Industrial Labour and the Environment

This volume brings the history of the environment together with that of work. Faced with the “great acceleration” of the second half of the twentieth century—characterized by the crisis of the relationship between economic development and civil progress—the history of the environment has tended to separate itself from the history of work. The idea behind this book is to bridge this cultural divide, because human work is one of the main parameters of the anthropic footprint left on ecosystems and social spaces. The dimension of work is—even in a dramatically lacerating form, as shown by the events of environmental and work conflicts in the 21st century—the mirror of the impact that human activities have on the environment.

From a transnational perspective, this book points out some issues of future significance: the impact of production activities on the territory and forms of environmental protection; the fractures that the environmental issue generates in the disputed spaces between groups of workers and local communities; and the problems related to the processes of reclamation and redevelopment of dismantled industrial areas.