The book Case Study: Anhovo: Between Asbestos, Waste, Development, and Health Crisis by environmental activist and our long-standing guiding colleague Jasmina Jerant represents one of the most comprehensive analyses of an environmental conflict in the Slovenian context. The local story of an industrial plant in the Middle Soča Valley is unfolded as an analytical lens through which the fundamental patterns of modernity become visible: the entanglement of industrial development, political power, scientific expertise, and the everyday lives of people who have lived for decades in the shadow of the former three.
Jerant does not treat the Anhovo case as an isolated phenomenon or an anomaly, but rather as a paradigmatic situation reflecting the logic of imposed industrialization characteristic not only of the twentieth but also of the twenty-first century. Asbestos—initially framed as a symbol of progress, safety, and economic growth—is gradually revealed as a material trace of the structural neglect of health and the environment, and of the systematic marginalization of community well-being. In this sense, it is significant that the author approaches asbestos and, later, waste incineration not merely as hazardous substances, but as symbolic carriers of social meaning: as embodiments of the modern promise of progress for all—a promise that has proven not only deeply ambivalent, but ultimately unrealizable.
The imaginative style and structure of the chapters allow the history of the Anhovo case to be read not as a dry sequence of technical decisions, but as a process of political and economic compromises that are as painful as they are revealing. A particular strength of the book lies in its demonstration of the continuity of industrial logic across political regimes, from real socialism to post-socialist capitalism. In doing so, Case Study: Anhovo transcends the often simplistic division between past and present systems and draws attention to the structural persistence of modern development models that frame environmental risk as acceptable collateral damage. The structural contradictions of modernity, the book makes clear, are resolved on the backs of the most vulnerable—regardless of the symbolic insignia worn by the repressive apparatus.
One of the book’s central focal points is the inescapable question of the protracted crisis: a persistent, silent, stretched-out, and slow crisis—both environmental and health-related—that does not manifest itself through spectacular disasters capable of attracting television cameras or social-media algorithms. On the contrary, it consists of long-term consequences that are largely uninteresting to the media, slowly unfolding and hovering over the community like a centuries-old fog. Jerant enables readers to connect the Slovenian case to contemporary international debates in environmental studies, which highlight the unequal distribution of risk between elites and the general population, as well as the ways in which the temporal and spatial dispersion of environmental problems contributes to their ineffective resolution. In Anhovo, this takes the form of intergenerational consequences: long-term health burdens affecting individuals and the healthcare system for decades, alongside a persistent sense of uncertainty that indefinitely shapes the local community.
The book also merits special attention for its unflinching examination of the often problematic relationship between expert knowledge and political decision-making. The project of modern science does not emerge as particularly robust in Case Study: Anhovo. Jerant’s work places Slovenia on the map of numerous pressing cases of distrust towards science as a key modern social institution. While she does not reject scientific expertise as such, she clearly demonstrates how the field of knowledge is far from autonomous—how it can be instrumentalized, relativized, or even silenced when it threatens dominant economic interests.
In this context, civil society plays a crucial role. Environmental activism, local resistance, and civic engagement are not portrayed as marginal phenomena, but as necessary counterweights to asymmetries of power. Jerant shows how prolonged struggles foster the emergence of political subjectivity within a community long treated primarily as a labor force or a statistical unit. Anhovo thus becomes a site where questions of environment, health, and democracy converge into a shared political struggle—for human rights and for survival.
Although the author remains appropriately cautious in drawing definitive conclusions, her work retains strong activist vitality. The analysis does not however offer simple solutions or moralizing judgments; instead, it insists on the complexity of the problem. This openness positions the reader as an active subject rather than a passive observer, inviting—and even compelling—reflection on one’s own embeddedness within a system that produces both material prosperity and unevenly distributed risk.
From a comparative perspective, the book stands confidently alongside international studies of industrial environmental conflicts. Its distinctive contribution lies in its synthesis of philosophical reflection and meticulous local analysis. Rather than mechanically applying global theoretical frameworks to a local setting, Jerant develops broader questions about humanity’s understanding of development and the future from a concrete case situated within a specific Slovenian context—one to which the author is also biographically connected. Case Study: Anhovo should therefore be understood as a significant contribution to Slovenian and European environmental humanities: a work that opens a critical space for reflecting on the price society is willing to pay for development, and on which segments of society are ultimately made to pay it.
Text by Gregor Bulc
Cover image by Niksy