In Italy, 31 million tons of waste disappear annually without undergoing any legally required sanitation treatment[1]. As a result, entire areas of the Campania Region (located in southwestern Italy) have been transformed into illegal waste dumps, which present exceedingly high risks to both public health and the environment[2]. In his novel Gomorrah, the Campanian writer Roberto Saviano speaks of the tremendous quantity of garbage piled there for almost twenty years as "the tallest mountain on earth", greater in size than Mont Blanc and Mt. Everest together[3].
The problem arose in the early 1980s, when new regulations for recycling increased the cost of waste storage. The inelasticity of waste disposal pricing and the cost of compliance (traceability, labelling, automation and book-keeping procedures) favour illegal operators, whose cheaper costs give them a competitive advantage[4]. In this context, Camorra - the major mafia-type organization based in Campania - has created a highly lucrative market for illegal waste trafficking, which has now infiltrated much of the garbage-collecting industry, partnering with entrepreneurs willing to save large amounts of money through uncontrolled dumping[5].
Profiteering is a key driver of such waste trafficking[6]. Yet the crisis can be comprehended more fully through analysis of its social, ethical, cultural and political dimensions, in addition to its immediate, unlawful economic utility. Among relevant explorations of the Campania case and other environmental cases, one or more of these dimensions has been addressed. Here they are brought together, with the main existing analysis providing background information, to achieve a more comprehensive overview. Without this, solutions proposed are unlikely to address the problem as a whole.
A Context of Social Injustice
The social dimension of the waste disposal issue in Campania is related to an "out-of-sight, out-of-mind" attitude of the area's populace. Garbage is physically unpleasant - smelly and ugly; so people prefer not to think about it, including where it goes. It would be easier to fantasize about a mythical solid waste heaven where all the plastic bags on the street are magically transported[7]. Yet, as indicated by Julie Sze, garbage transforms public spaces, doing so particularly when traded as a commodity across regions, whether globally, nationally or locally[8]. A hierarchy of place can be said to result. Places become differentiated depending upon their attractiveness to capital. Ironically, as evidenced by the Campania case, capital accrues in places from which garbage has been taken, particularly the North of the country, yet depends on places to which it is taken, particularly the South of the country.
Discriminatory zoning, an issue fought by the environmental justice movement, typically ensues. Such zoning is accompanied by unequal enforcement of civil rights and differential exposure to harmful chemicals, against which this movement also vociferates[9]. In the Italian context, environmental crimes, which constitute one fifth of Italian criminality[10], facilitate the simultaneous and systemic occurrence of all these abuses. According to Alessandro Mengozzi, in the Campanian case waste is not simply the material residue of production, distribution and consumption processes, but primarily a social indicator of the relation between communities and space, which develops in terms of appropriation and expropriation[11]. An entire socio-political region has been "commodified" and tranformed into a huge illegal landfill, altering its landscape, threatening its inhabitants' health, and disrupting their identities.
Vandana Shiva develops a distinction between poverty as subsistence and poverty as deprivation. In her view, culturally perceived poverty is not necessarily real material poverty, for subsistence economies satisfy basic human needs through self-provisioning. By contrast, deprivation of resources, the harsher form of poverty, fails to satisfy basic human needs[12]. In recent decades, Campanian citizens have come to experience the harsher form of poverty in consequence of their gradual dispossession of fresh water, clean air, and soil fertility, through illegal garbage trafficking.
In some instances, Campanian citizens have been offered short-term financial benefits (approximately 1.500 Euro) as compensation for the consequences of living among tons of trash piles. Yet such compensation is but little in comparison to the cumulative financial loss of declining incomes from tourism, farm produce exportation and real estate values. Moreover, unlike these damages, the monetary value of which can be estimated, other damages – including resource depletion and the increased number of cancer cases, respiratory illnesses, and genetic malformations – can hardly be assessed monetarily. In the context of such legal impunity and social injustice as reign in Campania, occasional small efforts at compensation are perceived more as an offense than as a relief[13]. An accompanying disregard for individual stories and community narratives draws local populations to experience what Robert Bullard perceives as a sense of loss, both of any future and of any hope for the future[14].
A Question of Ethical Responsibility
The ethical dimension of the Campanian waste crisis extends much further than the failure of various industries to act ethically, including when lobbying the government. Two kinds of responsibility, democratic and ethical, can be identified. Democratic responsibility requires citizens to recognize that they contribute as members of institutions to human and environmental harm and consequently have the duty to engage in active democratic citizenship[15]. Ethical responsibility requires citizens to recognize that they may unfairly benefit from the imposition of costs upon others, and consequently have the duty to correct this situation. In Die Schuldfrage, Karl Jaspers distinguishes among four types of guilt. Criminal guilt is that of transgressing the rule of law within a recognized jurisdiction. Political guilt is that of citizenship in a state engaged in committing crimes. Moral guilt is that of a sense of personal culpability. Metaphysical guilt is that of failing to embrace solidarity leading to effective action when humanity is threatened[16].
Broad approaches to understanding responsibility imply that the waste crisis in Campania is attributable to all Italians for not taking action against the abuse of this region of their country. The national attitude toward the crisis has a peculiar aspect, however, which enables many to evade any such broad attribution of responsibility for action taken or not taken. Where human causality occurs, the agents involved can be a range of entities: individual deciders, such as the consumer, the bureaucrat, the corporate CEO, the politician; local or regional community-based populations; for-profit or nonprofit entities; states or governments; mass human phenomena such as corporatism, capitalism, consumerism. Each of these entities seems capable of tending toward the better or the worse; and even if their behavior veers toward corruption, it is susceptible of rehabilitation, remediation or reconstruction. By contrast, criminal organizations are openly committed to deciding "for worse."
