A-Infos (en) Italy, Sicilia Libertaria #462 - SICILIAN RESERVES IN FLAMES (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

The signal is unmistakable. This summer's targeted and carefully planned 
attack on Sicily's main and most sensitive protected areas carries a 
political meaning that goes far beyond mere criminality. You do not set 
fire with impunity to the Zingaro reserve, Capodarso, Mount Cofano, the 
cork-oak woods of Santo Pietro and Niscemi, the oases of Torre Salsa and 
Vendicari, the Cava Grande del Cassibile, and substantial portions of 
Etna Park without intending to insult and undermine - in addition to the 
priceless natural heritage they preserve - what they represent: the 
fruit of years of grassroots mobilization to wrest them from speculation 
and private rent, from public inertia, from interested neglect, in order 
to protect, enhance, and hand them over - as a common, free good - to 
the community.

Zingaro, in particular, is the emblem of a hard-fought, widely supported 
struggle that culminated in the great popular march of 18 May 1980 
which, by halting construction of the coastal road and the associated 
real-estate speculation, forced the Sicilian Region to establish the 
first Sicilian nature reserve there.

On 18 May this year, the 45th anniversary of that event was marked with 
a commemorative march and various other initiatives, including bringing 
the ashes of Franco Russo - a pioneer of Sicilian environmentalism, who 
had died a few days earlier - into the reserve. "Ash upon ash," one 
might say today, as practically nothing remains of the vegetation (or 
the animals): on 25 and 26 July it was set alight from about ten 
ignition points, in the evening hours and with a strong sirocco wind, 
completely destroying 1,300 of its 1,600 hectares - areas that, 
according to experts, biodiversity, endemics, and rare species will find 
hard to recolonize.

Some blame the fires on criminal and business groups in the area who for 
decades have carved up, unhindered, the lands adjacent to the reserve, 
installing hundreds of illegal villas, mega tourist villages, and 
devastating marble quarries. Truth be told, if 18 May 1980 was 
undoubtedly a victory for a bottom-up movement defending Sicily's 
natural environment, it was soon overshadowed by a nefarious pact with 
dubious figures struck by local administrations to exploit the 
surrounding territories. They would have little interest in drawing 
attention to their dealings unless... their reference politicians 
guaranteed them some payoff: for example, by reducing the size and 
number of existing reserves, re-perimetering them - regularizing illegal 
buildings -, liberalizing access (especially for hunters) and tourist 
licenses, and privatizing the residual green land. All of which feature 
in the programs of our local center-right.

The public prosecutor of Trapani - who as a matter of course has opened 
an investigation that will end in nothing, like others in the past (no 
surprise: when it comes to fires, this is the rule everywhere) - does 
not even venture to imagine that speculators and mafiosi might be behind 
the blazes; instead, he hypothesizes that implausible novices are 
responsible for breaching the prefect's rules and the mayors' 
ordinances, who in turn would have been incapable of enforcing the bans; 
while the spread of the flames would have been facilitated by the apathy 
of the reserve's managing body - the Forestry Corps - explicitly accused 
of neglect and lack of maintenance.

On the other side of the island, the Niscemi cork-oak wood - for whose 
protection the "No Muos" movement has worked so hard - has likewise been 
reduced in recent days to a spectral landscape of smoking skeletons. The 
ridiculous reaches its peak here because those acting as guarantors of 
the woodland's safety were the very same U.S. military who have invaded 
it and partly compromised it with their antennas of death. It was, as 
the call to the demonstration held on 2 August in Contrada Ulmo 
reiterated, "one of the most guarded and controlled natural areas" in 
Italy! And yet it burned. Probably, behind this apparent paradox lies a 
precise will: to rid themselves once and for all of the cork forest - an 
annoying presence that has objectively hindered, and still hinders, the 
"free hand" the Americans would like to have in that territory, and 
which political and social forces, national and local, have long 
intended to grant them.

"The cork-oak fire broke out on 24 July, in the middle of the season," 
the "No Muos" statement notes - "not in April or May, when the necessary 
precautions had not yet been taken. What care and defense measures for 
the land and forests were implemented by the Forestry Corps and the 
Municipality? Why did they fail? Who is keeping the truth quiet?"

In Niscemi as in Zingaro, the main scapegoats remain the forestry 
workers. It matters little that they owe to the regional politicos their 
meager numbers, their inefficiencies, bureaucratization, the fact of 
being left without aerial firefighting means (only two Canadeir 
available on the whole island!), being strangely distracted at the very 
moment the fires broke out (despite previous years' "warning fires"), or 
reduced to demanding an odious toll at the entrance to allow them - as a 
tourist leaflet reads - "to properly carry out the work of protecting 
the reserve and of prevention as well as of extinguishing fires" (sic!)

Blaming the forestry workers serves to cover the true - political - 
matrix of this summer's fires in Sicily's reserves. It is evident they 
are the work of individuals and groups who profoundly hate environmental 
policies, which in recent years have found in the reserves (one is 
tempted to say, "Indian" reserves) their last refuge - or of exponents 
of more or less organized crime inspired and perhaps prodded to 
interpret brutally, in their own way, the climate-change "denialist" 
message spread by the right in power in Sicily and the rest of Italy.

"Friends" of the Meloni-aligned right, this vile rabble practices with 
impunity the violation and reduction to ashes of the sanctuaries of 
Sicilian nature. It must be opposed politically and without 
half-measures - not by delegating the struggle to collusive or 
deliberately weakened bodies, but by organizing autonomous intervention 
groups independent of the State, to relaunch environmental action across 
the territories with the most radical program possible: multiplying the 
commons to be protected - including in cities; restoring sites 
disfigured by illegal building and abandonment; extending and exporting 
outside the reserves the protection regime that applies (or should 
apply) within them; establishing new reserves (at Zingaro, for example, 
the marine area that was slated for restoration on the eve of the fire); 
openly denouncing the malfeasance concealed behind the "denialism" of 
right-wing governments.

Natale Musarra

https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
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