A fish cannot do what its neighbor fish can do.

Gilles Deleuze, The Velocities of Thought
Seminar on Spinoza. 9 December 1980

Some say that fishes don’t exist, some say that we all are fishes deep inside us. I am here on my mother island, Sicily, soaking in the Pools of Venus, and I ask myself how I’m feeling, ending up thinking about what I desire. The limits of evolution still mark my body. I am a land animal that would like to become a water mammal promiscuously but does not possess any of the specific cetaceans’ capabilities. I feel a certain admiration in the presence of the knowledge of these existing mammoths, and I dive into the water, mimicking with all my strength a swimming dolphin. But the mimesis enchantment does not last long; today, the current has brought too many microplastics to this West coast; I see two seabreams sifting through a white plastic bag degrading on the seabed. I take a breath and pick it up, resurfacing to tear it from the sea, even though I am genuinely in the position of someone trying to empty it with a teaspoon. It’s late August, and the high season is about to end; I tell the two seabreams as well as myself. I leave the beach thinking we should do away with mass tourism and return to my research.

I asked PubMed for data on the environmental impact of tourism in the Mediterranean Sea, and the most up-to-date answer is this: tourism is the largest producer of waste that infests the Mediterranean islands.

In The generation of marine litter in Mediterranean island beaches as an effect of tourism and its mitigation, Michaël Grelaud and Patrizia Ziveri explain that the Mediterranean absorbs a third of world tourism every year, thus being severely damaged by the pollution this industry brings with it. The research shows that during the high season in the Mediterranean’s islands, the population multiplies up to 20 times and that between June and August, on the excessively busy tourist beaches, an average of 330 pieces of waste per 1,000 m2 accumulate per day (5.7 times more than in the low season). The data that most impress me, however, are the following: tourism produces 80% of the waste that accumulates on the beaches of the Mediterranean islands in the summer, of which 94% is made up of plastic¹. Add to this the plastic coming from coastal activities such as fishing and navigation: in the Mediterranean every year, it is as if 229 thousand tons of plastic are dumped², which end up straight in the bellies of the fish that some sapiens love to eat. Many people, however, do not seem to care; perhaps they do not believe it because they do not see the plastic in their grouper fillets. Maybe they don’t know yet that plastic has also ended up in mammals’ wombs, in their placentas, to be exact?

Cyborg mammals, in and out of water, have plastic stomachs that make their lives disposable. Our cetacean cousins in all the seas, barely escaped fishing, are guarding human landfills in their entrails until the point of dying. While for humans, we have to prove that plastic kills with clinical studies and primary data, we just have to look at the inside of a sperm whale to understand the urgency of the situation. Without running with our mind to remote places, to Australian bays unknown to us, it was in the Tyrrhenian Sea that our re/productive system killed Siso.

I want Siso’s clicks to be still audible, but I can only try to make his story resonate from the sea to the mainland. If you stop for a while and start to eavesdrop, you might hear Siso whispering:

I didn’t know I had to eat plastic for breakfast
nor that an illegal fishnet
could entangle my tail fin.

Siso is the sperm whale from which we are taking notes so as not to end up composting in plastic bellies. I am not a ventriloquist who makes him speak. Siso spoke his language very well, and some human people could understand him and tried, unfortunately in vain, to help him. Sperm whales talk in rhyme, judging by how they make clicks in their coda³, and certainly in the Mediterranean, other marine mammals have heard Siso not surviving.

I do not fear anthropomorphizing, which I intend here as the possibility of redistributing the capacities of self-determination to non-human living beings. I do not anthropomorphize Siso in recognizing and naming his intellectual, affective, and relational capacities, his desire for endurance, quite the opposite: I am redistributing faculties that some men have improperly ascribed solely to themselves, at least since Aristotle denied to “nature” the possibility of giving purposes to itself autonomously. Massive philosophical efforts have been made over centuries to establish a difference of (and in) substance, from Aristotle the primacy of human reason has taken on supremacist tones through Descartes, Kant, Hegel. An example above all is Kant’s Critique of Judgement, where men are considered the only beings endowed with intellect and therefore capable of a culture that makes them “master of nature”. With these Kantian words in mind, it is not difficult to understand why, until the 1980s, industrialized humans could not understand and respect the culture of marine mammals. Today, their sexual and reproductive culture turns out to be of interest to us in several aspects.

