Making Sense of Oil Pollution: Thresholds of Harm in the Extractive Ecologies of Val d'Agri

INTRODUCTION

In the early morning of January 23, 2017, two workers of the industrial development consortium in the town of Viggiano, Val d'Agri, observed traces of a multicolored, reflective oily film covering the surface of a water basin outside the local wastewater treatment plant. ¹ The water smelled and looked like oil. A campaign of environmental monitoring and sampling was carried out by the regional state institution in charge of environmental protection, ARPAB. It led to the discovery of more than 400 tons of oil that leaked from the gas and oil pretreatment plant of Val d'Agri, Centro Olio Val d'Agri (COVA), and contaminated over 266 hectares of soil as well as underground waters. ²

A police investigation led by the Public Prosecutor's Office established misconduct and illegality by Eni (National Hydrocarbons Authority), ³ the multinational oil and gas company that was founded by the Italian State in 1953 and now operates in Val d'Agri as a joint stock company. In 2019, the directors of COVA and members of the Technical Regional Committee in charge of public environmental monitoring were brought to trial for environmental disaster. ⁴

While the oil leakage at the COVA plant and the subsequent ongoing trial received national media attention, the many environmental and public health risks that are connected to hydrocarbon extraction in Basilicata, such as minor oil spills, petrochemical waste, contaminated sources of drinking water, and polluting flare events, remain obscured. Industrial contamination in Val d'Agri does not exist as a singular spectacular event, but rather as a form of slow violence, ⁵ a slower burning environmental problem ⁶ that insists on bodies and environments as a chronic and compounding process.

Environmental degradation is the result of the many accidents and misconduct incidents that took place over the past 30 years, ever since Eni began intensive oil extraction in the region. Because exploitation of fossil fuel soils in Basilicata has been considered to be “of national strategic interest” by the Italian State, ⁷ the narrative of economic development has been constructed by sacrificing the local environment and its inhabitants.

Over the years, Eni and the other extractive companies active in the region, including Shell and Total, have contaminated environmental matrices and human and nonhuman bodies ⁸ by operating under substantial impunity that is granted by prevalent toxic narratives ⁹ of capitalist industrial development.

However critical the role of judicial actions in environmental protection may be to obtain corporate accountability, the outcomes of the trials conducted in Val d'Agri were unable to fully address the accountability of Eni beyond monetary compensation and a temporary shutdown of the COVA plant. This is also due to the fact that what counts as evidence of environmental hazard is put into question in institutional arenas that are unable to incorporate local epistemologies ¹⁰ and claims of harm that do not fit within the boundaries of either legal constructions of legitimacy or institutionalized expert scientific knowledge. ¹¹

Recognized scientific monitoring that is able to account as evidence remains in the hands of extractive companies and environmental state agencies. The inhabitants of Val d'Agri mediate and collect through their bodily experience evidence of the compounding effects of displaced fossil matter, as it emerges in more or less evident phenomena in the lived environment.

Some of the evidential phenomena gathered include flourishing algae that stain the freshwater reservoir of Pertusillo, ¹² carcasses of carps floating above the water and clustering on the reservoir shores, ¹³ black and red mud emerging in cultivated fields next to oil wells, ¹⁴ and flare events that diffuse toxic smells in the residential neighborhoods surrounding the COVA treatment plant. ¹⁵

By producing epistemological evidence of their own, citizens set up alternative systems of witnessing ¹⁶ that construct knowledge of pollution, thus challenging the boundaries of what is considered acceptable or safe both by the State and extractive companies. Unsettling the premise that only expert technoscientific monitoring is productive of truth and reason regarding contamination, the inhabitants of Val d'Agri have mobilized sense-based indicators as valid for their production of knowledge.

Sensing here draws primarily from expanded definitions of citizen sensing ¹⁷ and street science ¹⁸ and refers to the low-tech scientific apparatus of monitoring the environment, as well as qualitative experiential data, bodily receptivity to contamination, or narrations of encounters with experiences of pollution. ¹⁹

By examining the case of Val d'Agri, this contribution explores the making of citizens' claims for environmental justice and environmental information in cases of slow industrial contamination. I aim to give visibility to the existing and emerging struggles around permissible environmental harm in Val d'Agri while considering the political possibilities of lay and experiential knowledge to challenge institutionalized epistemologies within environmental monitoring and risk assessment.

