Fossil Regions on the Edge of Industrial Decline: Possible Kin Perspectives from the Energy Transition Margins

Film still from “Gente del Po” (1947), directed by Michelangelo Antonioni; flooded rice fields with power plant near Sannazzaro de Burgondi, Lomellina (Italy); aerial view of ENI oil refinery of Sannazzaro de’ Burgondi blurred with surrounding settlements; emerging urban skylines at bottom. Artwork: Colnate Group, 2024 (cc by nc).
Artwork: Colnate Group, 2024 (cc by nc).

The boundaries between city and country are blurred in the Po Valley. In just half a century, since the 1960s, the region has transformed from a shrinking agricultural economy, characterized by mechanized labor, mass emigration, and marginalization, to an industrial center and major hub in the fossil fuel energy system, only to end up at the onset of industrial decline and become the site of a ‘green transition.’ Looking through the lens of loss can help trigger a cognitive shift in thinking about environmental and energy systems, argues Cecilia Pasini in her “Kin City” article.

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Since I was a child, I have lived in the countryside, a vast plain that stretches as far as the eye can see in an area called Lomellina in northern Italy. Coming from a rural area, I was always expected to tell stories about natural landscapes, untouched forests, rivers, and fresh air. However, coming from the Po Valley, this is not the case, as industrial agriculture has transformed the area into a system for the extraction of human and non-human resources. Among the characteristics that are considered profitable are the open spaces that the plain offers and the ever-decreasing population of the area, which has been decreasing since the 1950s. The latter phenomenon is due to a combination of socio-economic difficulties, the lure of the city, and rapid urbanization. However, if people are leaving the area in search of better urban living conditions, the physical and socio-environmental conditions of the valley have attracted the localization of industries, along with the remaining population in search of employment.

In this context, the Po Valley, and in particular the Lomellina, experienced a complementary functional division of roles with the cities, as part of an interconnected system and metabolic extension of planetary urbanization (Brenner, Schmid, 2014), where the ontological division between urban and rural was (and still is) blurred. Among the industries established in the plain is the ENI oil refinery of Sannazzaro de’ Burgondi. Built in the early 1960s as a critical intersection of the Central European oil pipeline route and part of Italy’s so-called golden era as Europe’s refinery (Mazzaferro, 2021), it is still in operation today. It functions, but in a context of significant structural changes, at the time of an energy transition that is pushing fossil fuels to the margins of the global energy system, following a division of functions that creates and sustains industrialized areas of ecological sacrifice.

Energy transition and the creation of new marginalities

The establishment of the industrial plant in Lomellina was welcomed in the 1960s as a possible solution to the socio-economic problems of the area, particularly unemployment, poor working conditions, and a broader economic and demographic crisis. But over the years, the discursive and material impetus that characterized the first phase of the refinery’s development has slowed down. In 2021, the local manager of the plant announced a reduction in staff. A local newspaper ran the headline: “Green transition hits ENI. Stop idle plants. Risk of 100 redundancies.” Since then, the workforce has been reduced by about 140 people, while parts of the plant have been closed with no prospect of reopening. After a period in which Lomellina played an important role as part of the fossil fuel-based energy system, the energy transition now signals an impending industrial decline for the area, pushing it towards a new form of marginalization.

In just half a century, the region has gone from a declining agricultural economy in the 1960s, characterized by mechanized labor and mass emigration leading to marginalization, to an industrial center and key hub in the fossil fuel energy system, only to experience re-marginalization with the onset of industrial decline. The energy transition therefore comes at a significant cost to this area, which continues to bear the social and environmental burdens of its fossil fuel production. These areas will also have to pay high prices for the decarbonization of their economies as “left-behind regions” (Thomas, 2022) in the global system.

Recognizing the deindustrialization effects of the energy transition allows us to focus on what is left behind by the decline of a particular energy-industrial system. Nevertheless, the transformation of this system is still underway; a slow process that does not amount to complete decommissioning, which means that what separates us from fossil production takes the form of a “jagged, asynchronous, and contradictory line” (Benadusi et al., 2021).

