptic oriented books as an
example of “unjustified alarmism” (Kohler, 2002).
2
At the local level, the population affected by the dioxin contamination has
mostly tried to forget the event, asking for “silence and oblivion” (Lagadec,
1981, p. 68). Only recently, almost 30 years after the disaster, a “collective
remembrance” (Winter and Sivan, 1999) has emerged, through the creation of
the “Seveso disaster’s memory pathway” in the Oak Wood.
The Oak Wood is a 42-hectare plot of forest in the urban centre of Seveso that
was artificially created over the most contaminated area. The memory pathway
– a series of displays telling the accident's story through texts and photos - is
part of the project “Bridge of Memory” promoted by a local group of
environmentalists. This group aims at opposing the process of erasing the
disaster's memory at the local level, connecting the local memory to the public
memory of the disaster, the one considering the Seveso disaster as a symbol
of catastrophic risks.
My interest is in investigating how this shift from forgetting to remembering
the disaster has took place at the local level. First of all, I analyse the crisis
that followed the dioxin spill from the ICMESA plant and which was marked,
locally, by a harsh political conflict opposing a part of the affected population to
social movements and public authorities. The result of this conflict has been
the lack of a shared interpretation of the event of the accident accounting for
the difficulty to commemorate. I then turn to how the experience of this
conflict has been at the heart of the renewal, during the 80’s and 90’s, of the
political action of a group of Seveso environmental and feminist activists. I
analyse how this renewal brought the group to launch the “Seveso Bridge of
Memory” project in 2000. This project succeeded in creating a shared view in
the local community on the dioxin disaster as an “opportunity for change”. At
the same time, the compromise reached through the idea of “discreet
memory” incorporated in the displays of the memory pathway shows how the
possibility to remember is linked to collectively avoid to investigate the
controversial legacy of the disaster, in particular concerning health effects of
dioxin and, more in general, environmental and health damages caused,
beyond the single case of ICMESA, by the chemical industries that for over 40
years have polluted the region of Seveso.
This detailed analysis of the conflicts and critical tensions surrounding
remembering and forgetting the Seveso disaster can help in understanding
what is at stake in the social processes of disaster memory construction and
inscription. In particular, I will discuss two aspects: the difficulty to collectively
commemorate technological disasters, because of the uncertain and
controversial nature of the damages they provoke; how collectively
remembering can be strictly linked to collectively forget.
1976: the Dioxin Crisis in Seveso and its Management
Seveso is a town of 20.000 inhabitants, located 15 Km North of Milan, the
regional capital of the Lombardy, in the geographical area known as “Brianza
Milanese”. The Brianza is a “district area” (Bagnasco, 1977), of strong catholic
cultural tradition, specialized in furniture production and design, with a
productive structure of small, family-owned firms. Since after World War II,
chemical industries began to install their plants in this same area, given the
rich water resources and the good transportation infrastructures. The accident
at the origin of the Seveso disaster occurred in the chemical plant ICMESA
(located in the territory of Meda, near Seveso), 170 workers, owned since
3
1963 by the Swiss multinational Roche through the controlled Swiss company
Givaudan. It produced intermediate compounds for the cosmetics and
pharmaceutical industry among which, since 1969 and more intensely in the
‘70s, 2,4,5 trichlorophenol (TCP), a toxic inflammable compound used for the
chemical synthesis of herbicides. One question still open today is that of the
true destination of the TCP produced by ICMESA during the ‘70’s. According to
journalist Daniele Biacchessi (1997), the TCP produced by ICMESA was
transported to the US and used in the production of chemical weapons for the
Vietnam war.
Saturday the 10th of July 1976, around half past twelve a.m., the ICMESA
reactor where trichlorophenol was produced released a toxic cloud of dioxin
and other pollutants, because of a sudden exothermic reaction that caused the
breaking down of the safety valve5. A 20 minutes hazardous emission settled
on a large area of about 1.810 hectares involving the municipalities of Seveso,
Meda, Desio, Cesano Maderno and, even though in a less serious way, other
seven municipalities of the province of Milan.
The 2,3,7,8 tetrachloro-dibenzo-para-dioxin (TCDD), simply called dioxin,
released by the ICMESA reactor6 is an extremely dangerous molecule due to its
very high toxicity, persistence and stability. Nevertheless, dioxin was little
known at the time of the accident.
In 1976 the extremely harmful effects of dioxin on human health were mostly
supposed, on the basis of toxicological evidence. Epidemiological studies were
still few and limited to the follow up of cohorts of industrial workers. A dioxin
environmental contamination affecting an entire population was without
precedent. Scientists were not able to anticipate the damages to be expected
(on the environment, animals, human beings of different sex and ages) nor to
supply methods for decontamination. Besides, there were no technical
instruments for measuring the level of dioxin in human blood (Mocarelli, 2001).
Therefore a “radical uncertainty” (Callon, Lascoumes and Barthe, 2001)
surrounded the contamination consequences to be expected on human health
and the environment, their extent in space as well as in time, with just one
certainty: the extreme toxicity of dioxin proven in laboratory tests. This latter
authorized catastrophic scenarios.
These catastrophic scenarios didn’t take shape immediately after the accident.
The toxic cloud passed largely unnoticed, considered by Seveso and Meda
people as a “usual” nuisance (one in a long series). A “week of silence”
The air emission originated from a TBC (1,2,3,4 tetrachlorobenzene) alkaline
hydrolysis reaction vessel at 2,4,5 sodium trichlorophenate, an intermediate compound
in the preparation of trichlorophenol. The direct cause of the emission was excessive
pressure induced by an exothermic reaction in the TCP vessel, which occurred few
hours after suspending operations and made the disk of a safety valve break down.
