Two square meters per second. This is the frenetic pace at which
concrete devours Italian soil. To give you an idea, it is equivalent tobuilding an entire city the size of Milan every year. ---- Consuming
soil does not just mean taking up space. In fact, soil cannot be reduced
to the two-dimensional surface of a piece of land. Soil is the most
important (and ignored) ecosystem on the planet. In just 30 cm, "the
highest living density" is concentrated (Pileri 2024). Sophisticated
symbiosis strategies are in place: cooperative/competitive processes
that, as biologist Lynn Margulis taught us, can transform each
individual's weakness into strength. Contrary to what we might think,
this ecosystem, which is also the largest incubator of CO2, is not only
fragile, but not at all resilient: if it takes centuries to form, a
bulldozer only needs five seconds to destroy it.
Covering the soil with concrete is a crime not only for the territory
and the communities involved, but for the entire planet. Yet soil, as an
ecosystem, is not recognized or protected by law. And the strategies
implemented by governments to limit its consumption are almost inconsistent.
Yet we are still surprised that the Po Valley floods, when we have
transformed the soil into inert and lifeless clay; when we have covered
rivers, not cared for the banks or eliminated the ditches between the
fields (considered useless 'defects'). We are still surprised that a
water bomb (now at home in a boiling Mediterranean), transforms the
Etnea road into a river in flood, when we have transformed the Catania
hinterland into a carpet of concrete where the water can do nothing but
flow. And we would have concreted the craters, if only Etna had not
prevented us.
In soil consumption the protagonist is certainly it, concrete. This
material, like plastic, expresses the profound meaning of modern
capitalism (Jappe 2022): in it we find exploitation, volatility,
obsolescence. If the buildings of the past, according to the Vitruvian
norm, had to respond to criteria of utility, beauty and solidity (the
so-called firmitas), with the cement business we have declined to all
three paradigms: today we continue to cement regardless of real utility
(after all, Capital knows well how to create the commodity first and
then its use value); we force the masses to live in alienating buildings
and suburbs, surrounded by fragile infrastructures. The Morandi bridge
tragically bears witness to this. But we experience it, daily, every
time we cross the motorway colanders. The 'new world' of cement,
inaugurated with the twentieth century, is literally crumbling under our
feet. Taking care of it and maintaining it, after all, would be too
expensive. Much more convenient to pour new concrete on the cracks of
the previous one, in a perverse process that aims for infinity.
Concrete expresses well the violence with which neoliberalism exploits
territories and communities, in perfect harmony with the arrogance of
lobbies and the mafia bourgeoisie. Lobbies that, with the complicity of
the States, continue undisturbed to do business on concrete.
But concrete, precisely by virtue of its versatility, has played and
plays a central role in the process of metamorphosis of society and
urban spaces, inaugurated at the end of the nineteenth century, and
based on the logic of work and productivity. The wide availability of
concrete has allowed for brutal urban interventions. Operations such as
the "disembowelment of San Berillo" or the "sacking of Palermo", with
annexed urban "deportations", would not have been possible without
concrete. And if we look at the international scene, we notice even more
blatant and casual operations: think of China, where real
transformations of territories are taking place, creations of dams and
new cities, with all due respect to the communities that find themselves
overwhelmed by 'progress'. From this point of view, the power of states,
and now with the AI also of Big Tech companies, can look at the world as
a laboratory to design the Huxleyan brave new world: and Gaza represents
the golden opportunity to try the experiment on a large scale.
An entire system of life centered on the mass-man, inserted inside his
cubicle and his car, has been made possible thanks to concreting. The
city - understood as civitas, which includes the community that lives in
it - has been progressively destructured. The collective spaces where
the Politics is exercised or in which "new situations" (Debord) are
created, are now residual. Or, if they still resist, they are
criminalized. If we had left the cities to a Haussman or a Le Corbusier,
they would probably have razed a good part of our historic centers, or
put them under glass cases for tourists. A dystopian scenario that,
after all, we are gradually approaching. The "red zones" do nothing but
continue this process of destruction of the city, through the
criminalization of sociality and marginality, placing the "showcase"
areas of the city under an ideal glass case ("panoptic").
We cannot understand, therefore, the concreting, outside of this
adaptation of life to an industrial process, or rather to its alienation.