Part one of this contribution engages with structural conditions of data opacity and with the socioeconomic dependency on oil extraction that is instigated by both the private sector and state agencies that operate in Val d'Agri. Part two investigates citizens' initiatives and sensing methodologies that address environmental pollution in the region. Part three discusses the possibilities offered by the epistemological discrepancies between different forms of sensing pollution to stimulate civilian intervention. The conclusion of this contribution considers the manifold relational practices of attention that forge a common ground to address slow environmental violence. ²⁰

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

To grasp the granularity of the diffused industrial contamination that penetrates the environments and bodies of humans and nonhumans in the region of Val d'Agri, I frame my contribution within Nixon's definition of “slow violence” ²¹ as a form of environmental degradation that occurs gradually and accretively through space and time. By following the understanding of porous relationships between bodies and ecologies, as theorized by Tuana's “viscous porosity” ²² and Alaimo's “transcorporeality,” ²³ I think of the interdependence of social forces and phenomena of slow degradation to understand environmental damage and resistance politically.

I investigate the entanglement of socioeconomic structures and pollution by taking into consideration Michelle Murphy's theorization of “regimes of imperceptibility” ²⁴ as the framework by which to explore the alliance between corporations and epistemological habits of scientific analysis that shape the understanding of harm and risk.

Thinking with Murphy's examination of the ways in which different forms of knowledge become visible or invisible within scientific inquiry and society at large, I attempt to illustrate how the scientific data used by Eni and the Italian State are instrumentalized to produce public uncertainty regarding what is harmful and to render community struggles for environmental justice invisible.

Additionally, I engage with Gabrys and Pritchard's “just good enough data” ²⁵ framework, demonstrating the expanded uses that citizen-gathered data can have beyond regulatory comparison, to validate the democratized datasets mobilized by citizens. This resonates with citizen sensing defined by Suman et al. as a practice of participation that expands epistemic justice by bringing the multiple perspectives of affected actors into the debate around risk. ²⁶

Furthermore, I addressed Claire Waterton and Kathryn Yusoff's invitation to consider forms of not knowing as falling outside the demands of empiricism ²⁷ to tie my investigation to the area of indecisiveness between scientific thresholds of pollution and information that remains unmediated by technological sensing. In doing so, I consider qualitative data gathered through sensing, storytelling, and memories as alternative forms of witnessing slow and diffused environmental contamination, which are embedded in local knowledge.

This echoes Privitera et al.'s concept of “small data” ²⁸ as the ensemble of emotional and sensorial qualitative data gathered through street science as well as Armiero et al.'s theorization of “toxic autobiographies” ²⁹ as personal experiential stories of contamination, which contribute to community resistance and challenge the violence of narrative injustice. ³⁰

METHODOLOGY

To investigate the case study of Val d'Agri and resonate with the local epistemological practices, I mobilized both quantitative and qualitative methodologies. Publicly accessible, quantitative expert data were collected and archived through open-source research into legal documents, public health dossiers, official epidemiological accounts, scientific articles, and environmental reports from Eni, ARPAB, and independent experts.

Additional quantitative information was gathered from citizen datasets made public on online platforms or shared with the author. Qualitative information was gathered during online and in-person interviews. Qualitative information also included other publicly available sources, such as cellphone videos uploaded on YouTube and Twitter, narrations on activist blogs, and other published forms of media.

The fieldwork was carried out over the course of a week. It consisted of following the activities of one researcher and local experts and activists in their research and monitoring work. The approach included active listening as well as spontaneous conversation that took place in shared activities such as data collection on the ground, walks, informal interviews, gatherings, and public presentations.

OPACITY AND TECHNOCRATIC KNOWLEDGE

The region of Basilicata sits on one of the biggest onshore hydrocarbon reservoirs of continental Europe and holds a central role in the national oil and gas production in Italy. ³¹ Its territory is crossed by a 550-km-long network of pipelines that transport the crude oil to the local hydrodesulfurization plant (COVA) and to the Taranto refinery in the neighboring Puglia region. ³²

Val d'Agri is pierced by around 100 oil wells, of which 24 remain productive as of today. Dismissed wells have been abandoned, cleared out, or used for wastewater reinjection, as in the case of Costa Molina 2 that is at the center of yet another legal case of state-sanctioned environmental contamination caused by Eni. ³³ Geological resources, private interests, and governmental policies shape the space of lived experience in Val d'Agri and unsettle the definition of what constitutes harm and pollution.