The toxic cloud burst out of the roof spreading directly in the air due to the lack of the
expansion chamber (Ramondetta and Repossi, 1998).
6
The mixture inside the vessel at the moment operations were suspended was
probably composed of about 2030 kg of 2,4,5 sodium trichlorophenate (or other TCB
hydrolysis products), 540 kg of sodium chloride and over 2000 kg of organic products.
While recovering the vessel, 2171 kg of material, mainly sodium chloride (1560 kg)
were found. It can therefore be concluded that the air emission, composed of a
mixture of several different pollutants including dioxin, has been of about 3000 kg. As
for the dioxin content in the toxic cloud, technical literature reports different
evaluations, ranging from 300 g to 130 kg (Ramondetta and Repossi, 1998).
5
4
(Fratter, 2006) passed by. In the meantime, alarming phenomena took place
in the area near ICMESA: sudden falling of leaves; death of small animals
(birds and cats); a skin disease (chloracne) affecting children. Anxiety grew in
the population. On July 19th, Roche experts informed Italian public authorities
that the accident at the ICMESA plant had caused a widespread dioxin
contamination. The evacuation of a part of Seveso and Meda population was
highly recommended as precautionary measure.
On July 24th, the evacuation begun: 736 inhabitants of Seveso and Meda were
forced to leave their houses and all the personal belongings inside them. 200
people never came back to their houses that were demolished during the
decontamination. “Risk zones”7 were created, officially on the basis of the
estimated trajectory of the toxic cloud and of random tests of dioxin
concentration on the ground. In fact, the criteria adopted to delimit risk zones
included as well practical feasibility and reduction of negative social sideeffects to be expected in case of massive displacements.
The design of the risk zones implied a delimitation of the area officially
considered “at risk”. Confronted to a widespread contamination probably
affecting a large area hardly definable, public authorities tried to reduce to the
utmost the territory at risk. This reduction of the crisis area had the effect of
producing an overlap between the territory of Seveso (and its population) and
the territory at risk. Of the municipalities affected, it was Seveso the only one
constantly associated with the crisis situation, in particular in the media. The
overlapping between the name of Seveso and dioxin was considered by Seveso
citizens as a form of injustice. Seveso appeared to them as the town
authorities have decided to sacrifice in order to reduce the extent of the crisis.
The clear-cut definition of the area at risk was just one of the measures
adopted by public authorities in order to reduce the uncertainty they were
confronted to. In fact, public authorities decided to reduce uncertainty through
denying it, and acting “as if” uncertainty were not there. Another measure was
the creation of Technical-scientific Committees of experts in charge of deciding
the solutions to be taken with respect to the management of dioxin health risk,
decontamination, socio-economic implications of the crisis. The definition of the
problems at stake was entirely delegated to experts. In fact, the committees
were taking decisions of a political nature: these were not just advisory
committees (Conti, 1977).
Embracing public authorities a paternalistic stance (Centemeri, 2006, ch.III),
citizens (and their political representatives at the municipal level) were not
allowed to participate in decision making (see as well Rocca, 1980).
Nevertheless, decisions were taken that heavily affected them, as persons and
as community. In particular, given the suspected teratogenic effects of dioxin,
pregnant women of the contaminated area (within the third month of
pregnancy) were “left free” to ask for medical abortion. Abortion was still
illegal in Italy. In fact, the fight of Italian social movements for the de-
In Zone A (108 hectares, 736 inhabitants), evacuation of the whole population; in
Zone B (269 hectares, 4.600 inhabitants) no evacuation, but inhabitants forced to
follow strict rules of conduct (including “restrain from procreation”); in the “Zone of
Prevention” (1.430 hectares, 31.800 inhabitants) no evacuation but inhabitants forced
to follow some precautionary rules of conduct.
7
5
penalization of abortion was at its peak8. About thirty women of the
contaminated area –but the precise number is not known- decided to interrupt
their pregnancies (Ferrara, 1977).
From Disaster to Cultural Conflict: Rival Interpretations of the Dioxin
Crisis
Given the radical uncertainty surrounding dioxin effects, it was clear to citizens
that public decisions couldn’t rely on any kind of scientific ‘truth’. The scientific
controversies about dioxin risk were widely discussed in the media.
The scientific uncertainty surrounding dioxin effects implied that the decisions
taken in response to the crisis were not just technical solutions for well defined
problems. They were political decisions. Nevertheless public authorities insisted
in denying uncertainty. No public debate involving the affected communities
took place, in order to define the problems to address in response to the
contamination as well as how to address them. Nonetheless conflicting
definitions of the problems at stake in responding to the crisis emerged. This
happened through the mobilisation of the affected people and of social
movements, resulting in two contentious public controversies.
One controversy was centred on the question if malformation caused by dioxin
to embryos should be considered as a potential damage to be prevented
through abortion. In fact, abortion became rapidly the central issue in the
national public debate concerning dioxin effects. In this debate, the catholic
church, pro-life, opposed leftist movements, pro-choice. Other controversies
concerning the disaster -like the suspected link between ICMESA production
and chemical weapons in the US, or how to design epidemiological studies to
correctly detect dioxin health effects- slipped in the background. The centrality
gained by the controversy on abortion helps in explaining the shifting of dioxin
risk from health and environmental problem to “moral-cultural problem”.