But land consumption is not only concrete: the so-called energy
transition also plays its relevant role. If the market wants us to
believe that "renewable" is synonymous with "sustainable", we must not
fall into the trap. As Paolo Pileri points out, renewable does not equal
sustainable. That is: the fact that solar panels use a clean energy
source does not mean that they themselves are "clean" from the point of
view of environmental impact, which we know is anything but low. Not to
mention how we continue to consume land to install panels, when we could
more logically place them on roofs. It has been estimated (ISPRA data)
that the roof surfaces already available would amount to around 90,000
hectares, a surface that, if covered with solar panels, would satisfy
the renewable energy needs foreseen by the Energy and Climate Plan
(PNIEC) for 2030 (Munafò 2023). Unfortunately, companies find it less
expensive to sacrifice virgin land rather than reuse the roofs of public
buildings and warehouses. Demonstrating, once again, that they respond
to a logic aimed solely at immediate profit, which ignores medium and
long-term costs, and passes them on to territories and communities.
The recent agreements signed at COP16 in Rome (which our Minister of the
Environment did not consider it necessary to attend) have solved the
thorniest issue, the financial one. The agreement, defined by some as
"historic", would have the objective of mobilizing funds from the global
North to the South, involving "indigenous populations and local
communities", whose "knowledge, experience and role on the front lines
in the biodiversity crisis" should be recognized (COP/16/L.1/Rev.1).
Laudable intentions, but marked by a financial approach that, already on
the climate issue, has shown its limits. Once again: financing the
energy transition, even in the South, even with the involvement of local
communities, does not necessarily equate to stopping land consumption,
much less to reconstituting ecosystems. We can glimpse, not even so
disguised, the usual greenwashing trap, a model that instead of bringing
back ecological and cultural biodiversity is imposing a new building and
industrial monoculture.
But if today we find ourselves in a situation in which land consumption
and ecocides advance unchecked, we owe it to a certain political and
social posture. One might think that politics is held hostage by
capitalist-mafia lobbies, not to mention that between mafia, politics
and industry there is often no solution of continuity. Let us think of
the shameful reaction of the then mayor of Catania Nino Drago, on the
very day of Fava's funeral: "Enough talking about the mafia in Catania.
Otherwise the knights of labor will leave with their businesses". A
sentence in which we read the same blackmailing approach contained in
the recent words of Meloni, when she warns that opening an investigation
into her risks scaring away Norwegian investment funds.
But would the lobbies, alone, be able to impose concreting on the entire
world? If Capitalism - and the concreting is its emblem - has imposed
itself, and if even today we are unable to have, as a society, as a
politics, as a community, the strength and lucidity to say enough, to
reverse the trend, it is precisely because, deep down, society is
homogeneous to this type of logic. I certainly do not say this to
criminalise the masses, nor to point out illegality. I ask myself
instead: why do we find it so advantageous to adhere to the capitalist
logic? Which includes the exploitation of our time, the house in the
suburbs, the cars, the highway, and everything that this machine-life
requires, for these machine-men like us. Without victimism, we need to
look at why the masses behave this way. And if I look deeply, I find
only homologation and exploitation.
So be careful not to fall into the trap of attributing concreting to
illegality. Of course it is true that this exists and that it represents
a problem, if we consider that almost 45% of new homes in Sicily are
illegal, with constructions that often insist on restricted areas or at
high hydrogeological and seismic risk. But the problem is not so much
illegal building in itself, but the industrial logic that governs our
lives. Suffice it to say that if illegal building is more widespread in
Southern Italy, the most concreted area is Emilia-Romagna, while the one
with the most environmental crimes is Lombardy. It is confusing to look
at land consumption through the lens of illegal building, because it
brings with it the legalistic approach of the State (that State which,
with its amnesties, is complicit in it). It is industry - and the
lifestyle model connected to it - that demands, and obtains, land
consumption, in spite of everything and everyone. Illegal building
should rather be read as a symptom of the times, and placed in the
broader context of the exploitation of the masses.
And I am not using the word "masses" inappropriately: within its
apparently anachronism, which takes us back a century, there lies, in my
opinion, a tragic relevance.
Riccardo Ricceri
https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Geen opmerkingen:
Een reactie posten