Female sperm whales, for instance, do not form families based on monogamous heterosexual couples; these female mammals stay alone with their offspring and only meet males for mating (sharing partners). Whitehead and Rendell have defined sperm whale culture as a “culture of mothers”⁴. Still, I suggest it would be more appropriate to define it as a “culture of aunts” and promiscuous kinship since each female helps the other in the task of raising and protecting the young of the group. Of course, until they separate because, I hypothesize, perhaps autonomy is as valuable to them as the mutual care they have been able to show for decades.

I repeat, we should not fear the risk of anthropomorphization, that is precisely how things work, sperm whales do deliberately attack and sink whaling ships to protect their kin⁵. I embrace Bennett’s political-philosophical positioning here, and with her, I believe that “A touch of anthropomorphism, then, can catalyze a sensibility that finds a world filled not with ontologically distinct categories of beings (subjects and objects) but with variously composed materialities that form confederations”⁶.

If there is something like anthropomorphism in these pages, the direction of its use is undoubtedly that of a conscious attempt “to counter the narcissism of humans in charge of the world”⁷. I feel in charge of what happened to Siso: who among us hasn’t at least once in our lives had a basil plant in a plastic pot?

I emit my coda, a rhyme of denunciation and pain for Siso and all the mammals killed by “sapiens’ capitalism”:

In Siso’s belly black
plastic bags of the kind used for garbage gathering
in the bags in Siso’s belly
plastic pots of the kind used for seedlings

Siso ate our waste, which poisoned him, while an illegal fishnet made it impossible to swim and procure the correct nourishment, while underwater noise pollution contributed to disorienting it. Confused and diseased, he arrived at the Pools of Venus in Capo Milazzo, not yet exhausted, young, and determined to stay alive, and he agreed to be brought back to the open sea where, however, he was not able to keep up with the currents that dragged him drained to Milazzo. It was the summer of 2017, and Carmelo Isgrò, together with Carolyn Berger and many other activists, decided that in some way, Siso had to rest in Milazzo, a modest witness of a development model that kills us, feeding off its discarded. It is out of doubt that for his death, Siso would have preferred the slow descent on the seabed and the progressive becoming of his carcass, firstly marine compost and then an entire ecosystem. But the biologist Isgrò did not make a mistake when he considered grouping a museum around Siso because MuMa⁸ is a non-museum that does not intend to add trouble to troubles. Siso died with plastics in his belly and will not live forever as it is right to be; he will become compost because, by choice of the museum’s direction, it has not been plasticized. His bones were cleaned in the same water where he died and were not immersed in any oil derivative with the gift of eternal life. Siso will disappear and the plastic will not, the pot found inside will most likely outlive him and this non-museum wants to make us face this awareness: our artifacts continue to cause damage beyond the space-times of our lives. Crossing the museum, we pass from the belly of the sperm whale to the plastic room where, among illegal fishnets and bottle caps, we understand better that we drown every day in the sea of plastic where Siso died and that we force too many other critters, our kin, to try to stay afloat.

Once again, I am not anthropomorphizing here: Siso’s fins contain bones that remind us how related we are because that’s how things work. And if we pause to admire them, we see bones of human hands. I like to think that we are close to recognizing the truth: cetaceans would be at the top if there were an ontological-evolutionary hierarchy among mammals. Rebecca Giggs lovingly reminds us that anatomically, modern humans began to emerge in the Middle Paleolithic about 200,000 years ago, but cetaceans are fifty million years old. Thus, looking inside a whale, we should not see waste but plenty of life; as Giggs stated, inside the whales, we should see the hippopotamus, the dog, the marsh chordate, and even ourselves⁹, not our long-lasting discarded.