Another controversy contributing to this same shift concerned what had to be
considered as “safety”. Public authorities defined safety starting from the
detached standpoint of experts and laboratory science. In this view, safety is
the condition of not being exposed to risk: displacement from the
contaminated area was considered the solution guaranteeing the higher level
of safety. Local committees of Seveso citizens supported a different definition
of safety. They claimed for the relevance of another kind of risk: the risk of the
Seveso community to disappear. Not only individual safety had to be preserved
in responding to dioxin but as well the attachment to the territory, shared in
terms of “being a community”. These local committees found themselves
opposing not only public authorities but as well national social movements
mobilized in Seveso in order to support victims.
Social movements already active in the Italian political scene on the issue of
environmental health, together with left-wing political parties, mobilized in
Seveso. They organised a “Scientific Technical Popular Committee” (STPC) in
order to help victims having justice for what they were suffering. One of the
most important actor in this mobilisation was Medicina Democratica (MD)9. For
8
Voluntary pregnancy terminations were finally admitted by the law 194 in 1978.
MD (Democratic Medicine) is an Italian social movement born in the 1970’s on the
initiative of industrial workers, scientists and intellectuals. MD claimed the importance
9
6
MD, the Seveso disaster called for a large coalition (between citizens and
workers) in order to impose in the political agenda the issue of environmental
health. The concept of environmental health pointed to health damages caused
by industrial productions, inside and outside plants. Underlying it, there was a
social critique of the capitalistic exploitation. Capitalistic exploitation entailed
“hidden costs”. These costs were “hidden” because of the control exerted on
scientific knowledge production by hegemonic forces. MD claimed for the need
of a democratization of knowledge production, in order to make socially visible
the negative consequences of the industrial society. Quoting Giulio A.
Maccacro, one of the leaders of MD:10 “To fight this legalised robbery of health
and life, justified in name of the needs of capitalistic production, objectified by
an enslaved science, we need (…) a new way of doing science and technology,
based on the subjective experience of workers and citizens” (Maccacaro 1976,
p.6).
The call for a wide mobilization of victims and their participation in the
production of knowledge about dioxin damages found little answer among
Seveso population. This reduced the critical charge of MD public arguments.
This lacking of victims support can be explained if we consider that MD
interpreted the dioxin contamination in Seveso in terms of a typical
“capitalistic crime”, one of the many crimes perpetrated by a logic of “private
profit”, regardless of the social costs imposed on human and environmental
health. (Maccacaro, 1976, p. 6). The “novelty” of Seveso was just quantitative:
the ICMESA accident was considered not “a pathological episode occurring in
the system” but an evidence of “the pathological nature of the system itself,
with respect to human freedom, human needs and human survival” (Martini,
1976, p.152). What was happening in Seveso was a clear example of the
capitalistic injustice. This injustice needed to be denounced, first of all by its
victims. Seveso people were asked to join the pre-existing cause of workers
and class struggle in their being victims of the capitalistic system. There was
no place for more local and even personal definitions of the problems at stake
in the disaster situation. In this respect, activists were as unable as public
authorities to understand what Seveso people cared for in responding to dioxin
crisis.11
For a large majority of Seveso people, the priority in responding to the crisis
was to maintain their previous way of living, to preserve the specificity of their
community and their territory. Neither public authorities nor leftist activists
were able to take into account this dimension of “attachment” (Thévenot,
2006) to the territory and the community. The fight over the abortion issue
increased the feeling in the affected population of an instrumental exploitation
to develop participated forms of knowledge production on health problems related to
industrial activities.
10
Giulio Alfredo Maccacaro (1924-1977) was physician, biologist and biometric
specialist. After specialization in UK and USA, in 1966 he became professor of medical
statistics and biometry in the faculty of medicine of the university of Milan.
11
At the same time, the overlapping in the broader grouping of leftist movements
between the movements pro-abortion and the movements fighting for environmental
health increased the mistrust of a part of the population, mainly of catholic
background, in mobilised activists claiming for environmental health.
7
of the crisis in order to foster political struggle alien from what was happening
in the territory.
The scientific uncertainty about dioxin risk implied that no clear evidence was
there to support the interpretation given to dioxin risk by public authorities and
social movements. Appealing to this uncertainty, a grassroots mobilization of
catholic background took shape and asked for public authorities to consider not
only the seriousness of dioxin health risk, but the fear that Seveso community
might disappear. The collective damage caused by dioxin was thus interpreted
as a damage to a community. However, public authorities did not open any
participative arenas to discuss publicly these issues, nor they proposed any
mediation. This caused the grassroots movement to radicalize its protest in
terms of communitarian claims. This turn became visible in the central role
assumed inside the grassroots mobilisation by the militants of the radical
catholic movement of “Comunione e Liberazione” (CL) 12. For CL the disaster
was not “a crime” but a “test” for the community that had to stick together,
and to its (catholic) values, in order to respond to the crisis. CL asked public
authorities to recognize an auto-organisation right of the local community in
responding to contamination social consequences. This was necessary in order
to guarantee the taking into account of community values.
The interpretation of dioxin as a cultural threat to the community and its
values has prompted a recovery process based on the individualization of the
controversial implications of the contamination, the ones jeopardizing
communitarian cohesion. In particular, in the communitarian approach to the
crisis, issues of justice and of reparation simply disappeared from the public
debate.
