WORLD WORLDWIDE ITALY SICILIA News Journal Update - (en) Italy, Sicilia Libertaria 2023 June: Editorial. Eco-anxiety is fought with struggle (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 Fifteen dead, thousands of displaced people, tens of thousands of dead animals,

damage to the territory estimated at around five billion euros: we will long
remember the May flood in Emilia Romagna. Especially if connected to the ongoing
climate crisis, which takes natural phenomena such as rains to extremes, making
them a growing source of eco-anxiety and environmental devastation. Here the
problem is not (only) understanding who is responsible if everything goes down
with every storm or if you can make comparisons with the past, nor even trying to
equip yourself now that the bad weather has become systemic. Because here there
is very little of "natural" left. Given capitalism's responsibilities in creating
the climate crisis for granted, so much so that more and more scientific and
academic communities speak of this as the Capitalocene era, it must become clear
that the fight against global warming is literally vital. There are two keywords
to keep in mind: mitigation and adaptation. In the first case, it is a question
of making the impacts of climate change less serious by preventing or reducing
the emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere: this can be done by
reducing the sources of these gases (for example by increasing the share of
renewable energies or the reduction of the use of fossil fuels) or by enhancing
their storage (for example through the increase in the size of the forests or the
capture of carbon dioxide). As far as adaptation is concerned, on the other hand,
it is a matter of anticipating the adverse effects of climate change by putting
in place adequate measures that can prevent or minimize the damage (for example,
by moving people who live on coastal areas to defend themselves from of sea
level). One does not exclude the other, indeed both solutions must go hand in
hand. So far the concepts are shared by environmental NGOs, the scientific
community and the various United Nations bodies. The difference is in how you
want to achieve those goals. And this is where the first fault is established.
Because even in the climate field, reformism, albeit radical, is the path chosen
by those who are aware of the current crisis. But which reformism is feasible in
the face of a territory like Italy where, according to Ispra data, almost 94% of
Italian municipalities are at risk of hydrogeological instability and subject to
coastal erosion, and over 8 million people live in areas high risk? What kind of
reform is feasible in the face of land consumption, again given by Ispra, which
grows at an average of 19 hectares per day and at a speed exceeding two square
meters per second? A situation that becomes even more disconcerting in Sicily.
Because the island is located in the center of the Mediterranean Sea, defined by
the world's leading climatologists as a "climate hotspot", i.e. a place where the
increase in temperatures and the effects of this increase are more intense than
the global averages. According to a study by the World Meteorological
Organization, in the next five years the world will experience new temperature
records and global warming will probably exceed 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial
levels, a threshold beyond which there could be disastrous knock-on consequences
for the planet potentially irreversible. If it is true that we tend to forget
everything extremely quickly, it is worth remembering what happened in Floridia,
in the province of Syracuse, between 11 August 2021 and 26 January 2022: in the
country there was a thermal shock from record, going from 48.8 degrees in summer
2021 (the highest temperature ever recorded in Europe since instrumental
measurements exist) to the collapse of temperatures to -4.3 degrees below zero.
It all happened in just over five months. With the arrival of El Nino, the
climatic phenomenon of warming of sea waters, Floridia will no longer be the
exception but the standard, and Sicily more than all will have to face heat
waves, droughts and floods in the coming years. This is why the concept of care,
born on the left during the pandemic and then almost immediately set aside, must
be taken up and extended. People will need care, especially the elderly and
peasants; cities and towns will need care, deprived as they are of trees and
water networks; animals will need care, which suffer even more than humans from
high temperatures; ecosystems will need care, increasingly at risk in the name of
progress. Furthermore, like and even more than Covid, the climate crisis is an
accelerator of inequalities. Those with money and power will be able to easily
continue to live in their opulence, without ever suffering nuisances such as lack
of water or the house overwhelmed by a flood.  While the island will have to face
an inevitable increase in migrations, which will increasingly be climatic
migrations. And the usual offensive advice from the news to stay at home during
the hottest hours this summer will be of no use if in the meantime the usual
cement ovens remain in offices and homes. Faced with the inevitability of climate
change, young people are increasingly speaking of eco-anxiety. It is time to
transform this anxiety into a struggle, starting with the territories that suffer
most of all and will have to suffer the effects of a crisis that has been
generated elsewhere, by the ruling classes. As environmental historian Jason W.
Woore argued back in 2017, "capitalism does not have an ecological regime, it is
an ecological regime". In the sense that for some time even nature has been
incorporated into the organizational mechanisms of profit. All this must
therefore be opposed by a climate struggle that can only be anti-capitalist and
supportive.

Andrea Turco

https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
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