 

Since they are also very long-lived, marine mammals retain waste within them that are indicators of the techno-economic changes of homo sapiens. In particular, whales, even bicentennial, retain the impact of capitalism in their flesh, testifying to its historical articulation up to the era of agribusiness and large-scale distribution.

They eat toxic species of phytoplankton developed due to intensive agriculture waste; in the Mediterranean, they still die today poisoned by PCBs that, despite having been declared illegal in the 1980s, are so resistant that they have entered ecosystems by packing themselves into cetaceans’ blubber (PCBs are polychlorinated biphenyls, the molecules used in lamps and refrigerants, transformers and electrical capacitors since 1930 when Monsanto began producing them commercially).

Our re/productive system is distressing because it never shuts down; no night is not illuminated by hyperproduction, and there is no longer any product that does not become a plastic belly¹⁰. Due to a cross-species geopolitical short circuit that tells us a lot about the era in which we live, Siso died of plastic right in Milazzo, where a refinery with a very high environmental impact is still in operation today. And who knows if the sperm whales have told each other how and why men killed cetaceans in the past? Who knows if Siso was told that PCBs are a bitter and cynical retaliation of chemistry and that too many of his distant kin died for that thing we call the industrial revolution to happen. In fact, chemists initially obtained PCBs by isolating them from the gases emitted by whale oil. This happened when whales were a global product and a proto-energy industry: their fat was extracted to fuel the final phases of the Industrial Revolution¹¹.

The era in which sapiens failed to set a limit to growth shines with the light generated by the death of our cetacean cousins. Fat for lighting or food for the population, cetaceans have allowed us to reproduce, and today that their fishing has noticeably decreased thanks to the struggles of animal rights activists¹², we kill them without even knowing that we are doing it, we kill them from the past, in a space-time short circuit in which the key-players are chemical compounds released into the seas more than half a century ago as much as today’s mass tourism industry.

At this level, the question of responsibility cannot be asked to the individual person and perhaps not even at present. And more than on philosophy, here I draw on environmental criminology: if it is a crime to kill a whale by fishing it, how is killing a sperm whale with a plastic pot configured?

If we take data seriously, we could rightly consider an ecocide what we have been making cetaceans experience at least since the 18th century. Due to our exploitation, since the appearance of modern humans, the population of marine mammals has decreased fivefold¹³. Today, there is an entire field of studies called Climate Change Criminology, which intends to “construct from a criminological point of view the actions (or omissions) that are at the basis of global warming as a specific type of crime”¹⁴. Well, by killing a cetacean, we are indeed committing an action that worsens global warming, a crime against the planet. Sperm whales, particularly giant marine mammals, significantly determine the composition of atmospheric gases. Killing a sperm whale is like burning a forest. Without living sperm whales, we could say goodbye to plankton blooms caused by their excrement, and with increasingly more sperm whales killed and, therefore, beached, we can say goodbye to that magnificent ecosystem that flourishes when a sperm whale dies by falling to the bottom of the sea. Every cetacean we take from the sea by hunting it or causing it to beach with toxic waste is equivalent to two more tons of carbon in the atmosphere: exactly the amount a sperm whale can store under the sea and that we will take 2,000 years to dispose of¹⁵.

In the language of environmental criminology, we would say that Siso is not the only one to have been damaged. Entire ecosystems are compromised by a human responsibility that is shared, yes, but in an asymmetric way that reflects the asymmetries of power relations between human subjectivities themselves. Not that I would be relieved of something like the institution of an international ecocide commission, but I am not even among those who expect ecocide to be recognized as an international crime. However, I am interested in stopping those who pollute in the name of profit. I wish for compensatory and transformative justice, regenerative and redistributive. Multispecies justice¹⁶ is not punitive, in part because we are caught in the tight meshes of capitalism to such extent that responsibilities must be sought carefully. To the extent that we do not organize collective paths that can self-manage re/production, we are also responsible. Still, certainly, ENI or the 100 companies that exploit the oceans have more responsibilities than all others since they earn exorbitant sums. Even those who drafted the Ocean 100 report think so: if the hundred “giants” of the seas, among which Saudi Aramco, Petrobras, Exxon Mobile, Total and Eni are at the top of the list, are a “power capable of generating revenues of over 1.1 thousand billion dollars”, they are the ones who must stop drilling, extracting oil and overfishing. A possible com/pensatory-regenerative-redistributive-transformative justice should include not only compensation for damages to the devastated communities but also and above all, an active commitment to the defossilization-deplasticization-decarbonization of re/productive systems.

