Dear Lorenzo,
non we know each other personally, but I am writing to you in relation to your Jova Beach Party and the controversies that are unleashed for your piqued response to the criticisms of citizens and associations. I take the liberty of calling you as a long-time friend, since I have been following your musical and human journey with attention and sympathy since at least «Serenata Rap», that is, for almost thirty years. I state that I really like your artistic evolution and I also appreciated a certain global inclination of some pieces, such as “L’ombelico del mondo”. All this to say that there is no shadow of bias in my analysis. And so I come straight to the point: we all love to combine nature and culture, art and environment, music and landscape. I would say that it comes spontaneously, both when we enjoy it and when we are protagonists. In my very young, I am certainly not against it and I have performed shows of words and music with Niccolò Fabi in the Caves of Castellana and with the jazz player Enzo Favata even in the most intact beaches of Sardinia.
So I like the combination. In fact, the problem lies not in the event itself, but in the impacts, which, as can be clearly seen in the photos of the JBP from above, are disruptive, simply for the number of individuals who participate: one hundred people are one account, another fifty thousand . A recent study by the CNR estimated that, from the beaches of the La Maddalena Archipelago National Park, every bather who spends a day at the beach takes with him, willy-nilly, 50 to 100 grams of sand. The study was developed for the famous beach of Budelli which was systematically plundered of its pink sands and which was closed to access precisely because, in any case, ten swimmers unwittingly transported at least a kilo of sand a day elsewhere. Multiply this figure by your ten or fifty thousand people and see what mountain of sand you get to, not to mention dancing and shaking, adding erosion to erosion. Even if only for a day.
The first element of criticism is therefore the numbers, unsustainable by any natural system, especially if it is delicate and fragile. And the second element is precisely the place: the coastlines are the most delicate on the planet and are compromised especially in Italy. Today our sandy coasts are often in the process of erosion, while the high cliffs end up suffering the blows of the tides, increasingly disastrous also due to the frequent storms. In Italy, about 40 per cent of the beaches are subjected to constant erosion and the result of this process is that they risk being lost if no effective action is taken. As long as you don’t rely on the usual works: piers, brushes, artificial cliffs or even replenish the beach with trucks of sand taken from who knows where and unloaded along the coast. Instead, one should rely on guided natural nourishment, but for this it takes long times, gentle works and tranquility.
No less harmful is the unhealthy use we make of the beachia, which in Italy is particularly deleterious. The dune, for example, has now been obliterated on almost all the tens of thousands of kilometers of the marine border; most of the submerged grasslands of Posidonia have now been devoured; the immense forest that once went from Ventimiglia to Trieste going around all the coasts has now disappeared for at least two thousand years. Only 29 per cent of the Italian coasts, about 2,200 hectares, are free from settlements and can be considered an intact landscape. 60 per cent has already been the subject of intensive occupation that has led to the cancellation of the dune and the scrub, replaced by carpet constructions and bathhouses in reinforced concrete. The remaining 11 per cent are in the process of being employed. The coasts are a heritage that we take for granted, but which is being lost without us even realizing it.
It does not seem like one of the best ideas to go bulldozers before the event or to impose a mega-gallery of that size with all the temporary, but heavy, works that it requires. And the compensatory works are relatively useful, because only resilient ecosystems resist impacts and, for this reason, in Italy they are at the limit, especially along the coasts. It is true that the WWF has guaranteed the mitigation of the impacts, since both the municipalities would have authorized the events anyway. But as a member of the Scientific Council I must reveal to you that, along with others, I had raised my concerns.
There is also an underlying cultural aspect that should not be overlooked: transforming natural environments into places for mass events could give the idea that nature and the landscape are, after all, constantly modifiable by sapiens even for needs that are not they are of immediate survival, while recognizing the absolute value of music. But there are places designated for those events, even gigantic ones: stadiums, buildings, municipal squares and so on. And if it is true that events are held in the Verona Arena or in archaeological sites, it is also true that the Pink Floyd in Pompeii did not have the public and that the numbers are in any case much lower. The problem is the numbers, but certainly not to harm people who want to enjoy your music, just to avoid sending a negative message, that anything can always be done at the expense of the environment.
Each of us is very wrong on our own and I know where I can put it, but you really don’t have to think that there is a fighting patrol of eco-Nazis, as you called them, who want to destroy your initiative out of social envy. While there are extreme voices, there are also others, long-time ecologists like me, who study the environment from a scientific point of view and who have seen enough to suggest you give up this project and remodel it by tying it to real initiatives of environmental compensation: from the altering climate emissions that an event has always and in any case, to the planting of trees followed and certified, to the restoration of dunes and Posidonia meadows, to the defense of avifauna and sea turtles. Who cares about the refectory, you might tell me, or about the turtles. But you would make a mistake: in this world there is a place for the mosquito and one for the bat, one for the little brother and one for the jellyfish, only we sapiens take the place of all the others, overbearing and invasive as we are. We do not realize that, if one species goes extinct, the effect is dominoes and, sooner or later, the others also die out. After all, the richness of life on Earth is given by its individual components, just as the safety of an aircraft is guaranteed starting from the last screw of the machine for heating meals on board: you never know how things are going, if you do. look the other way.
I take my leave in the illusion that my words serve at least as a rethinking and a discussion that is not hostile and even serene.
Your.
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