The way the Swiss multinational Roche managed compensations to victims in
the immediate aftermath of the disaster also contributed to downsize to the
level of personal problems the (politically and morally) controversial
consequences of the disaster. The compensation issue was dealt directly by the
multinational with instruments of private settlement, like individual contracts
passed between victims having suffered material losses and the
multinational.13 Apparently abundant compensations were given to the Italian
state, the Lombardy region and the affected municipalities. However, no public
discussion took place concerning the criteria for compensation and the way to
invest the compensation given to public actors. This “privatistic” (de Leonardis,
1997) management of compensations caused the emergence of new conflicts,
contributing to divide victims and to weaken efforts of building a collective
action able to address the radically new challenges in terms of justice and
reparation that the disaster raised.
“Comunione e Liberazione” is a catholic movement born in Italy in the 1950’s and
particularly active in Lombardy. For a presentation of this movement see Abruzzese
(1991) and concerning the “radical” nature of the movement see in particular Zadra
(1994) .
12
The compensation issue concerning individual victims has stayed open in Seveso
until 2007 when the two proceedings instituted against Roche on the initiative of two
groups of citizens were declared not valid as a result of the statute of limitations. The
two groups of citizens never succeeded in having local support for their initiative and
can not be considered as representative of victims (Centemeri, 2006: 135-158). It is
important to say that Roche has never admitted its responsibility for the disaster at
any court of law.
13
8
Nevertheless the affected community succeeded in overcoming conflicts and
having its voice recognised concerning one crucial issue: the disposal of the
decontamination waste. In this process, an alliance emerged between the
otherwise conflicting forms of mobilisation locally active, grassroots catholic
and leftist. Confronted to the difficult task of disposing of the waste produced
during the decontamination (included the waste of the dismantlement of the
ICMESA plant), the Regional authority decided for the building of an incinerator
in the zone A, assuring the population that the incinerator would have been
dismantled once the decontamination completed. The decision was presented
as the soundest technical solution. A strong opposition emerged to the project,
allying environmental scientists and citizens into a “Group of work and
coordination for Seveso”. For environmental scientists (including the well
known biologist Barry Commoner who arrived in Seveso to support the action
of the STPC), incineration was far for being the safest way to dispose of dioxin
waste. For citizens, building an incinerator amounted to a death sentence for
the city, implying the impossibility of a full recovery. The Region’s project was
the ultimate evidence that Seveso was meant as the city to be sacrificed. The
incinerator was seen as a “scar” that would have changed forever the territory
and its landscape. Citizens were sure that public authorities’ promise to
dismantle the incinerator was not to be trusted.
An alternative project for the waste disposal was then elaborated by scientists
allied with citizens. It implied to bury dioxin waste in two subterranean dumps
to be dug in the Zone A, built so to assure that no toxic would percolate into
the soil. It was suggested as well to transform the Zone A in a “urban forest”
of oaks, the traditional kind of regional forest. After two years of struggle,
including a big demonstration organised in Milan, in 1979 the Region decided
to give up the project of the incinerator. The creation of the “Oak Wood” then
started, while the life in the city of Seveso slowly returned, year after year, to
normality.
In 1986, the “Special Bureau for Seveso”, the Regional authority created in
1977 to manage and monitor the decontamination activities, ceased to exist,
having accomplished its tasks, that is, guaranteeing a full recovery of the
contaminated territory. Francesco Rocca, mayor of Seveso in 1976,
representative of the Christian Democratic party, thus commented on the
coming to an end of the decontamination:
This is the end of a situation that has been overdrawn, if we
consider its actual size. That’s true that a toxic cloud was
released, causing some damages to occur, affecting the
territory and citizens health. But this case has been blown
up for reasons that are external to the event in itself. This
event has been useful for political purposes, for sociology
and science, but mostly it helped in the process that leaded
to approve in 1978 the legalisation of abortion.14
Rocca’s opinion was largely shared in Seveso: for many citizens the dioxin
disaster’s gravity had been blown up for political reasons. In this sense,
Seveso citizens were victims not so much of dioxin, but of political
14
Interview with Francesco Rocca, published in the newspaper Corriere della Sera,
18/12/1986 in the article “Che cosa è cambiato in questi dieci anni” (What changed in
these 10 years).
9
machinations causing the name of Seveso (and its citizens) to become a
symbol of collective anguishes. The decision to call the Directive on major
industrial hazards after Seveso was locally contested15. Forget and move on
became the keyword in the recovery process.
From forgetting to remembering:
environmental activists
the
role
played
by
local
After the accident, only a small number of inhabitants chose to leave Seveso,
among them, a small group of young Seveso environmental activists who had
participated in the mobilisation promoted by the STPC. The accident had
pushed them into political action, yet the reaction of most Seveso people made
them believe that “in Seveso it was not possible to carry on the struggle
necessary to change the institutional system so as to avoid repeating a similar
accident” (Interview LB).
In fact, from the perspective of the political ecology of STPC, industrial damage
was proof that the capitalist system needed radical changing. Concern for
nature or territory was of dubious validity because such issues were a matter
of “bourgeois conservationism” (Diani, 1988). Needing to face conflicts stirred
up by the disaster in Seveso, these young activists lacked a vocabulary capable
of translating into political issues the attachment to place that their fellow
citizens claimed to be a “common good” needing protection. Indeed, their
political culture condemned this very attachment as an obstacle to join the
general cause of the class struggle.
During the 1980s, these young activists embraced new political agendas, in
particular, international cooperation and feminism. These political experiences
shared the belief that practice, “enrooted” in the territory, is a form of political
engagement.
