Translation of the article on La Repubblica http://www.repubblica.it/cronaca/2013/11/25/news/terra_fuochi_saviano-71865994/

 

Land of fire, who has burn the felix Campania

THE STORY of the most dramatic suicide taken place in the Mediterranean countries, namely the elimination of a large part of the first fruits of agriculture in favor of the illegal economy of waste, for few days has seemed of interest to the national media and politics.

Suddenly the theme of the poisoning of the land in Campania went through the national debate, the banner with the word " biocide " appeared in photos, websites, news, and was able to provoke outrage, fear, and promises of change. Many talk about the Land of fire, but few know what it really means. In recent weeks, an image of a document has circulated on the net, dating back to the 1980s, drawn from the section of the Communist Party of Casal di Principe. This document was denounced as was happening the poisoning of the land, the end forever of the felix Campania. We already knew it all. That's why when Carmine Schiavone in 1997 said that the inhabitants of the Land of fire "would all be dead over twenty years," he was wrong: they were already dead, civilly dead.

It has been years that I, along with others, have been telling the story of the Land of fire, which over time has come to engulf entire communities, increasingly extending its borders. Since Peppe Ruggiero of the enviromental organization Legambiente used this suggestive expression, so far from Land of fire described by Magellan. As the Portuguese explorer saw fires on the coast from the sea, so those traveling on Highway 7a Terra di Lavoro (from Nola to Villa Literno ) or the Asse Mediano, if they divert the attention from the asphalt see all around smoke rising from the ground and lowering the window feel a burning smell in my throat, leaving a sour taste.  A smell that they cannot get used to.

How could this happen? How was it possible to dump so much toxic waste that is difficult if not impossible to extract from the ground? Is there "legal” way ? For thirty years, many companies in the north of Italy have outsourced - and unfortunately still do - the disposals of their hazardous waste to specialized companies, apparently legal, that can make huge discounts: making the difference between survival or failure, especially in an economic situation like this. It is a clear dynamic: is this not the time in which the industrialised countries declare of not being able to observe the constraints imposed by the Kyoto Protocol? Just think, for example, as the Italian stakeholders (i.e. the mediators between industry and waste companies) have succeeded, in 2004, to ensure that 800 tons of hydrocarbons from contaminated land, owned by a chemical company, were treated at a price of 25 cents a kilo, including shipping . A saving of 80 percent on ordinary prices. The companies that in this way get rid of the produced waste are guilty, of course, but at the same time legally protected because the companies that provide disposal service give legal documentation. Then, the dirty game begins with the sending of shipping notes proving that the cycle is apparently respected. The second step of the shipping notes takes place in the storage centers. The owners make sure to collect the special waste which, in many cases, is mixed with ordinary waste, diluting the concentration of toxic and declassifying following the EWC (European Waste Catalgue) the danger of poisons.

And then there is the criminal the way. The illegal disposal by combustion fires: burning tires, burning clothes, all sorts of plastic, copper wires burned to get rid of the sheath, burning all sorts of rubbish, special and ordinary. It is the crazy shortcut taken by those who want to avoid high disposal costs. The burning decreases the mass of the waste and then the ashes are mixed with the soil. These lands are considered simply spaces, spaces to fill, spaces on which to earn. It happens often, when traveling in this part of the country, to see parking areas full of garbage. The most immediate thought and the furthest from reality, is to think that people from Campania are uncivilized because instead of differentiating their garbage instead of throwing it in the bin just below the house, they take the trouble to load it onto the car and leave it in the street in order to give yet another humiliating spectacle of themselves and of their land. It is not so. Those parking areas are space, square meters to dump in. All this is the exact opposite of what it seems. It is not incivility. It is crime, or an organized form of income. By summing the area of ​​ the parking areas of Caserta and Naples, littered with trash, you would reach the extension of a big dump. And this is also the sign of the end stage of the disaster. The waste is no longer identifiable, circumscribed: the waste has pervaded our lives. It advances, it almost skims over us or overwhelm us, as has already happened in the city of Naples a few years ago.

But how could such a situation be reached? Why have these precious lands for cultivation have become graveyard for waste? Tomatoes, broccolis, zucchinis, chicories, cauliflowers, beans, peppers. And then oranges, tangerines, apples, pears. Large retailers began to pay farmers of Campania less and less for all these products. The ris, if they had not agreed to lower prices, was that they would be purchased abroad to Lebanon, Greece, and Spain. And so falls the barrier: agriculture ceases to be the primary source of income for farmers who often give or rent a portion of their land to companies, or more often, their intermediaries for illegal waste dumps. With those gains they go ahead and keep some crop, misled by assurances that the wastes do not cause damage. Soon it emerges that it is not like that. That they are often toxic substances, rotting entire harvests.

