Intergenerational narratives of toxicity: understanding heterogeneity and care in a polluted steeltown (Taranto, Italy)

This article examines environmental narratives amidst chronic industrial pollution across three generations in Taranto, Italy. Drawing on ethnographic research with residents positioned in different historical periods, we show how each generation's understanding of toxicity is intimately tied to shifting economic conditions, political interventions, and embodied experiences in Taranto's polluted landscape. The first generation, closely tied to state-led industrial development, recalls their experience of pride and modernity. The second generation is faced with growing scientific evidence on industrial pollution and institutional scrutiny: they make sense of toxicity by questioning the promise of prosperity that the industrial development and resulting modernity offered. The youngest generation, who grew amid persistent environmental degradation, creates a narrative of pollution as a given dimension of everyday life and one that calls forth community cohesion. By highlighting these intergenerational narratives and their ongoing renegotiations, we shed light on how wellbeing and care are assembled, reworked, and contested over time. In doing so, this paper contributes to more heterogeneous understandings of environmental justice and the ways communities live through, and make sense of, industrial harm.