At the beginning of the 1990s, the group of activists returned to Seveso with a
new political project, that of making the experience of the disaster a basis for a
change toward a model of local sustainable development. One of the activists
explains this decision as follows:
We decided to accept the challenge to start from here,
from Seveso, from a territory colonized and abused by
the capitalistic system, and to create, through a network
of strong relationships enrooted in the territory,
opportunities to trigger a social, environmental and
economic change. For the good of this territory, of
course, but more in general as an example that it is
possible to change. (Interview with LB)
Since the time of the accident, and thanks to their recent political experiences,
their previous way of conceiving political action on environmental issues had
changed dramatically, largely because of feminist influences. The emphasis
that Italian feminism puts on the “practice of relationships” as a form of
“primary political action” (Libreria della Donne, 1987) led to a redefinition of
the very terms of the issue of environment, far from the frameworks of both
political and conservationist ecology. The idea here is that of taking care of a
15
See for a recent example the article by A. Morra “Il marchio di Seveso” published in
the newspaper Corriere della Sera, 23 February 2002.
10
concrete and local environment through practices that give birth to new
relationships between human beings, and between human beings and their
environment. The emphasis is no longer on the concept of political duty, nor on
the abstract concept of the right action to be taken as a guide for political
engagement.
One of the Seveso activists describes this change in focus of political action,
and the need for change, as follows:
At the time of the accident, we were unable to understand
the importance of the “practical” dimension. We launched
into an ideological extrapolation of the environmental
question in order to fight a global struggle. We didn’t
consider, or didn’t consider enough, the vital interests
linked to everyday life, that were affected by the dioxin
event. This is the reason why we did not succeed in our
attempt to interact with the people. This is the reason why
I decided to leave Seveso, because my political action at
that time was intended to change a lot of things: it was
not enough for me to change a small aspect of living in my
neighbourhood. But after a few years, I began to see my
political action as rootless. There was a sort of gap: my
political action was becoming more and more universal,
but every time I came back to Seveso I had less and less
to share with the people living there (Interview with MM).
The new political attitude of the group became consolidated through a series of
local experiences of new political engagement. First of all, the creation in
Seveso of a local section of Legambiente16, named after Laura Conti, one of the
preeminent figures in the STPC, and a communist, environmentalist, and
feminist activist. Then in 1991-1992, the group became engaged in restoring
a small wooded area in Seveso, “Fosso del Ronchetto,” which was being used
as a waste dump. The “Fosso del Ronchetto” experience was a turning point.
Legambiente activists made themselves visible in the eyes of the local
community; the restoration project provided the opportunity for meeting
citizens and getting them interested in Legambiente activities. At the same
time, the activists established a new kind of relationship with local institutions:
they assumed a direct and formal responsibility in doing things for the
community, an attitude far from their former critical logic of action. In fact, the
town council gave the local Legambiente section formal responsibility for the
recovery and management of the wood.
Direct action in the local context is considered by these activists as just one of
the ways to promote a greener model of local development. Direct involvement
in the local political arena is the other. In 1999 the activists contributed to the
creation of a “civic list” not directly linked to any national political party in
order to support a candidate for the election of the town mayor; this candidate
was a bridging figure, strongly linked to the catholic movement CL but also to
local environmentalism. The civic list won the elections and one of the activists
was put in charge of the municipality's social and environmental policies. One
of his first decisions had been to promote an Agenda 21 process together with
the other municipalities involved in the accident of 1976 (Cesano Maderno,
Desio, Meda). In the Agenda 21 process, the memory of the disaster is
Legambiente is the most important environmentalist organization in Italy today. On
the recent development of Italian environmentalism, see Della Porta and Diani (2004).
16
11
explicitly presented as a milestone in the local change toward a more
sustainable model of development. These developments are why, in 2002, the
Agenda 21 process sponsored the project “Seveso Bridge of Memory”. This
project is the first attempt in Seveso to publicly address the issue of the
disaster legacy.
The Construction of the “Discreet” Memory of the Seveso disaster
The issue of the memory of the Seveso disaster has been since the beginning
related by the local group of environmentalists to the “Oak Wood” and its uses.
In 1996, the wood was opened to the public without any kind of memory
inscription testifying to its origin. Legambiente activists highly criticized this
kind of “indiscriminate opening”:
We never agreed with the choice of an indiscriminate opening
of the park, composed of folkloristic and purely recreational
events. Instead, we proposed since 1996 to make it a space
of environmental education for preserving and safeguarding
the memory of the disaster. The idea that one could forget
what was hidden under its soil, and perhaps even build
houses on it, has always been greatly disturbing for us
(Interview GB).
In a press release issued the day before the official opening of the Oak Wood
to the public (9th of July 1996) the activists thus denounced the risk of
forgetting the disaster implied in the normalisation of this space of nature, built
over two special dumps still bringing the burden of the dioxin contamination
legacy:
Twenty years after the dioxin toxic cloud released by the
ICMESA reactor we state the follow:
The Oak Wood is a form of environmental compensation
meant to make up for human incapacity and error. We
want it to be a recognizable sign of the chemical and
environmental disaster perpetrated against the living. (…).
We propose a regulated opening for activities of
environmental education, that we already organise and
will keep on organising, thus contributing to preserve the
memory of the event, too often removed. We alas have to
point out that the ownership of the Wood is still of
Givaudan, through the society Ragam, and not of the
Region.