Allowing a criminal actor to engage in public affairs has serious ethical implications. Even if the actor is passively allowed engagement in public life, through conflict avoidance on the part of other citizens, the effect can be one of legitimization or authorization. Just by accepting Camorra's interference with the environment, Italians legitimize the exposure of many to hazardous substances, the exploitation of vulnerable disenfranchised communities, the subsidization of ecological destruction, and corrupt profiteering by a criminal sector of society.
Cultural Legacy and Corruption
Corruption appears in innumerable forms in all societies and coincides in many cases with environmental degradation. Paul Connett says of communities, provinces and countries that the "bad law of pollution" pertains to them: "the level of pollution increases as the level of corruption increases. The more corrupt a community is, the more polluted it will be"[17]. Social attitudes toward pollution and corruption vary, however, from tolerance to hostility. The waste crisis in southwest Italy can be portrayed as a crisis of civic values, but cultural complacency may serve to curb public attentiveness and even to suggest that complacency is itself worthwhile, insofar as culturally endemic.
The rise of criminal organizations in southern Italy has been described as a response to the autocratic rule of King Federico II[18]. Initially, the mafia-type organizations performed a mediating role, providing what was viewed as justice and normalization to the local population. Their activities would be recognized as tax fraud today, but historically they were socially and morally acceptable insofar as pursued at the expense of royal tyranny operating through corrupt and oppressive bureaucracy. While this does not imply that Campanians reject trust as a virtue, their historical experience erodes their capacity to trust the government: trust is a virtue but also an ideal difficult to realize within their circumstances[19].
The phenomenon of corruption can occupy cultural space in the intergenerational transmission of values, on which future policy expectations depend[20]. To achieve change, cultural space must be given to democratic empowerment concerning nature and future human generations. Campania needs not only effective clean-up interventions, but also reconnection and revaluation programs: reconnection links families and communities to opportunities; and revaluation creates enough value for regional consumers, investors, businesses, and residents to view the area as a place of choice[21]. as it had been historically. This change is critical to counteracting the Camorra clans' businesses, which have been the chief source of employment and income in recent decades.
Reconnection with values and revaluation of places require broad-based efforts at all levels of society, including a change in preconceptions. Campanians have accommodated themselves to a no-growth attitude: among them the habits of winning and accomplishing are missing[22]. They need to be provided with critical instruments to elaborate their own ''strategy of survival", erasing the infamous image of the beauties of ancient Naples swallowed by its own trash. As Serenella Iovino suggests, narration together with environmental education is critical to their re-appropriation of their territory, responsibility and future[23].
Political Exclusion
Inappropriate management of the waste crisis by local public authorities has had the effect of further weakening the Campanians' motivation for citizen participation. Condemning the insufficient implementation of European waste legislation by Italy, Stavros Dimas, the former European Commissioner, observed at a European parliamentary plenary session in January 2008: «The more direct cause for the waste crisis appears to be the lack of action and the lack of political will to adopt the measures necessary for solving the waste-management problem. Camorra should not be used as an excuse for political apathy and ineptitude»[24]. Yet according to Laura Lieto, the crisis has been perpetuated not by the failure of public authorities to take proper action but by invasive and autocratic governmental management. She maintains that the central government discouraged local civic engagement by appointing an Extraordinary Commissioner invested with special power to cope with the emergency: the power to restrict public freedom severely and to bypass the separation of ordinary public authority and military power[25]. Problems arose particularly when these temporary provisions became permanent, and the terms of the original mandate were changed from "exceptional circumstances" to "ordinary activities"[26].
The provisions together with their permanency had the effect of reducing public participation in the decision-making process[27]. Rather than building a dialogue with the citizens to find shared solutions, the central government intervened with repressive measures, justifying military intervention as an emergency measure. In the absence of public dialogue, the democratic process, including any public demand for environmental quality and public health, was inhibited[28]. Those with political power were left holding sway over the crisis themselves.
A somewhat similar situation arose in New York City when Mayor Giuliani proved to be careless of local needs while closing Fresh Kills, the largest landfill in the world located in Staten Island. His authoritative, antidemocratic approach was comparable to what prevailed in Campania, yet the epilogue was different. Sze describes how community activists organized themselves into a citywide coalition focusing on the racially disproportionate health effects of garbage policy[29]. Pressured by this grassroots activism, the municipal government reconsidered and endorsed two ideas previously ignored: the principle of borough equity; and the transfer of garbage by rail or barge rather than diesel trucks[30]. A comparison of the two cases demonstrates that environmental remediation may hinge upon the responsiveness of public authorities to local populations, which itself may depend upon whether such authorities have fallen prey to corruption. Where corruption pervades waste management, waste crises will tend to remain unresolved.
Conclusion
The mountains of trash in the streets, the mounds of burnt rubbish, the exhausted and insufficient dumping sites, and the population compromised in both its health and dignity[31] are all major traits of the formal state of emergency declared in the Campania Region since 1994. This waste crisis has been repeatedly analyzed, and many explanations and solutions have been proposed in the relevant literature. Reviewing the main problems has shown the complexity of the crisis. Yet among them, corruption seems the most pervasive. It impedes the waste crisis from being addressed and resolved in its most fundamental dimension: its ecological dimension. Human corruption induces and then neglects ecological corruption. Philip Cafaro observes:
we falsely assume that we can keep separate harms to nature and harms to humanity, harms to others and harms to ourselves. We do not see that environmental vices do not just harm nature, they harm us and the people around us…many of these harms are scientifically verifiable; the rest can be understood by anyone with open eyes and an open heart[32].
In this way, environmental ethics return us to consideration of human ethics.
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