Fossil regions as late and noxious industrial sacrifice zones

Areas like the Lomellina were partially abandoned by agriculture in the 1960s, when farmers ceded their land to ENI for the construction and expansion of the industrial plant. Now that the company’s land consumption is complete, the industrial presence is evident in the landscape, as well as in the material organization, representations, and identity construction of the territory. The plant is functioning, but with compromised production and labor power, indicating the beginning of its decline. This can be defined as a phase that is not yet post-industrial, as it has not outgrown the industry, but “late industrial” (Fortun, 2012; Benadusi et al., 2021).

Industry is in a form of decline here, but remains important both in terms of spatial organization and territorial ecology. Areas such as those described have also paid, and continue to pay, the environmental costs of production. The constant concern throughout the economic history of Lomellina has been the spectre of unemployment and, more specifically, the fear that the loss of its industrial role will lead to a further increase in local unemployment. This logic refers to the idea of environmental blackmail, whereby ecological costs are to be borne for the sake of – hoped-for – economic benefits. However, we should ask ourselves: is there really a trade-off between environmental costs and economic benefits? Rather, it seems to be a case of noxious deindustrialization (Feltrin et al., 2022), in which industry loses its economic and employment centrality, but retains its negative impacts on the environment, society, landscape, and spatial organization.

Wearing the lens of loss in fossil deindustrializing areas

How we manage what remains of manufacturing and industry is crucial. The industrial legacy of the region is often contradictory: on the one hand, there is a strong connection between industry and local communities; on the other hand, local communities are often aware of the costs that the industrial presence has imposed on them. Moving beyond the industrial vocation of regions now marginalized in the energy transition requires acknowledging the sense of loss that this shift can bring. To be in this sense of loss, to consider it without avoiding it, is an exercise that Rebecca Elliott proposes to us: “Loss is [an] ambivalent outcome. Although, I will argue, it does not necessarily imply pessimism or catastrophism, where sustainability is often mobilized as an overtly normative project of harmony and holism, the identification of ‘win-wins,’ the reproduction of a certain kind of status quo, and the voluntarism of enlightened actors. [Sociology] can highlight contradictions: what is lost so that other things can be maintained? And it can imagine deeper transformative visions: what might take the place of what is lost” (Elliott, 2018).

The insistence on the inevitability of energy transition and the imperative of sustainability distracts from the fundamental question that Rebecca Elliott poses: “What is being lost so that other things can be sustained?” (Elliott, 2018). It is essential to grasp the materiality of loss, to see the realization of its ruins, to think about and accept loss in order to interpret the processes behind industrial decline. It is also necessary to elaborate a politics of loss that focuses on the exposure to loss and marginalization, and to act with the awareness that the current socio-economic and cultural models must be overcome, but that this overcoming also has consequences.

What counter-hegemonic perspectives are emerging from the margins of transition?

Fossil industrial regions in the energy transition era are marginal places in relation to the transformative centrality of the eco-restructuring transition. This margin, as bell hooks described it, is not a safe place, but a place where the sense of threat and uncertainty is destabilizing (1998), a space of “friction” (Tsing, 2005). Questioning what becomes marginal in this transition allows one to step out of the objects of study at the center of the debate and to critically examine the energy issue, where the demand for transition has become the dominant driving force. This marginality, however, remains to be deconstructed and explored if we consider the fossil industry as a past that does not pass; a force that maintains its centrality in the energy system, albeit neglected and misunderstood.

Starting from the undoubtedly problematic aspects arising from the management of the toxic remnants of industry from an ecological and socio-economic point of view, we can try to adopt a proactive attitude that takes seriously bell hooks’ suggestion that we perceive the margins as those places that allow a “spatially strategic perspective for the production of a counter-hegemonic discourse” (1998). At the same time, Rebecca Elliott’s call to consider the driving force of materiality and the politics of loss (2018) allows us to conceptualize the present without shying away from environmental and industrial decline. The perspective of the energy transition as a win-win situation, where growth is potentially unlimited, loses substance. Looking through the lens of loss can help initiate a cognitive rethinking of ecological and energy systems, leading to a deeper understanding of the global and complex metabolic entanglements in which industrial fossil regions are embedded.

Editor’s note: The bibliography of the article is listed here.

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