Paper short abstract:

The paper discusses "noxious deindustrialization" through a comparative study of the bays of Bizkaia (Spain) and Guanabara (Brazil). By analyzing oral history interviews, we establish the parameters to map out social-political conflicts, inequalities, and environmental violence from 1975 to 2020.

Paper long abstract:

Noxious deindustrialization, as proposed by Feltrin, Mah, and Brown (2022) affects local ecosystems and societies as a unique experience - and yet it is also a planetary experience, shared by workers and their networks of social and biophysical relationships around the world. Bay areas are particularly sensitive to these processes as they are gateways between their hinterland basins and the oceans – which have been at once the favored dump for industrial effluents and the waterways for global trade. By selecting the metropolitan region of Rio de Janeiro, which includes Guanabara Bay, and the metropolitan region of Bilbao, which extends to the Bay of Bizkaia, areas of peripheral industrialization and deindustrialization in the Great Acceleration, we propose to understand deindustrialization from this dual perspective, local and global. We analyze oral history interviews with subjects involved in noxious deindustrialization in Guanabara and Bizkaia in the last 40 years, such as activists, workers, and public servants, and we suggest tentative parameters to map out social-political conflicts, inequalities, and environmental violence. To do so, we privilege the study of the voices of those individuals more directly involved and/or affected by these processes, in a contribution to the use of oral history for environmental history and for the study of deindustrialization worldwide.