Starting from these premises, the “Seveso Bridge of Memory” project was
developed in 1999-2000 by these activists as a way to oppose what appeared
to them as a collective pressure to erase the disaster's memory, starting from
the normalization of the Oak Wood. They then asked local town councils to
finance the project. In particular, the project included: the creation of an
archive of the disaster, collecting public documents dispersed in different
archives as well as documents stored by ordinary citizens; the creation of a
“memory footpath” in the Oak Wood complete with displays telling the
accident's story through texts and photos. The project started in 2002 and was
12
funded by the local Agenda21 and supported by the Municipality of Seveso, the
Foundation “Lombardy for Environment” 17 and the Lombardy Region.
With the aim of using the project of the memory footpath as an opportunity to
finally shape a shared interpretation of the dioxin disaster in the local
community, Legambiente activists asked a group of social psychologists for
help, in designing the process of making the displays. The psychologists
suggested the creation of an “oversight committee” composed of people from
Seveso, to be chosen as representatives of the local community in terms of
“sensitivity, role, helpfulness, public acknowledgment”.18 More precisely, the
committee members were meant to represent the pluralism existing in the
community, in terms of “different expressions of the life of the community”.
The committee members were supposed to participate to and, so to say,
validate, in the name of the community, the writing of the displays, .
After a series of interviews the psychologists conducted with key actors of the
public life in Seveso, the members of the committee were chosen: an activist
of Legambiente, a physician member of CL, a social worker, a retired high
school teacher author of some books of local history, a member of the local
branch of the CAI (Italian mountain sports association), two volunteers in the
parishes of the city, a professor of humanities. Nobody of them have held
office in political parties or public institutions.
During the period December 2002-June 2003 the Committee met five times to
discuss the content of the displays, originally drafted by Legambiente activists.
Discussions were animated during the meetings, disagreements and conflicts
visible. The group of psychologists played the role of mediators. The two main
points of conflict were the legitimacy of the committee in representing the
community point of view and the risks of this memory building effort to
reopen conflicts and to cause new suffering:
There can be events that seem by now close, dead, but a
spark is enough for bringing back to life old disputes and
controversies. We will be able to create an agreement
over the content of the displays? And if it is not the case,
how to manage the situation?19
An agreement was found on the idea that the work on the disaster memory
should not be the case for reopening controversial issues, like compensations
The Foundation “Lombardy for Environment” (FLA-Fondazione Lombardia per
l’Ambiente) was created in 1986 with part of the monetary compensation given by
Roche to the Lombardy Region. The aim of the foundation is to develop scientific
research on environmental issues, in particular those issues related with the Seveso
disaster experience (dioxin and other pollutants effects on human and environmental
health, recovering and reforestation). The relationship between FLA and the Seveso
community has always been quite controversial (see local press in particular the
newspaper “Cittadino”, 19 novembre 1994, letters to the editor).
17
18
Working document: “Proposal for the collection and valorisation of the emotional
memory to support the making of the commemorative displays of the Oak Wood in the
frame of the project ‘Bridge of Memory’. Authors: Stefano Carbone, Alessandro
Carbone e Monica Cellini.
19
MS, member of the committee speaking during the meeting held the 3rd of
December 2002.
13
and dioxin health damages. The committee opted for what one of the members
named a “discreet memory”:
The memory we are writing here must be a discreet memory,
respectful of personal suffering. In this process, we must try to
avoid reopening old wounds, avoid forcing people to confront
painful or sorrowful things they want to forget. We must avoid
the nihilism that assumes recovery from this damage is
impossible, stressing instead the resilience of civic community. 20
The “discreet memory” is marked by “measure” and “caution” in remembering
what happened. The disaster and its consequences are described in the
displays mainly through data and numbers, as a guarantee of objectivity. The
conflicts that at the time of the accident divided the affected community are
shortly mentioned. What is stressed instead is the existence of different voices
in the community that all contributed, in their own specific way, to the
recovery:
The Community, however, did not break up. Men and
women formed committees, groups and associations. An
important role was played by the Religious Communities,
the meeting groups (we remember the slogan "Seveso life
goes on"), the numerous voluntary initiatives, the
Technical Scientific Popular Committee. Ideological
implications linked to the event and the decisions to be
taken subsequently, reinforced the contrast. The different
points of view that sprang up from committees, groups
and single citizens, gave way to a variety of experiences
in environmental and health education, in information, in
scientific research and in social animation. They allowed,
contrasts notwithstanding, to maintain the community
alive and cohesive in facing dramatic facts and handling
the heavy uncertainty caused by a situation never
occurred before. (From the display “A lively community”).
The ten displays written by the committee for the memory footpath then
promote an interpretation of the dioxin accident in which the community is the
main character in the struggle against what is called the “drama of the
unknown”:
The women and the men of Seveso were able to react
positively to the "drama of the unknown" caused by the
accident of July 10th 1976 and for this reason all this story
represents, today, a "hymn to life". (From the display “A
lively community”)
The dioxin damage is defined as follows:
An environmental and human damage, healed by the
actions of men and women moved by profound love for
their land, the land they belong to. (From the display “Oak
Wood: a place of memory”).
20
FT, member of the committee speaking during the meeting held the 3rd of
December 2002.
14
The Seveso disaster is presented in the displays as symbolic in many respects.
In the display “Seveso, a symbol of environmental protection”, the existence
of the Seveso Directive is considered as evidence of the Icmesa accident
having prompt “a new phase in policy-making which implies control by rule of
law of the pollution sources, as to ensure the safety of citizens”. As for the
local reality, the disaster is presented as the opportunity to understand the
relevance of taking care of the territory:
Since 1976 living in Seveso meant a choice of deeper
awareness of environmental values. This choice made the
population conscious of the need to reclaim the polluted
areas and to increase the quality of the environment.