A question cannot be avoided. Who are those responsible for this environmental and human disaster? I believe that personifying the evil is an unnecessary artifice, when there is the presence of such a sequence of works, omissions, silences and determination to ignore what was happening. The smell was always there, and for the new born has become normal, as the parking areas of the state highways have become makeshift landfills. Those silences, those omissions and sometimes those works have been made by the middle class of Campania, Naples and Caserta in particular. The disaster has created a secondary economic activity, supported by the policy of emergency. And then there are the political responsibilities, beyond the judicial ones. Only if we accept this, then we can go back to those who, elected by plebiscite, represented the power in Campania in recent years. Two personalities stand out in this scenario of death: Antonio Bassolino and Nicola Cosentino . The first is fresh from a full acquittal outcome of the trial that was supposed to trace any liability related to the disaster of the waste cycle in Campania. The second is currently on trial, even with regard to the events of the group Eco4: the network of co- management of the waste cycle which has formed the backbone of the democratic subvertion, which led to the waste of public resources, has produced huge profits for organised crime and undermines a normality in waste management in a way difficult to repair. The groups were governed by a system of associated power.

The center-left and center-right groups have always been allies. For the enormity of this evidence the weight looming over the Prosecutor's Office of Naples is huge: the failure of a process that lasted years can be a devastating boomerang. The attempt to punish political responsibilities with the instrument of the criminal trial, may have two terrible consequences: on the one hand, the inability to focus on the real criminal liability if there would be any, and second, the risk of turning the acquittal to the outcome of the process in an acquittal even from political responsibilities. That is what happened with Antonio Bassolino, whose acquittal in court does not clear, however, the responsibility that he has had as a politician in allowing that all degenerated to this point.

What are the prospects? What to do? What is certain is that we should definitely think outside - even linguistically, before taking action - the logic of emergency, which in southern Italy and Campania in particular has become culture. It is the time of study and analyses: it is the time to call to offer alternatives to the disaster to those young and not so young people excluded from this inherently criminal southern society. A key role should be taken by the mayors. The story of Vincenzo Cennamo, mayor of Camigliano , in the province of Caserta , for example, should teach everyone that the solution is already there and should only come out. Opposed by the system of groups, Cenname resisted, backed by his fellow citizens, and has been able to organise the disposal in total autonomy and it works. Today, it is imperatively necessary to carry out a scientific calculation of the polluted areas with the introduction of the ban on agricultural production for the same and, on the other hand, the provision of incentives for non-agricultural products (such as bioethanol) . This proposal, in its reasonable pragmatism, comes from the need to associate with each area a precise value, since not all areas have been exploited in the same way, not all have the same degree of pollution. Not all of them show evidence of the same substances and not all in the same quantities. It is evident that some lands are totally compromised, while others can be reclaimed and recovered for agriculture with less restrictive and therefore less expensive interventions.

The damage of these days, which adds to the devastation of pollution and discomfort that accompanies the constant thought of the lack of a decent future, is that everything seems poisoned. That all products from Campania are considered contaminated from the mozzarella with the apples, strawberries and tomatoes. Everything is given up, compromised. To save the agricultural economy of Campania is no longer sufficiently simply to trace the chain of a product, add the label "organic" and give it a semblance of a healthy product. Now the communication must necessarily be made ​​in a different way, it should not be left room for doubt. The label should say explicitly that the product comes from unpolluted soil or healthy land. It must contain the address of a website on which you can check the state of that particular land through analysis. Whenever a generalisation on agricultural products from Campania is made, or even if "this product does not come from Campania” will be seen in the stores, this will help the economy of Camorra: in what way? The  agricultural products of Campania becoming unsalable enter the illegal market. The poisoned products are mixed with healthy ones and mobsters will bring them in the fruit and vegetable markets who - as the investigations of the DDA on the Funds and Milan have shown - were often infiltrated thanks to the power of the clans. Those products are highly sought clandestinely from wholesalers because they can be bought at very low price and  resold as products of the north at the high prices with the label “not produced in Campania"

Agricultural land, grazing lands, lands of tourist destination, land of beauty, systematically poisoned under the sun, under the eyes of all. Under the eyes of those left helpless in a country where you are now convinced that it is impossible to reform things. What remains is the cowardly pleasure of wanting to break down thinking about a new and wonderful world that will never come. And in the name of this world the daily is becoming an unlivable hell. This mechanism is well described by Robert Musil: " That  unspeakable pleasure (that many of us have, I add) that is to see the good bending down and be destroyed with amazing ease ."

