And the bill arrives.
When a natural type disaster arrives in Italy, a complaint always arises such as "but it's the most powerful earthquake in the galaxy in the last million years", "but it's 150 mm of rain, the heaviest rain in the radius of 2000 light years”, always forgetting the same fact.
What is forgotten is the concept of "mitigation": the same phenomenon can cause disasters, let's say from 10 to 100, then we have to go and see if it causes 100, or causes 10. The position that reality assumes, in spectrum of possible consequences, is the measure of what is called "mitigation" of risks.
It means that if you behave well, extreme rain does damage, let's say, 50, while if you behave badly you get the whole 100. It's a spectrum.
I know Emilia Romagna well. I grew up with it. And I know how to think, that is, from greedy little shopkeepers.
I could tell a couple of episodes, just to give you an idea of how to think:
- One fine day, a row of cottages is built. The usual useless villas, hideous to the eye, pretentious due to free architectural elements (arches, columns, fake towers, etc.). In the land opposite, also due to an agricultural ditch, a kind of grove grows, small, there may be about thirty trees. What do we do? You shoot them down. Even if they are on the ground of others. Why'? Because they make pollen, and if they make pollen then those with allergies don't buy houses.
- When I was young, on the highways we passed on a scooter in a cool place. Two rows of plane trees, on either side of the road, formed a kind of tunnel which, because of the shade, was cool. The streets looked something like this, almost all of them:
What happened? It happened that today only one historic road still has plane trees, and it is debated, because it happens that being a straight road on Saturday night, it goes 160 km/h, and when you crash into a plane tree at this speed , the airbag doesn't change anything: you leave your legs on the seat, rip out the airbag and exit through the windshield with the rest of your body. Sometimes something remains on the steering wheel.
Obviously, it's not the plane trees that run over the cars. The plane trees don't move. It's the fools who go after him. But instead of eliminating the fools, the plane trees have been eliminated. (then the fools discovered that kinetic energy is the same even if you vent it by falling into the ditch and crashing on the side, but I don't expect them to understand).
These two examples make it clear how the territory has always been managed in Emilia.
- If he stops "the lyre", or we are afraid he will stop the lyre, the tree is removed.
- If our little ones crash into it because they are stupid, the tree is removed.
- Whatever's there, it takes off the tree.
The approach does not change if we talk about anything else, for example water reservoirs, which were previously common in all farms as a reserve, when we were talking about crops that require a lot of water. Today, of course, they are all covered because it is better to use the land to cultivate it.
These ditches no longer exist, or have become very small.
Then there is no water and the crop is lost, but if you cry enough the municipality/province will find two coins to "help agriculture".
In any case, now as fifty years ago, in Emilia the territory comes AFTER the least of the economic needs.
Even in the Apennines, where I lived in the last few years before coming here, the situation hasn't changed. Except that in addition to trees and reservoirs (which are rare because accumulating water in the hills is not risk-free), there is total sloppiness in building. If it is difficult to build a home for an individual individual, when cooperatives come along, buy a lot and build on it, landscape boundaries seem to vanish when it comes to the small cooperative builder.
So suddenly it happens that the construction company arrives, and a row of terraced houses pops up, complete with parking, non-existent drainage, absurd geological expertise, uprooting trees as if it were raining, and all because the municipality wants to collect two lire. Then everything will remain uninhabited, as often happens (those municipalities are depopulating due to lack of services), or it will be used as a summer house.
But there is one thing to say: if I wanted to pave the courtyard in front of the house, or put an outdoor patio floor on it, let's say 49 square meters, the municipality and the forestry had to give me a permit because of the hydrogeological issue. Interesting, because then, along the road to go to the village, permission was given to build this thing here:
Need I add more?
When I said the same things about earthquakes and houses built ass, I was accused of racism towards the south. But in the matter of hydrogeological balance in Emilia, now non-existent because the lira is the lira, (“i baiuc”), personally I go with stone feet in the same way.
You got what you deserved. You and your corrupt municipal surveyors, you and your cheap cottagers, you and your condominiums with high quality finishes in the middle of the greenery (two plants in a courtyard) but close to the centre.
Before you bother with the gambiamendo glimadigo, I want to point out that it increases the frequency of extreme events, but it's not that they were absent before. They just happened much more rarely.
And this is where mitigation comes back into play. Certainly an extreme event will do damage: the problem is that it can do damage from 1 to 100, depending on how much the damage is mitigated. If people don't understand that it is necessary to take certain things into account, that one cannot PRETEND, as is done, that a forest is cut down because it ruins your holidays, or makes you mosquitoes, or makes you pollen and you are allergic, or hosts you animals that you can't stand, well, I'm sorry: now you are enjoying the landslides.
Sure, a landslide is a landslide. But if the land was still all wooded, the water would not cause the layers of topsoil to slide. You would not have solved the problem of climate change. But you would have mitigated it.
But no. And then you get it all on your teeth.