Starting from ethnographic reports articulated in the long run, the book deals with the intertwining of environmental ways, right to health and social struggles for change in Brindisi, a city with a high industrial density and with important health problems. Anthropological research carried out in this field shows how the networks of causation between processes of contamination and protection of the environment, between industrial pollution and the usion of diseases, are inscribed within fields of forces that are at the same time scientific, political and legal crossed by the tensions between public institutions, industrial companies and movements for environmental justice. These are real laboratories with laboratories in which the stakes are on a sort of new citizenship that on the one hand de nisce and quanti cation of the biological damage in itto to territories and people, on the other hand indicates possibilities for sustainable development conveyed by delicate dynamics of identity that also affect the processes of patrimonialization of local cultural and natural heritage.