When I emerge from the water on the East coast, the first “thing” I see is the refinery, now in my eyes a patch of black smoke with many points of lights and one that burns, generating more fire than all the others, the fire that should be here only of Vulcano and Etna and that we have lit always to remain lit in the meshes of capital. It has been there since I can remember this sea, since the mid-eighties, it has been one of the too many forges of global warming, now owned by ENI and Kuwait¹⁷. These oil processing plants destroy the health of all coastal critters and the marine ecosystem as a whole, of which we are also a part. If there is an “excess of PAHs in the dust sampled in Milazzo”, not only in the case of accidents and related fires, ENI and Kuwait are responsible for that. PAHs (Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons) can be carcinogenic because they reach the blood and tissues through breathing¹⁸. Not only for PAHs, Milazzo is also included in the Italian SIN (contaminated sites of national interest). Unfortunately, it exceeds the limit values of any indicator, whether it is air quality, aquifers pollution, or sea microplastics. It could not be otherwise if we follow the summary made by the Ministry of the Environment. In fact, here “there is an industrial hub (active since the 1960s) that hosts various types of production facilities, such as: oil refining (Refinery); electricity production (Edipower former Enel power plant, Milazzo former Sondel thermal power plant); steel industry (Duferco Travi e Profilati S.p.A.); production of electrical equipment (ETS); storage of household appliances (Messinambiente S.p.A. plant), asbestos processing, an activity now completely decommissioned (former Sacelit now Punto Industria), as well as various oil product depots and industrial waste dumps“¹⁹.

While reading these scientific reports, I feel a rage that turns into salty tears for all my human and cetacean mammalian kinship. Plastic killed Siso here in Milazzo, but in these lands, there is a tangible ecocide underway that has too many different instigators.

Because my kin doesn’t count cancers and heart attacks, because of my mother and my godmothers’ breast and uterine cancers, because of my sisters’ endometriosis, because I grew up comfortable with superstitious statements like “which cancer will I die of?”, concern based, I learn from Sentieri 2023 report, on an intuition that has become statistics: between Milazzo and Pace del Mela there is an excess of mortality for circulatory system diseases, ischemic diseases of the heart and urinary tract; people are born with more congenital anomalies, especially of the reproductive systems and limbs. Respiratory diseases have a very high incidence, and marine aerosol alone is insufficient to compensate. Inflammatory states are the norm in the Lands of Fires. I continue to read the Sentieri report and learn that chronic renal failure, prostate cancer, and breast cancer are all linked to PCBs and benzene. For this, we have to thank The Land of Mordor, the refinery, as we call it here.

And, as if that were not enough, we must also deal with the long shadow of asbestos and cement because here, Sacelit in Pace del Mela caused the death of 150 people out of 220 workers²⁰. When industrial hyper-production makes us ill with cancer, what paths open up for treatment if not those of the struggles of the resistant communities that demand the closure of these plants²¹? I refuse the path of the industrial techno-scientific system, the same one that killed Siso with plastic and that kills us with work, and that today shows interest in whales because it discovers that they are almost immune to the tumors that it causes in other mammals²².

I must take a break from these reports of our late-capitalist misfortunes and remember the patience and dedication with which marine mammals breathe because the rhythm of my heartbeat increases, and I begin to gasp when my pain and diseases and those of the people I love come up.

