Wheat no longer grows in Sicily... Lake Pergusa, the only natural
reservoir on the island, has disappeared... In Sicily farmers forced tocut citrus fruit plants... Sicilian farmers forced to cull livestock...
Water rationed for over a million people: emergency in Sicily...
Drought, there is an alarm in Sicily: only 25% of water in the
reservoirs... Sicilian agriculture risks disaster due to the continuing
drought.
These are just some of the newspaper headlines that have been chasing us
daily for a few months as we hope that the emergency will disappear as
it appeared: suddenly. Yet the unheard appeals of scientists who, for
decades, had predicted what is happening have been and are repeated. Now
that the effects of the climate crisis are starting to become evident
and forcing changes in our habits, perhaps we will find time to reflect
on how and why we got to this point. Moreover, the causes and multiple
consequences of the events whose scope comes to our attention are well
documented.
What remains most in the shadows is our way of thinking and feeling,
what leads us to consider life as a linear path that leads us from the
past to the present in an unstoppable progress, unstoppable even when it
leads us towards an abyss. But to justify total inertia in the face of
such serious problems, the typically human tendency to remove everything
that could negatively alter our present is not enough, nor can blind
trust in powerful and modern technological means capable, according to
many, of solve every problem with some new discovery. At the bottom of
everything I believe there is the desire to sever the link with the
natural environment in which we live, that stepmother nature that man
with his intelligence has imagined he can subject to his own interests.
Interests which, far from belonging to everyone, become more and more of
a few with each passing day, or rather very few: around 1%. So we have
forgotten the law of restitution: what is taken from nature to become
food for plants, animals and humans must be returned to nature under
penalty of the impossibility of obtaining other fruits in the future. We
did this by inventing synthetic fertilizers, the great discovery of the
green revolution, which however in the long run dry out the soil which,
poor in humus from organic decomposition, is no longer able to retain
water or bear fruit. Already a decade ago it was estimated that 30% of
the arable land surface had become unproductive, today we are talking
about 52% of soil in degraded conditions, a percentage which rises to
60-70% in Europe.
In the same way we have removed the importance of forests and tree cover
in general which, in addition to being producers of oxygen and habitat
for numerous different species, create that humid microclimate which
favors precipitation; they also actively remove CO2 from the atmosphere,
transforming it into organic substance with a process, part of the
carbon cycle, at the basis of life on earth. We have therefore remained
inert in the face of the recent rush of those who, in the name of
presumed safety, cut down as many trees as possible not only in the
cities but also along the roads or in the villages, while it would have
been enough to plan a minimum of maintenance to solve the problem of
damage caused by trees uprooted due to the intensification of extreme
climate events. And to those who defend themselves by saying that for
every tree removed another will be planted, we must remember that trees
do not grow in a day or even in a year and then those who assure us that
the planted tree will be able to grow, in an environment that every day
by day it becomes more hostile.
But we have done the greatest removal by transforming an essential need,
that of nourishment, into a commodity to be produced and exchanged for a
profit. Agriculture has thus become an agri-food industry and even if
only 30% of the food consumed comes from large-scale industrial
cultivation, the fairy tale continues to be bandied about that wealth
and food are guaranteed by capital. Silencing the fact that industrial
food production consumes 75% of the earth's resources, costs hidden by
the fact that the damage to health and the environment and what needs to
be spent on the production of fossil fuels and pesticides are not taken
into account. The assumption that the ecological destruction of the
natural environment is essential to feed a world whose population is
continuously increasing is, moreover, contradicted by the data which
tell us that poverty is increasing, while the availability of food is in
continuous decrease above all due to its illogical distribution, based
on treaties modeled on the profit needs of agri-food multinationals. Not
to mention the fact that even those who have enough food are unable to
introduce the necessary nutrients due to the poor quality of industrial
food, a condition that favors the prosperity of the food supplement
industry, which in Italy alone has a turnover of around 4 .5 billion
euros. To this we must add the increase in diseases such as cancer, and
their appearance in increasingly younger sections of the population, due
to the consumption of processed foods rich in chemical contaminants
absorbed during the production chain. What can we say then about those
farmers who, by cultivating small plots of land, produce around 70% of
the food: they try to resist an increasingly hostile environment both
due to the altered climatic conditions and the scant consideration given
to their knowledge branded as antiquated and outdated, but above all due
to the pressures exerted by a global market that reduces them to starvation.
Are we sure that all this suits us? Are we sure we don't want to do
anything to change it, even if it is leading us to self-destruction?
What if we instead began to consider life as a network where present,
future and past intertwine and where we need to find new affinities with
everything, living or non-living, that surrounds us? The possibility of
reversing the trend exists, it is up to us to believe in it and start
practicing it.
Brunella Missorici
https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
_________________________________________
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