ABSTRACT
In 2016, in the midst of economic crisis and austerity politics, the valley of the Ave river in Northern Portugal experienced a series of floods that evicted thousands from their homes and washed large amounts of illegally dumped toxins into the land and rivers. Drawing on 21 months of ethnographic research, this chapter explores the coming together of austerity and disaster from the perspective of the working-class households most affected by the floods. I argue that in order for the disaster and its effects to be adequately conceptualised empirically and analytically, their occurrence needs to be placed in a historical longue durée of industrial expansion, uneven infrastructural distribution and classed risk discrimination. This argument is undergirded by a threefold elaboration: i) the inequality of suffering environmental degradation, ii) the power politics dominating disaster narratives, and iii) the ways working-class people define and devise a subaltern vision of an ecologically sound future. I conclude with revisiting the floods as the moment of crisis, when working class ecological interest entered the arena of public and political opinion.