Similarly to other areas of environmental struggles in the south of Italy, the region of Basilicata was stigmatized as a primitive and premodern other by the state narrative of postwar national development. ³⁴ State-led industrialization prompted private industries to locate themselves in Val d'Agri on the premises of modernizing narratives of progress centered on oil extraction.

As anthropologist Marco Alliegro reminds us, oil in Basilicata came to be the symbol of modernity able to lift a whole disadvantaged region from poverty and underdevelopment. ³⁵ The extractive processes imposed on the region hinged on the possibility of exploiting structural conditions of underdevelopment, poverty, and migration, ³⁶ which allowed forms of internal colonialism in the south of Italy to proliferate. ³⁷

Research conducted by Bubbico, ³⁸ Iacono, ³⁹ and Pellegrino and others ⁴⁰ has shown that the employment and development rates promised by Eni and other petrochemical companies and bolstered by the state did not have any significant impact on a regional scale and the region remains one of the poorest in Europe, with high unemployment and emigration rates.

Meanwhile, environmental and health impacts of an economy fully relying on fossil fuel extraction compromise, with impunity, bodies and environments. ⁴¹ Eni continues to maintain close ties within governmental structures, influencing both national energy policies ⁴² and international relationships. ⁴³ This private–public entanglement foregrounds that the private interest of Eni coincides with the collective interest of the Italian State. ⁴⁴

Relying on this toxic narration, Eni has infiltrated every aspect of life in Val d'Agri, turning the region into a petro-centric culture. ⁴⁵ As narrated by Peca and Turco, ⁴⁶ Eni has instigated campaigns to brand itself as a company attentive to matters of care, health, and local environment by establishing a corporate image that is connected to territorial issues and demands, from supporting local biological agriculture projects to funding programs of environmental education in schools, cultural events, and conferences. ⁴⁷

The economic leverage that Eni is able to deploy in the form of royalties ⁴⁸ and occupational blackmailing plays a crucial role in instigating economic and epistemological dependency on fossil fuel-derived profits. The perceived impact of a potential disinvestment by the extractive companies in the region instigates fear and insecurity onto local inhabitants, thus undermining the possibilities of cohesive efforts to oppose harmful practices of hydrocarbon extraction.

Eni also plays a fundamental role in shaping the discourse around perceived environmental risks by claiming legitimacy over monitoring of environmental data, ⁴⁹ interfering with external monitoring, and avoiding reporting certain polluting accidents. ⁵⁰ The results of environmental studies and monitoring campaigns financed by Eni are exclusively owned by the company itself and do not need to be disclosed either to the public or to state institutions, allowing the company to conceal health hazards and environmental risks that could undermine its industrial processes. ⁵¹

Monitoring phenomena of pollution then assumes a paramount role in the region as it can be weaponized by corporations to instigate a domain of opacity around environmental information and guarantee the safety of industrial profit over the safety of people and environments. In Val d'Agri, determining what counts as “safe” for the environment and local population rests on corporation datasets that are produced by relying on the claimed objectivity of heavily financed science reports ⁵² and on high-tech monitoring mechanisms operated solely by Eni and ARPAB.

By deploying technocratic and legalist forms of industrial contamination regulation in their favor, ⁵³ corporations in the region exploit the relevance of data monitoring in environmental disputes to create a privileged channel of knowledge production.

To give an example, a medical health assessment promoted by a group of local mayors and experts from the Institute of Clinical Physiology of the National Research Council in 2017 examined the sanitary impact of oil extraction on the inhabitants of the villages surrounding the COVA plant. ⁵⁴ The assessment highlighted a higher regional rate of mortality for cardiovascular and respiratory disease. ⁵⁵ When the assessment was publicly presented, Eni quickly responded to the claims with a counter study that included a variety of scientific experts from selected Italian universities and the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York to decisively dismiss all the claims made by the five-year-long medical study.

Similarly, assessments made by scientific experts who provided scientific evidence of high levels of contamination in the waters ⁵⁶ and soils ⁵⁷ of the region were dismissed by Eni by means of counter studies, pressing charges, and defamation. ⁵⁸

WAYS OF SENSING

Because of a substantial lack of dialog between institutions and inhabitants ⁵⁹ and of economic resources, as well as corrupted power relationships within the public administration in the region, ⁶⁰ public data gathered by ARPAB, which should certify a certain level of safety and supervise the conduct of petrochemical companies in the region, remain inadequate. ⁶¹ Unable to find answers to their chemical distress, local citizens extend their epistemological reach to mediate their sensorial experiences of pollution by collaborating with nonstate-funded expert scientists and with environmental activists.

