Golgotha
(… I could hear the hunting oboes …)
(… yesterday was a "rest" day – in an athletic sense – and I dedicated it to something I've wanted to do for a long time: visit the extreme southern reaches of my constituency. The southernmost municipality, as you certainly know, is Slaves of Abruzzo :
and for me who lived in the northernmost municipality when I taught:
and since "I've been in politics" I have my base in the second northernmost municipality:
even if now I'm writing to you from a town in the South:
(let's see who can guess them) paying a visit to the opposite end of the college seemed to me a dutiful act and had been desired for some time.
You can see it here, at the bottom, in the center of the image, on a spur at 1127 meters above sea level, steeply perched on the confluence of the Sente and Trigno rivers, in a dominant position, with a prominence of almost a thousand meters, with respect to the valley crossed from this viaduct , which is not surprisingly the highest road bridge in Italy, and for which we are trying to #dosomething . I also wanted to take a look at this bridge, to realize its actual usefulness, and I'd say that I've got an idea: to go around it you have to go kilometers and kilometers of provincial roads that are not exactly in excellent condition, for objective reasons: the so-called abolition of the provinces, requested as you know by the so-called Europe , and even before that geology, which is not an exact science, in the sense in which the pieiccdì piglets would understand it, but like all non-exact sciences it reigns over human things: from the Maiella in below is a sort of millefeuille of limestone layers with clayey layers interposed, which in the contrast between the Eurasian plate and the African plate have inclined, sometimes coming to emerge vertically from the surrounding terrain (they are the morges, like this one ). If the clay between two layers of limestone somehow infiltrates with water, if there's a slope, if there's erosion, the landslide starts, and you go down.
It has never occurred to me so spontaneously to respect the speed limits!…
As you may have guessed from the last map, to get down to the South I had to cross a piece of Molise, whose beauties I won't now tell you (look for example Pescopennataro), to then return to Abruzzo in the municipality of Castiglione Messer Marino, in precisely correspondence of the sources of the Sente. The landscape everywhere dominated by wind turbines, on all the crests, almost like in the Daunian sub-Apennines. Having climbed to the top of Castiglione Messer Marino, where the castle, which perhaps once was there, perhaps at the time of the Duchy of Benevento, is no longer there today, I took the shot you see above, struck by the presence of a Calvary between many bald and barren tops. Only later did I see that in the photo two acts of faith faced each other: on the left, in the foreground, the one in God, today a bit out of fashion; on the right, in the background, the one in the "green", now in great vogue, which translates into an ordeal for the landscape, with ridiculous returns for the territory. From this rape the mayors do not even draw the resources necessary to keep the municipal roads in order (there are those too, and they are subject to the same geology), especially since the royalties must be reinvested in transition. Ecological, ça va sans dire, even if for this territory the geological transition, whose times are not established by the reghiulescion of some European Eichmann, is the real emergency. Always, not just when some acute episode, like this or this one , brings our attention back to what we don't know and can't predict about our Earth.
Lesson that escapes those who think they know everything today.
I, on the other hand, don't know many things.
For example: while to crucify Our Lord, as tradition says, two pieces of "carbon sequesters" were enough (it was therefore, in its own way, a "sustainable" end, to use the current jargon), to raise the modern Golgotha, the horrifying shovels, to crucify the landscape, how many raw materials are needed? How much energy does it take to put up such a gallows? How much CO2 is emitted? Everyone tells us how much energy a shovel produces, no one tells us how much energy a shovel is built with. Yet it will be measurable! I'm sure the balance sheet is largely positive, but having an exact account of it would reassure. A bit like electric cars: sure, they don't smell bad when you use them, they don't "emit". But where does the electricity come from? From Castiglione Messer Marino? And where does lithium come from and where does it go?
We could also talk about the economic aspects: fees for the use of municipal land, royalties and their constraints , but the summary is what I told you above.
Two facts emerge: the indisputable ability of others to appropriate a symbolic, archetypal dimension, and conversely the risk that their false narratives lead us to throw the baby out with the bathwater, in a context in which I, however, honestly, I only see water polluted by propaganda and various levels of opacity.
Can someone help me see the baby?
I only see the cross: countries with wind and no landscape require countries with no wind and no landscape to disfigure themselves, in case anyone ever understands that the first mitigation strategy is to come and live in the highlands. But I'm a bad person: help me to improve… )
This is a machine translation of a post (in Italian) written by Alberto Bagnai and published on Goofynomics at the URL https://goofynomics.blogspot.com/2023/08/i-golgota.html on Sat, 26 Aug 2023 14:44:00 +0000. Some rights reserved under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.