I pause to recognize in this pain a political passion because it is a political fact that my father survived his chronic kidney and lung diseases, but too many others did not. It is a political fact that my mother in Messina and Naples’ public hospitals suffered only obstetric violence, that in order to heal, she had to go into debt, and that many others could not even attempt the path of debt. It is a political fact that I had the first colic that pinned me to bed for months at 16 and that today, between endometriosis and periodontitis I live a toxic body in poisoned lands.

Messina, like Caserta, and Naples, like Milazzo, are full of toxic bios that demand justice²³. Biographies that are not only terrestrial and not only human for which it is urgent to be response-able²⁴. It is urgent to learn ways to leave our mammalian cousins free to conspire at sea to heal together with them from the diseases of extractive capitalism. Ilenia Iengo writes this: “Mending anti-extractivist futures involves coalitions, in which marginal bodies-territories identify and resist the violence inscribed in normative ideologies of desirable, productive, and natural”²⁵.

I continue to walk accusing my inflammatory states and my problems in my lower limbs, my legs and feet that sometimes accompany me and sometimes not. Today is a good day because my right knee is holding up so I look away from the refinery and I turn towards the West coast. I glimpse the castle where MuMa is located, I get dressed and climb the steps that take me back to Siso. Here we breathe PCBs while we smell the sweet notes of lobularia maritima and the pungent ones of sulfur and silicon, here at every step I make a wish: that iodine may erode extractive capitalism, that marine mammals may teach us how to breathe together. It is a desire that, as the bacterial-viral symbiont that I am, I hope will become contagious, I hope it can move us to fight against the sixth mass extinction, against global warming and the consequent acidification of waters: the desire to live well on this Earth together.

The text is extracted from the book of Angela Balzano Eva Virale. La vita oltre i confini di genere, specie e nazione, (Meltemi, Milano 2024) and it was translated by the author.

About the author: Angela Balzano is professor at the Department of Cultures, Politics and Society (University of Turin). She is also coordinator and lecturer, together with Ilaria Santoemma, of the science course at the Master in Gender Studies and Politics of University of Roma 3. She is the author of two books for Meltemi Press: Per farla finita con la famiglia. Dall'aborto alle parentele postumane (2021) and Eva virale. La vita oltre i confini di genere, specie e nazione (2024). Her research focuses on reproductive justice and rights for human and more than human subjectivities. She is the Italian translator of many cyberfeminist, posthumanist and neo-materialist authors, including Donna Haraway, Jane Bennett, Rosi Braidotti and Francesca Ferrando.

Footnotes
1:  M. Grelaud, P. Ziveri, The Generation of Marine Litter in Mediterranean Island Beaches as an Effect of Tourism and Its Mitigation, in “Sci Rep”, vol. 10, 2020, 20326.

2: J. Boucher, G. Billard, The Mediterranean: Mare plasticum, IUCN, Gland, Switzerland 2020.

3: Sperm whales are in constant sound contact with each other, they communicate identity, needs, affections, dangers with accents and tempos that differ from family to family. Codas are their codes of presentation and introduction to the conversation; they are particular rhythmic compositions of clicks with different meanings.

4: H. Whitehead, L. Rendell, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 2015.

5: Melville, in writing Moby Dick, was inspired by the events of the whaler Essex which in 1820 went as far as the Pacific to hunt for whales: on that occasion not only did a sperm whale escape being killed but it deliberately decided to return, four days after the attack of sailors, to repeatedly hit the ship until it sank.

6: J. Bennett, Vibrant Matter. A Political Ecology of Things, Duke University Press, Durham and London 2010, p. 99.

7: Ivi, p. xvi.

8: https://www.mumamilazzo.com/site/?page_id=1378&lang=en

9: R. Giggs, Fathoms: the World in the Whale, Scribe Publications, London 2020.

10: To learn more on our Wasteocene, see M. Armiero, Wasteocene: Stories from the Global Dump, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2021.