By collecting samples and setting up databases, citizens develop not only environmental knowledge ⁶² but also an alternative understanding of pollution, thereby closing the informational gap of unrepresented phenomena in state-funded research. In Val d'Agri, multiple forms of knowledge mobilization are conducted on the ground by a variety of sensing actors, including affected inhabitants, activists, and experts.

Cova Contro, ⁶³ a local nonexpert activist association, uses makeshift and low-technology instruments for sampling of water, soil, and air as a tool to reclaim the right to information on pollution. The association receives alerts by inhabitants regarding anomalies registered in the landscape, such as persistent smells, colored mud in agricultural fields, and uncommon coloration of fresh water.

Upon registering the anomalies, the association proceeds to collect samples that are then tested by scientifically accredited laboratories for polluting molecules. Depending on the findings, the results are communicated differently in shared posts on social media, articles in the local newspaper, informal gatherings, or public conferences. The online archive of Cova Contro, AnalyzeBasilicata, ⁶⁴ contains environmental data that are either not monitored by Eni and ARPAB or not disclosed to the public.

Some of the results of these samplings remain under the threshold of juridically regulated pollution levels and others reveal mercury and heavy metals in locally produced milk and high hydrocarbon levels in the waters of streams and rivers next to the COVA plant. Most of the evidence gathered by AnalyzeBasilicata is disregarded or ignored by monitoring state agencies and Eni, ⁶⁵ but their formal complaints to the regional authorities are able to stimulate further sampling by ARPAB.

Other local initiatives, such as the Osservatorio Popolare per la Val d'Agri and Libero Osservatorio Val d'Agri ⁶⁶ survey, categorize and archive accidents of pollution that might go unreported by Eni. Either by observing the Cova torch to archive flare events or monitoring air pollution data from the ground, the collective taps into their bodily knowledge by enhancing the role of observation and sensory perceptions. DIY and low-tech sensors are also used to compare experiential data with the data publicly released by ARPAB and the Italian State.

By posting videos and reports of polluting events and documents attesting the discrepancies within publicly available datasets and by signing petitions and notifications, they pressure ARPAB to release the missing data that they claim should be accessible to the public in accordance with European regulation. ⁶⁷ Citizens' monitoring activities also bring expert scientists to the region. As an example, in 2020, citizens and activists who became worried about the increasingly pungent smell of hydrogen sulfide and the noise coming from the COVA Oil Center called a nongovernmental environmental organization of expert scientists, Source International, ⁶⁸ to perform alternative air samplings to the ones performed by ARPAB.

The report, ⁶⁹ which was made public in February 2021, has shown a daily average concentration of total volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in the area comparable with concentrations found in extremely polluted cities such as Beijing and New Delhi. Because total VOCs and nonmethane hydrocarbons are not regulated by law on a national level, ⁷⁰ emissions from COVA that might exceed the conventional threshold of safety are not registered by the ARPAB sensors, thus allowing Eni to remain unaccountable.

These experiences exemplify the co-formation on the ground of the citizen/science alliance, ⁷¹ in which the issues perceived by laypeople are the fuse for collaboration of experts and citizens to address local struggles. Qualitative data play a fundamental role in describing chronic, and not acute, distress and slower burning environmental problems. ⁷² Forms of sensing experiences in the region, which are not mediated into the dataset by technological sensors or experts, include bodily intuitions and personal narrations.

Some of the stories gathered by listening to local farmers and laypeople include accounts of sick animals in farms surrounding the oil wells and the COVA plant and fainting while rooting out vegetables from farming soils located next to extraction wells. Others recounted memories of sleepless nights caused by “a light that shines more than the moon, ⁷³ ” which was emitted by the flares of the petrochemical torches, or nocturnal roars and trembling glass panes in the living rooms of houses located next to the COVA plant. ⁷⁴

Narration of bodily experiences, memories, and intuitions allow us to witness nonhuman phenomena of contamination that go unreported or uninterpreted by scientific sensors and to gather indications on the altered ecological relationships within the environment. The necessity to bring to the forefront such personal narrations has been underlined by Armiero and Iengo as the tool to collectively counter narrations that make the struggles of underrepresented communities invisible. ⁷⁵

Ultimately, sensing is a form of vernacular and experiential knowledge that remains an important indication of divergent relationships within the ecosystem of extraction. When the variety of embodied sensing practices is shared and deliberated collectively, it stimulates and broadens the scope of citizens' engagement in environmental issues ⁷⁶ while propagating environmental knowledge and collective resistance in the region.