THE STORY of the most dramatic suicide taken place in the Mediterranean countries, namely the elimination of a large part of the first fruits of agriculture in favor of the illegal economy of waste, for few days has seemed of interest to the national media and politics.

Suddenly the theme of the poisoning of the land in Campania went through the national debate, the banner with the word " biocide " appeared in photos, websites, news, and was able to provoke outrage, fear, and promises of change. Many talk about the Land of fire, but few know what it really means. In recent weeks, an image of a document has circulated on the net, dating back to the 1980s, drawn from the section of the Communist Party of Casal di Principe. This document was denounced as was happening the poisoning of the land, the end forever of the felix Campania. We already knew it all. That's why when Carmine Schiavone in 1997 said that the inhabitants of the Land of fire "would all be dead over twenty years," he was wrong: they were already dead, civilly dead.

It has been years that I, along with others, have been telling the story of the Land of fire, which over time has come to engulf entire communities, increasingly extending its borders. Since Peppe Ruggiero of the enviromental organization Legambiente used this suggestive expression, so far from Land of fire described by Magellan. As the Portuguese explorer saw fires on the coast from the sea, so those traveling on Highway 7a Terra di Lavoro (from Nola to Villa Literno ) or the Asse Mediano, if they divert the attention from the asphalt see all around smoke rising from the ground and lowering the window feel a burning smell in my throat, leaving a sour taste.  A smell that they cannot get used to.

How could this happen? How was it possible to dump so much toxic waste that is difficult if not impossible to extract from the ground? Is there "legal” way ? For thirty years, many companies in the north of Italy have outsourced - and unfortunately still do - the disposals of their hazardous waste to specialized companies, apparently legal, that can make huge discounts: making the difference between survival or failure, especially in an economic situation like this. It is a clear dynamic: is this not the time in which the industrialised countries declare of not being able to observe the constraints imposed by the Kyoto Protocol? Just think, for example, as the Italian stakeholders (i.e. the mediators between industry and waste companies) have succeeded, in 2004, to ensure that 800 tons of hydrocarbons from contaminated land, owned by a chemical company, were treated at a price of 25 cents a kilo, including shipping . A saving of 80 percent on ordinary prices. The companies that in this way get rid of the produced waste are guilty, of course, but at the same time legally protected because the companies that provide disposal service give legal documentation. Then, the dirty game begins with the sending of shipping notes proving that the cycle is apparently respected. The second step of the shipping notes takes place in the storage centers. The owners make sure to collect the special waste which, in many cases, is mixed with ordinary waste, diluting the concentration of toxic and declassifying following the EWC (European Waste Catalgue) the danger of poisons.

And then there is the criminal the way. The illegal disposal by combustion fires: burning tires, burning clothes, all sorts of plastic, copper wires burned to get rid of the sheath, burning all sorts of rubbish, special and ordinary. It is the crazy shortcut taken by those who want to avoid high disposal costs. The burning decreases the mass of the waste and then the ashes are mixed with the soil. These lands are considered simply spaces, spaces to fill, spaces on which to earn. It happens often, when traveling in this part of the country, to see parking areas full of garbage. The most immediate thought and the furthest from reality, is to think that people from Campania are uncivilized because instead of differentiating their garbage instead of throwing it in the bin just below the house, they take the trouble to load it onto the car and leave it in the street in order to give yet another humiliating spectacle of themselves and of their land. It is not so. Those parking areas are space, square meters to dump in. All this is the exact opposite of what it seems. It is not incivility. It is crime, or an organized form of income. By summing the area of ​​ the parking areas of Caserta and Naples, littered with trash, you would reach the extension of a big dump. And this is also the sign of the end stage of the disaster. The waste is no longer identifiable, circumscribed: the waste has pervaded our lives. It advances, it almost skims over us or overwhelm us, as has already happened in the city of Naples a few years ago.

But how could such a situation be reached? Why have these precious lands for cultivation have become graveyard for waste? Tomatoes, broccolis, zucchinis, chicories, cauliflowers, beans, peppers. And then oranges, tangerines, apples, pears. Large retailers began to pay farmers of Campania less and less for all these products. The ris, if they had not agreed to lower prices, was that they would be purchased abroad to Lebanon, Greece, and Spain. And so falls the barrier: agriculture ceases to be the primary source of income for farmers who often give or rent a portion of their land to companies, or more often, their intermediaries for illegal waste dumps. With those gains they go ahead and keep some crop, misled by assurances that the wastes do not cause damage. Soon it emerges that it is not like that. That they are often toxic substances, rotting entire harvests.