11: R. Giggs, Fathoms: the World in the Whale, Scribe Publications, London 2020.

12: The international fishing ban, which came only in 1986 after twenty years of animal rights struggles, was decreed by the International Whaling Commission (IWC), the international organization for the conservation and management of whale stocks, established in 1946 by the International Convention on the Regulation of Whaling. However, from 1986 to today, Japan, Norway, Iceland, Russia, Korea and fishing industries in various locations have continued to kill them, leading to the disappearance of a total of 21,760 whales, as estimated by the IWC. https://iwc.int/en/

13: R. Giggs, Fathoms: the World in the Whale, Scribe Publications, London 2020.

14: R. Altopiedi, I crimini ambientali, in T. Pitch (edited by), Devianza e questione criminale. Temi, problemi e prospettive, Carocci, Roma 2022.

15: T.J. Lavery, B. Roudnew, J. Seymour, J.G. Mitchell, V. Smetacek, S. Nicol, Whales Sustain Fisheries: Blue Whales Stimulate Primary Production in the Southern Ocean, in “Mar Mam Sci”, vol. 30, 2014, pp. 888-904.

16: To learn more on multispecies justice: S. Chao, K. Bolender, E. Kirksey, The Promise of Multispecies Justice, Duke University Press, Durham and London 2022.

17: Opened in the 1960s, decommissioned and then returned into operation in 1982, the refinery caused seven deaths in the 1993 fire and, despite the trial started after the last fire in 2014, it is still in operation.

18: D. Grechi, A. Biggeri, Deposizione di idrocarburi policiclici aromatici nell’area a rischio di Milazzo-Valle del Mela a seguito dell’incendio in una raffineria di petrolio, in “Epichange”, 40, n. 1, jen-feb 2016.

19: https://bonifichesiticontaminati.mite.gov.it/sin-53/

20: Sacelit has been called “the factory of death” here in Messina. Quotidiano Sanità keeps count of the deaths it has caused: https://qds.it/13341-amianto-centocinquantesimo-operaio-sacelit-morto-asbestosi-htm/

21: There have been many struggles here, of various kinds. From the struggles for the rights to health and safety at work of the refinery workforce and its related industries, to the struggles of the people who would like to see the refinery closed and dismantled or at least reconverted. For those who want to learn more about the history and conflicts in the Milazzo area, see: A.F. Ravenda, Family Frictions. Workers, Health and Conflicts in a Sicilian Industrial Area, in “Archivio Antropologico Mediterraneo”, Year XXIII, n. 22 (1), 2020, https://journals. openedition.org/aam/2724?lang=it; P. Saitta, Oil and Fear. Populations, Space and Other Economy in the Sicilian Risk Areas, Aracne, Rome 2010.

22: D. Tejada-Martinez, J.P. de Magalhães, J.C. Opazo, Positive Selection and Gene Duplications in Tumour Suppressor Genes Reveal Clues about How Cetaceans Resist Cancer, in “Proc Biol Sci”, vol. 288, n. 1945, 24 February 2021.

23: Toxic Bios is a project of “activists who have been working for environmental and climate justice for twenty years”, “an independent, radical, horizontal, feminist ecological organization” that investigates “the causes of environmental crises”: https://asud.net/chi-siamo/

24: The concept of response-ability has been coined by Haraway (D. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Duke University Press, Durham 2016). In Hofman words: “Haraway calls for cultivating response-ability for multispecies flourishing on a damaged earth. Being paradoxically both an ontological and ethico-political notion, response-ability is something that many multispecies critters do (thus being ontological, already there) that yet needs cultivation (which makes it an ethico-political call), especially by the human animals that can read her work”. L.B. Hofman, Immanent obligations of response: articulating everyday response-abilities through care, in “Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory”, 2023, p. 3.

25: I. Iengo, Endometriosis and Environmental Violence: An Embodied, Situated Ecopolitics from the Land of Fires in Campania, Italy, in “Environmental Humanities”, vol. 14, n. 2, 2022, pp. 341-360.