Naples 2008, Or, The Waste Land: Trash, Citizenship, and an Ethic of Narration.

After having been systematically disfigured by building developers for decades, in the last 15 years Naples has been over-polluted and unable to manage the problem of waste dumping sites. The latest and most blatant outcome of this situation is the world-infamous image of a beautiful and ancient city literally swallowed by its own trash. But behind this shocking TV-picture lies a structural condition in which ecological devastation, politics and business are tightly interlaced. Environmental ruin is here in fact just another face of a deeper political failure, which can be labeled a crisis of citizenship, also caused by the rise of the so-called “ecomafia.” This essays questions whether and how ecological culture and ecocriticism in particular can provide the population with critical instruments necessary to develop their own “strategy of survival” both environmental and political. After reflecting on the philosophical implications of the idea of waste, it considers whether projects of environmental education based on narrations about territorial issues can be implemented as forms of a “narrative re-inhabitation”: a task intended to sharpen people’s ecological and political awareness starting from their “locatedness,” to restore social hope and to envision long-term community projects. In this framework, the eco-cultural retrieval and invention of locally embedded stories and of place-identity is both an expression of civil disobedience toward a corrupted power and a means of political resilience.