A question cannot be avoided. Who are those responsible for this environmental and human disaster? I believe that personifying the evil is an unnecessary artifice, when there is the presence of such a sequence of works, omissions, silences and determination to ignore what was happening. The smell was always there, and for the new born has become normal, as the parking areas of the state highways have become makeshift landfills. Those silences, those omissions and sometimes those works have been made by the middle class of Campania, Naples and Caserta in particular. The disaster has created a secondary economic activity, supported by the policy of emergency. And then there are the political responsibilities, beyond the judicial ones. Only if we accept this, then we can go back to those who, elected by plebiscite, represented the power in Campania in recent years. Two personalities stand out in this scenario of death: Antonio Bassolino and Nicola Cosentino . The first is fresh from a full acquittal outcome of the trial that was supposed to trace any liability related to the disaster of the waste cycle in Campania. The second is currently on trial, even with regard to the events of the group Eco4: the network of co- management of the waste cycle which has formed the backbone of the democratic subvertion, which led to the waste of public resources, has produced huge profits for organised crime and undermines a normality in waste management in a way difficult to repair. The groups were governed by a system of associated power.

The center-left and center-right groups have always been allies. For the enormity of this evidence the weight looming over the Prosecutor's Office of Naples is huge: the failure of a process that lasted years can be a devastating boomerang. The attempt to punish political responsibilities with the instrument of the criminal trial, may have two terrible consequences: on the one hand, the inability to focus on the real criminal liability if there would be any, and second, the risk of turning the acquittal to the outcome of the process in an acquittal even from political responsibilities. That is what happened with Antonio Bassolino, whose acquittal in court does not clear, however, the responsibility that he has had as a politician in allowing that all degenerated to this point.

What are the prospects? What to do? What is certain is that we should definitely think outside - even linguistically, before taking action - the logic of emergency, which in southern Italy and Campania in particular has become culture. It is the time of study and analyses: it is the time to call to offer alternatives to the disaster to those young and not so young people excluded from this inherently criminal southern society. A key role should be taken by the mayors. The story of Vincenzo Cennamo, mayor of Camigliano , in the province of Caserta , for example, should teach everyone that the solution is already there and should only come out. Opposed by the system of groups, Cenname resisted, backed by his fellow citizens, and has been able to organise the disposal in total autonomy and it works. Today, it is imperatively necessary to carry out a scientific calculation of the polluted areas with the introduction of the ban on agricultural production for the same and, on the other hand, the provision of incentives for non-agricultural products (such as bioethanol) . This proposal, in its reasonable pragmatism, comes from the need to associate with each area a precise value, since not all areas have been exploited in the same way, not all have the same degree of pollution. Not all of them show evidence of the same substances and not all in the same quantities. It is evident that some lands are totally compromised, while others can be reclaimed and recovered for agriculture with less restrictive and therefore less expensive interventions.
The damage of these days, which adds to the devastation of pollution and discomfort that accompanies the constant thought of the lack of a decent future, is that everything seems poisoned. That all products from Campania are considered contaminated from the mozzarella with the apples, strawberries and tomatoes. Everything is given up, compromised. To save the agricultural economy of Campania is no longer sufficiently simply to trace the chain of a product, add the label "organic" and give it a semblance of a healthy product. Now the communication must necessarily be made ​​in a different way, it should not be left room for doubt. The label should say explicitly that the product comes from unpolluted soil or healthy land. It must contain the address of a website on which you can check the state of that particular land through analysis. Whenever a generalisation on agricultural products from Campania is made, or even if "this product does not come from Campania” will be seen in the stores, this will help the economy of Camorra: in what way? The  agricultural products of Campania becoming unsalable enter the illegal market. The poisoned products are mixed with healthy ones and mobsters will bring them in the fruit and vegetable markets who - as the investigations of the DDA on the Funds and Milan have shown - were often infiltrated thanks to the power of the clans. Those products are highly sought clandestinely from wholesalers because they can be bought at very low price and  resold as products of the north at the high prices with the label “not produced in Campania"
Agricultural land, grazing lands, lands of tourist destination, land of beauty, systematically poisoned under the sun, under the eyes of all. Under the eyes of those left helpless in a country where you are now convinced that it is impossible to reform things. What remains is the cowardly pleasure of wanting to break down thinking about a new and wonderful world that will never come. And in the name of this world the daily is becoming an unlivable hell. This mechanism is well described by Robert Musil: " That  unspeakable pleasure (that many of us have, I add) that is to see the good bending down and be destroyed with amazing ease ."