Environmental and social opportunities prove this: areas
as Fosso del Ronchetto, an abandoned green area,
recovered and treated by the environmentalists from
Seveso, the Groane Park, "born" in 1976, the Bosco del
Biulè, the historical villas of Seveso. (…) The community
has not broken up. The Bridge of Memory fulfils the desire
to hand down this Story, connecting the present and the
past: the decontamination was not obtained only by
bulldozers but above all, by a community that reacted to
the damage and that still today lives in its land finally
recovered. This is why today Seveso is a symbolic place
for environmental protection. (From the display “Seveso, a
symbol of environmental protection”)
The writing of the displays of the memory pathway is not the case to start an
investigation concerning the controversial questions still open, among which
dioxin long term health effects, the link between ICMESA production and
chemical weapons, Roche responsibility. The displays show the result of a
negotiation in which different interpretations of the event find a common
ground in celebrating the importance of the attachment to the territory as a
resource, a resource for guaranteeing a better environment, social and
natural. In this respect the collective memory inscribed in the displays
presents the ICMESA accident as a test for the community, showing its
strength in responding to dioxin dramatic threat. The Seveso community thus
acknowledges the importance and gravity of what happened and the need to
testify. What has to be testified is not a condition of victims of an irreversible
damage but the capacity to respond. In this sense, the disaster is seen as an
opportunity for the community to understand its strength and to understand
the relevance of the territory as a common good to be cared after.
The process that led to the opening of the “memory footpath” in May 2004
showed the active effort of Legambiente activists to place the IMCESA event at
the center of a new collective identity of the Seveso community: Seveso is
presented as a “green” city, that invests today social and economic resources
to promote a sustainable development. The disaster is presented as the event
that trigger this green turn.
The displays fix the ICMESA accident as a test for the local community,
successfully overcome. The dioxin is therefore considered as a tragedy as well
as an “opportunity for change”. The people of Seveso can “positively” identify
themselves with the ICMESA event, confirming that this was not merely a
painful tragedy but also a moment in which the community recognized the
15
value of its attachment to the territory, making it an active instrument of
change. The Oak Woods is celebrated as a victory, a symbol of a community
rooted in the territory and of an environmentalism dependent on this same
attachment to the local, thereby opening it to broader issues of sustainability.
Yet this process of “memory building”, and its celebration of the community
attachment to the territory, conceals controversial issues. In particular it goes
with the reduction of the issue of dioxin long-term health effects to personal
problems, or troubles, thus accounting for the lack of collective effort to ask for
a full disclosure of the disaster damages. In fact, scientists are still working in
order to study dioxin effects in Seveso: but no community involvement exists,
as if the controversial issue of dioxin effects was either a pure scientific
problem or a personal trouble (or misfortune).
In the last 30 years, the population affected by dioxin in the area of the
disaster has been the object of many epidemiological studies, still underway.
In fact, the ICMESA chemical plant explosion, exposed the residents in the
surrounding communities to the highest exposure to TCDD known in humans
(Eskenazi, Mocarelli et al., 2001). Quoting an epidemiologist involved in the
research concerning dioxin health consequences in Seveso: “The accident was
a tragedy but for us scientists, I must admit, it has been a rare chance to have
a sort of laboratory situation, in order to explore how dioxin works on human
beings” (Interview with MS).
These studies have partially assessed the damages of the contamination,
including trans-generational damages (in particular thyroid dysfunction linked
to maternal exposure, see Baccarelli et al., 2008). The 25 years follow-up
study of mortality in the exposed population show excesses of lymphatic and
hematopoietic tissue neoplasms, diabetes mellitus, chronic obstructive
pulmonary disease (Consonni et al., 2008). Scientific controversies remain
sharp, in the frame of the broader controversy concerning the carcinogenic
properties of dioxin (Steenland et al., 2004). However, in Seveso, the affected
population has not asked for being involved more directly in the research effort
to produce knowledge about dioxin damages. Quoting a family physician in
Seveso, personally engaged for 10 years in trying to organise dioxin victims to
start a legal action to sue Roche:
You can not speak about all these scientific results
concerning dioxin effects here in Seveso. It is a
sort of taboo: public administrators and citizens
don’t want to speak about it. I’m in contact with
Seveso people on an everyday basis, because of
my activity as physician, and I can tell you that
people are divided in two categories. You have
people, the large majority, who don’t care about
dioxin, because they are fine or because they were
not exposed. Then you have people who were
exposed to the dioxin contamination and who now
are sick: immediately they ask if dioxin could be a
possible cause of their disease. The only answer I
can give is that I don’t know. It would be
necessary to organize an epidemiological study
parallel to the ones already in place, with the data
collected by family physicians, with a geographical
representations of the distribution of pathologies.
16
This is necessary to see if there are localised
situations with concentration of pathologies
(Interview with MD).
This physician’s efforts to start a new epidemiological study, putting as central
reference the territory (and not the exposed individuals according to risk zones
as in the epidemiological studies currently underway) has not found support by
regional authorities. Citizens as well have shown no interest in this project. For
them, dioxin health effects are a painful but private, not collective, legacy of
the disaster.
Final Remarks
The case of Seveso is a clear example of how the arithmetic of a destructive
event does not determine in itself the pattern of its reception and
remembrance. The ICMESA accident is fixed in the public memory in terms of
a disaster, mainly because of the radical novelty of the problems this event
confronted citizens and public authorities to. Uncertainty has been the main
feature of this event, anticipating controversies that are nowadays widely
known and experienced in the field of technological risks (Callon et al., 2001).
