Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), and are common by-products of
incineration.
Denmark's Development Minister, Poul Nielsen, denied that his
country was seeking to impose incinerators on Mozambique, but activ-
ists found this claim suspect, given that Danida had funded a failed
incinerator in India in 1986, and because Denmark was considering
fi nancial support for garbage incinerators in Zimbabwe and Tanzania in
1998, the year the confl ict in Mozambique ignited (“SA Dumping Plan
'Trashed' by NYC” 1998).
Coalition activists consistently called for the pesticide incineration
project to be halted, for the pesticides to be exported to a global North
nation, for the wastes to be disposed of using nontoxic nonincineration
technology, and for all the costs to be borne by the companies that pro-
duced the chemicals in the fi rst place (“Mozambique Activists Win Huge
Victory” 2000). And although Livaningo activists were only recently
beginning civil society organizing on EJ issues, they were familiar with
the problem of environmental injustice, since this was something that
has been widespread in the region. Anabela Lemos remarked: “In South
Africa, always the dumping sites are near the poor people. And we have
a waste dump here in the city and there is a concentration of poor people
there, so it's the same thing here. The poor, they always get the waste”
(Lemos 2004).
Thus, this transnational coalition of environmental justice activists
clearly articulated their opposition to Danida's use of local Mozambican
ecosystems and communities as waste repositories. Activists channeled
these grievances into a vision of environmental justice that communi-
cated an articulation of the symbolic, cultural, and political dimensions
of ecosystems—that is, a viewpoint that challenged the dominant
perspective of nature as a site of resource extraction and a place for
dumping effl uence. Thus, they were deeply engaged in disrupting the
social relations that produced environmental injustice in their commu-
nity and sought new relations of accountability locally, nationally, and
transnationally.
The Boomerang in Motion
After two years of campaigning, Livaningo had its fi rst major break-
through. The Mozambican government agreed to a “return to sender”
arrangement and allowed the chemicals to be shipped to a global North
nation—the Netherlands—for processing and disposal by hazardous
