What does pollution do to the people who live near the areas where it is emitted? Forced cohabitation with potentially toxic chemical residues is a source of great stress and unrest, but it does not prevent people from becoming attached to the areas concerned. This cohabitation also encourages the deployment of tactics for living with danger, forged by local residents on the basis of their perceptions and experiential knowledge. Through a series of original surveys conducted in France, for example in the Gulf of Fos, but also in Spain and Portugal, the author analyses the daily experiences of people living near polluting plants. She looks at the social and ecological consequences of chronic contamination and the changes in practices that are supposed to contain them. She also identifies avenues for collective recovery, arguing that the hybridization of expert and lay knowledge, via experiments in participatory metrology, could make it possible to define more attentive and precautionary ways of apprehending environmental and health risks. Foreword by Florian Charvolin, Reasecrh directof at CNRS, Lyon (France) Afterword by Philippe Chamaret, Director of the Institut écocitoyen pour la connaissance des pollutions de Fos-sur-Mer (France)