Back in the 1970’s, the Seveso accident just seemed to materialize many
prophecies of the rising environmental movement concerning the irreversibility
of the new technological risks. This event became immediately a symbol of the
new threats our industrialized societies were confronted to. At the same time,
at the local level, the event acted as an amplifier of already existing political
conflicts. The controversies concerning how to respond to the crisis were the
case for inflaming an already contentious political arena. Different actors tried
to exploit the event as a window of opportunity in political struggles relevant
at the national level.
Following Kofman-Bos, Ullberg and ‘t Hart (2005, pp.5-6), in order to explain
how disasters are remembered or forgotten both the grass-roots memory and
the elite-level political processing of disaster have to be taken into account. In
this respect, I have tried to show how the political struggle over the dioxin
contamination was marked by the exclusion of the affected people and their
concerns. The affected people, stuck in the position of victims, found a way to
make their voice heard through emphasizing their communitarian bond.
Dioxin, not so much in itself but mostly in its political use, was then
considered as a threat to the community and to its values. I have discussed
how this communitarian response implied to reduce to the level of “trouble”
(Mills, 1959) or individual problems controversial issues such as that of
compensation and, above all, that of the dioxin health damages to be
expected for the future. I have highlighted how issues of justice simply
disappeared in the communitarian frame that dominated the grassroots
response to dioxin. These dynamics account for a paradoxical situation that
has lasted until recently in Seveso: widely remembered around the world as
one of the major environmental disasters, the ICMESA accident has been
considered locally, in the affected community, as a politically over-exploited
episode, to be forgotten. As for dioxin health effects, the problem was
successfully de-politicised and totally delegated to scientists, with no request
from the affected people to be more directly informed and involved.
Only 30 years after the accident a collective memory has emerged that
recognizes the gravity and relevance of what happened in Seveso. This shift
17
from forgetting to remembering was produced by the effort of a group of local
environmentalists who actively started a work meant to inscribe in the
territory of Seveso the memory of what happened. The work on memory is
part of the activists agenda oriented towards producing a political change in
terms of more sustainable forms of local development. The accident is then
considered as a dramatic event but as well as an opportunity to change for the
better. In this sense, the disaster can contribute to define a new collective
identity, not in terms of a community of victims of a disaster, but in terms of a
community who shows that recovery from environmental damage is possible.
The capacity to recover is linked to the attachment shown by people to the
territory, which is promoted as a distinctive value, implying to care after the
environment. The fact that in Seveso dioxin health consequences have been at
the end not so catastrophic as expected has to be taken into account as well in
order to explain how the debate over the disaster memory could be reopened,
and the specific terms of this debate.
To summarize, the case of Seveso helps in pointing out how the specific way
in which an event is remembered in terms of disaster can be explained
considering three aspects: 1) the specific traits of the public space the disaster
enters as disruptive event (historicity); 2) the specific nature of the disruption
caused (realism); 3) how the disaster and its legacy are interpreted, over time
and at different scales (from the local to the national until the global level), by
public and political actors and by the affected communities, in particular in
terms of what damage has to be repaired and what “lesson” has to be learnt
(political controversies) (Centemeri, 2008).
In this respect it is true that the peculiar nature of the environmental damage
caused by dioxin, in terms of delayed and radically uncertain effects, is
important in order to understand not only why Seveso became immediately a
symbolic event in the raising risk society of the end of the 1970’s but as well
the difficulties of the affected community to deal with the memory of the
disaster. In fact, the community was confronted to the conflict existing
between going back to the normal life, which is part of the recovery process,
and keeping alive the alert over dioxin risk. In the case of Seveso this conflict
has been solved delegating to scientists the investigation over dioxin risk and
living in Seveso as if there were no dioxin risk. No commemoration of the
event was possible, because this commemoration would have clashed with the
collective effort to remove the dioxin risk from the public visibility. This
removal is not an unconscious reaction, but a way to collectively cope with a
tragic conflict.
Quoting Paul Ricoeur, for memory to exist the object of the past has to be
“lost”, to “have been” and “not to be anymore” (Ricoeur, 2004, p.11.). Dioxin
has been for years, on the contrary, a presence in Seveso, even if silent and
officially ignored. The memory pathway in the Oak Wood marks in this respect
the end of this troubling presence.
I have discussed how the collective memory inscribed in the memory pathway
at the Oak Wood of Seveso is the product of a negotiation involving the group
of environmentalists and other Seveso activists with the mediation of a group
of psychologists. In particular, I have stressed how the “discreet memory”
explicitly establishes a link between commemorating the disaster as an event
that made the Seveso community aware of the importance of caring after the
environment and forgetting its controversial legacy, either considering this a
personal problem or simply ignoring it.
18
In this respect, the Seveso case seems to confirm that “the processes of
memory, of celebration, can be functional to oblivion, that is, to processes of
collective removal” (Cavalli quoted in Tota, p.33). In fact, one of the main
problems that the Seveso disaster made collectively obvious was that of the
health and environmental damages stemming from the many chemical plants
of Brianza, beyond the single case of the dioxin disaster in Seveso. The issue
of the chemical pollution in Brianza has never been adequately addressed or
compensated, either politically or symbolically. The health and environmental
aftermath of industrial pollution, its costs and the need for justice and
reparation, is a question that local communities do not wish to address. The
creation of the “Memory path” in the Oak Wood in allowing to keep a memory
of the Seveso disaster, has as well implied to forget a lot.
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