Trashopolis! Storytelling, waste research and glocal conflicts

by Salvatore De Rosa

This is a very personal account of an ethnographic immersion in the epicenter of an environmental conflict of huge proportions. That happens to be, at the same time, the place where I was born. It is an attempt at connecting the dots between individual existence, collective destinies and glocal ecological transformations.

Campania, anno 2016, Anthropocene has already shown up here as Biocide. But in the Zone we became Stalkers…

31 years ago, I was born in the trash. Not in a bin, not in the litter, not in a dump, but in all three mixed up and entrenched in a fertile countryside. I was born in Acerra,  near Napoli, in the region of Campania, southern Italy, at exactly the half of the 1980s.

Photo by Eduardo Castaldo

In that place, at that time, a mix of deliberate will, flawed policies, industrial cycles, historical subordinations and economic…