NoMOSE and recent environmental history in Venice

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New article “NoMOSE: Contested Flood Barriers in Venice, Italy"
—> https://www.environmentandsociety.org/arcadia/nomose-contested-flood-barriers-venice-italy

The MOSE panels at dawn, with the Dolomites present in the background. A rare sight captured by resident Paola Juris, who said, “I heard the bora blowing in Venice at 5:30 and knew the barrier would be raised. I imagined that from Lido the mountains would be visible behind MOSE. It was true, and I ran desperately to the vaporetto, making the last trek on foot because there wasn’t an early bus. I went alone through the blackberry brambles and pine trees while the sun was rising. And I guessed correctly, the visibility with that type of wind was perfect. It was two degrees Celsius.”

——— 

A few months into my research in Venice I got introduced to one of the grandfathers of the NoMOSE campaign, which back in the early 2000s was the main organized voice against massive lagoon engineering. Stefano Micheletti graciously sat down with me on a park bench in Sant’Elena and narrated the story while looking over the very waters where twenty years earlier a line of boats and banners had denounced the ceremonial beginning of the project.

Micheletti told me about the existence of a folder of (physical) clippings hidden in the recesses of one of the main activist spaces in the city. I went to retrieve it and sifted through his archive, although I soon realized that it overlapped strongly with many (digital) clippings stored in a facebook page run by the group Laguna Ambiente Archivio.

‘Recent’ environmental histories are more squirrelly than ‘old’ ones. Living memory and emergent landscape changes — two facets of a natureculture text’s ongoing morphology — interfere with definitive conclusions. Writing contemporary environmental history requires dancing with ambiguity, though this does not mean that an interpretation cannot take a position.

Doing recent environmental history around NoMOSE, I found myself empathizing with the activists, despite having elsewhere brought to light the nuance around their claims: namely that MOSE workers and some politicians also find themselves in cramped spaces, unable to effect livable futures because of narrow national ideas about what ‘safeguarding’ the future means. Tacking back and forth across multiple perspectives is a practice of living with ambiguity, and telling one history does not mean that tomorrow’s telling will square exactly with today’s. Shared ideas of justice and futurity emerge in the overlapping space.

I’m super pleased to have worked with the online peer-reviewed journal Arcadia to bring this brief environmental history of NoMOSE to a wider audience. The short format was an exercise in pulling out key points of this recent history while also including enough details to paint a picture of a lively moment in Venetian activism (and lagoon politics more broadly). Many thanks to the editors and to my contacts on the ground, Stefano Micheletti and Paola Juris, for their generosity in sharing materials and stories. 

Full article here:

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