Where the Sea Holds Time: Urgency, Industry, and Ecological Repair in a Fragmented Landscape

Abstract (English)

The urgency constructed around the energy transition in industrial zones is deeply political. It is not just a response to climate change but also a strategy mobilized to justify and manage industrial restructuring. In the oil refinery zone between Siracusa and Augusta, urgency is instrumentalized in multiple and often conflicting ways, by the Industry Union, the Worker Union, and national environmental organizations, to frame industrial transition, economic security, and environmental futures. My research approaches this industrial zone as a fragmented patch (Tsing, 2015), where different actors, workers, inhabitants, environmentalists, and industry representatives struggle over what the future should look like and how ecological repair should be understood.
One entry point to these tensions is the closure of Versalis, a key industrial site. Analyzing media discourse, I trace how urgency is shaped through different narratives: for the industry and workers, urgency is about preventing economic collapse and job loss; for environmental organizations, it is about addressing long-standing pollution and the need for a radical shift away from fossil fuels. But these positions are not neatly divided. The workers and inhabitants are not separate groups: Many who suffer from the industry's toxicity also depend on it economically (Dörre, 2017).

Amid this contested terrain, the sea emerges as both witness and tool. It is a site of contamination and extraction but also of relation, care, and imagination. In a landscape where toxicity is often unquantifiable, where official data is inaccessible, inhabitants turn to their own life-time observations of the sea to make sense of environmental change. They can recall shifts in its colors, currents, and fish, sensing transformation through their bodies and daily lives. Their knowledge is neither abstract nor detached but embedded in experience, shaped by intergenerational memory and rhythms of living with the sea. Through ethnographic experimentation (Estalella & Criado, 2018), I explored how these embodied ways of knowing can be mobilized not just to document damage but to co-produce forms of ecological repair. One of the workshops I co-organized with local associations sought to move beyond analysis, using the sea as both a conceptual and material space to reimagine what repair might mean in practice. The sea, in this sense, does not just reflect industrial damage or climate change, but also offers a different temporal horizon, a way of thinking about the future that is not solely structured by crisis and urgency but by relation and continuity.
If anthropology is to reckon with the realities of industrial and environmental crisis, our role must extend beyond critique, we must also contribute to reimagining futures. This presentation engages with these tensions, questioning what it means to practice anthropology not just as an observer, but as a participant in the making of repair.