By sharing knowledge through media and in person and activating alliances with expert science, the heterogeneous and noncohesive community of Val d'Agri composes an ecosystem of sensing and care, which interconnects scientific data collection, civic monitoring, experiential local knowledge, and nonhuman material phenomena.

DATA GAPS

The tension between technocrat-led management of environmental contamination and social struggles for health in the region shows that existing mechanisms of accountability fail to address harmful phenomena of pollution. Technoscientific systems of monitoring alone often fail to register interactions between multiple molecules and perceive what falls under a certain sensitivity threshold that is technologically set. ⁷⁷

Citizen practices of sensing are able to intercept the microphenomena or quasi-events ⁷⁸ that compose the extractive socioecologies of the region. By extending the depictions of technologically sensed realities, ⁷⁹ embodied and perceptive experiences unsettle scientific findings by introducing new imaginaries of risk and harm determination.

Nevertheless, the space to institutionally negotiate safety levels and measures of harm is structurally unequal ⁸⁰ and is not easily accessible to nonexpert citizens. Therefore, the embodied experience of citizens constantly needs to negotiate critical levels of scientifically and institutionally established risk to be epistemologically validated. ⁸¹ The discrepancies between different forms of monitoring and sensing offer a productive friction that triggers multiple forms of visibility and divergent claims. ⁸²

In the context of this contribution, I define such discrepancies as data gaps and identify four categories around which environmental disputes in Val d'Agri are constructed.

The first category consists of intentionally omitted information: absence constructed by extractive corporations appropriating scientific monitoring tools and expertise to create regimes of opacity that deliberately conceal data to safeguard industrial profit.

The second category consists of absence of data that are generated by inertia, negligence, or connivance with industrial technoscience within existing public institutions in charge of protecting collective conditions of health.

The third category includes gaps in environmental information caused by technological insensitivity. This category includes a lack of accuracy of technoscientific sensors as well as yet-to-be-developed capacities of technological perception.

The final category consists of affective intuitions that necessitate practices of embodied sensing and oral narration and are impossible to translate through the existing models of technological sensing.

These categories connote the assemblage of multiple knowledge systems that compose the way citizens in Val d'Agri attempt to sense and make sense of their lived experiences of pollution.

CONCLUSION: ALLIANCES AND STRUGGLES

In Val d'Agri, the structural opacity around environmental contamination produced by the state and Eni signifies pervasive pollution-negating discourses. As such, they underplay ecological and health hazards in favor of industrial development and remain in compliance with the dominant toxic narration ⁸³ that naturalizes extractivist-made contamination. ⁸⁴

Under these conditions, what counts as harmful or as evidence of pollution is constantly put into question and citizens come to the forefront of the struggle for fair living conditions with their experiential data and knowledge. As this contribution examines, practices of experiential sensing are able to assemble multiple forms of knowledge to assess the slow and chronicle effects of hydrocarbon pollutants on the local ecosystem while critically challenging state and corporation-gathered datasets.

In cases of slow violence and diffused contamination, what is overlooked, unrecorded, or purposely excluded by institutional scientific narrations that construct imperceptibility is brought back on the radar by evidence and data gathered by coalitions of citizens and experts, as well as by small data, ⁸⁵ stories, intuitions, and forms of uncertainty. Reclaiming the validity of the senses as the instigating tools for gathering effects of pollution is the first step toward mending the gaps between institutionalized science and situated experience.

Civil practices that are instigated by sensorially intercepting the material phenomena of pollution in the quotidian environment stem from paying attention ⁸⁶ to the traces of contamination and harm that human and nonhuman porous bodies bear. ⁸⁷ By stimulating communication, exchange, and connection, the local struggles generate fluxes of knowledge between laypeople, experts, activists, and institutions contributing to the formation of a resisting community. ⁸⁸

With this contribution, I have argued for sensing-based practices of monitoring and local epistemologies to be considered crucial in the construction of counternarratives that challenge the dominant technoscientific discourses around environmental harm while contributing to establish communal forms of political struggles and care.

Embracing sensing as a form of heterogeneous resistance ⁸⁹ provides us with fertile ground for connecting environmental struggles that take place across space and time. The localized struggles and epistemological differences that are mobilized by the inhabitants of Val d'Agri are constitutive of environmental justice movements that generate resistance on a local as well as planetary scale.