During the night of January 1 to 2, 2019, the MSC Zoe, one of the world’s largest cargo ships, lost a staggering 342 shipping containers in the sea. Many of these containers, while en route from the south of Portugal to northern Germany, washed ashore on the Dutch islands of the Wadden Sea—an intertidal zone in the southeastern part of the North Sea—already hours after the spill. As a result, inhabitants of the Wadden Islands started witnessing the debris from some of the lost containers gradually washing up on the shore early the next morning: flat screens, Ikea furniture, all sorts of plastics, and many children’s toys were found by the hundreds of people who immediately volunteered to clean the Northern beaches. As the MSC Zoe container disaster deeply affected the symbiotic relationship between islanders and the Wadden landscape, it forged new relations of intimacy between material (plastic) waste, humans, and their surroundings.

By engaging with the MSC Zoe container disaster, this chapter explores the emerging intimacies in a landscape where humans exist in co-constitutive relationships with their ecologically damaged surroundings. Human responses to such newly damaged surroundings that are produced by projects of modernity, in this case that of intermodal infrastructure, open up new reflections on the intimate effects and affects that these projects have on human lives and the ecologies in which they find themselves intertwined. Such ecological intimacies are what the anthropologist Kath Weston tracks in her book Animate Planet, where she details new types of intimacies between humans and the animate environment. These “eco-intimacies” are emerging at a time in which the “high-tech ecologically damaged world” that humans have made is simultaneously remaking them. Building on Weston’s interpretative frame for reading the human entanglements with animate materiality in a high-tech world, I ask: how did the people of the Wadden Islands make visceral sense of the container spill that essentially led to their ecologically damaged surroundings? What happened, moreover, when the functional invisibility that is so typical to cargo shipping infrastructures suddenly turned highly perceptive and entered human life?

My purpose here is not so much to focus on the political embeddedness of the MSC Zoe accident, but rather in taking the contemporary fascination with ecologically infused intimacies worthy to study in its own right.