The Project: joy, despair and renewed hope
Good morning everyone!
Hope you are enjoying the project and wonder how you see it.
The two stages in the project for me are not only bound up with the greater freedom of movement in the second part but also dramatic changes in human management of our urban and rural habitats.
Phase 1.
The council mowers were silent. The strimmers and leaf blowers off. Noisy street cleaning vehicles remained stationary.
Not everything was peace. In the grounds of the Scuola Calcio Don Bosco, just before the Lockdown 30+ poplars representing 600 metres of wood and leaves and life were cut down. 4 or 5 may have been diseased but most were healthy trees. A letter I sent to the Oratorio has not been answered.
That apart, grass and other plants grew freely, populated by ants, spiders, bugs, crenefly and the odd butterflies enjoying the cover and the nectar.
We all found wonderful places where the temperature, light and the condition of the vegetation were ideal and wildlife was in abundance. Scores of caterpillars crawled up lime trees. A patch of nettles and elder has a spider or a snipe fly or a weevil on every leaf. In the grounds of Rodari school a hoopoe lingered for 10 days and red backed shrikes , grounded by the rain, passed through on migration. A small park in Via Adige had ants tending their larvae in nests in fallen leaves and behind the bark of trees, Hedge garlic, moon daisies, white campion (Selene bianco), barren strawberry (fragola matta) and hairy vetch (Vicia were welcome .
Phase 2
Then came phase two when the cutting, trimming, flailing and blowing machines came to manic life in urban areas and in parts of the countryside.
Nectar sources were cut to ground level and disappeared overnight, depriving butterflies and pollinators of food and places to lay their eggs.. Existing larvae and eggs and also adult insects were blended. The multicoloured grounds of Primo Levy school became a uniform green and road verges yellow with strimmed soil and cut grass, stems and litter left on the ground,
In the countryside near Rivoli flail cutters destroyed elder (sambuco) and hawthorn (baincospina)and blackthorn (prugnolo) shrubs and seriously damaged larger trees on the verges, which were littered with broken branches and frayed twigs and leaves. Not one flowering plant remained for kilometres. Hunting with my application ready I found to my dismay that the council mown verges had become deserts. Only in sheltered lanes and protective stone walls near executive housing were there any plants to record. This anihilation had all occurred in the nesting season and at a critical time for mammal and invertebrate life.
Where the mowers had not yet wrought their universal destruction, wildlife still flourished. The unmown embankment opposite the Tetti Blu development, and its looming cedar trees were patrolled by a dozen bats just before dusk. In the lanes behind main roads fireflies lit the night sky in amazing numbers.
Then going home after a good walk I saw a 50m2 patch of grass and herbage more than a metre high in the grounds of Primo levi school. It was bounded by red and white tape. A notice asked the gardeners not to cut the grass.
Phase 3
The abundance of species I had seen in urban Cascine Vica had inspired me. That joy turned to grief when Phase2 started. But where long grass and flowering plants remained there was still wonderful wildlife to see. The progressive gesture at the school had made my wild heart beat again. That is why I am convinced it is worth our telling our comuni what we want from them. We must not assume that no one will listen. Things are changing, and we can be part of that change.
The comuni are under pressure to tidy up our towns and cities. and even the countryside. When the comuni delayed their cutting many local people complained, unaware of the dangers we face from such obsessions. As nature-lovers we have a voice and we must say what we want. Politely of course. Recognising the rich heritage of tree-lined avenues and parks and verges in our cities but pointing out how things could be much better for nature:
later and less frequentmowing
cutting a short strip along wide verges and leaving the rest to nature
when cutting for the sake of drivers to exercise caution and moderation (many rotonde are potential hotspots for nature)
leaving uncut blocks in larger parks (Castello di Rivoli, Della Chiesa , Pellerina, Collegno)
leaving nettles and scrub (terrible clearance opposite Natta school in Rivoli) for birds and otherwildlife
planting native species or allowing natural regeneration to occur
getting communities to sponsor indigenous hawthorn, blackthorn (good examples near Rivoli)
creating small wetlands where possible
Guglielmo Vacirca and I have written a letter to our local assessore dell'ambient . If you wish to write one like it to your comune and could use a modified version of ours please contact me on dmshaw_uk@yahoo.co.uk.
If you are interested in meeting physically or at a distance to discuss such issues, again, please contact me.
Best wishes
Dave Shaw
,
Comments
Hi Dave,
I just read your journal entry: very well written & inspiring. I absolutely agree.
I live in a small french city, same problem: apart from pesticides in fields dedicated to agriculture, the city admin brings its contribution to destroying biodiversity by its management of public areas (very frequent mowing, quite no local species, watering during the middle of the day (automatic watering, pure non-sense!), electric leave movers (a nightmare for the fauna) instead of a good old broom, public lamps on all night, etc.).
Furthermore very few private gardens have flowers (a lawn cut twice a week is most the general & sad situation). Lack of knowledge? Laziness? Whatever, a desolate situation.
In our little garden, apart from flowers (most are bee-friendly), and lawn cut approx. each 3 weeks, or less when it's hot (well, no lawn, but grass, with buttercups, daisies and white clover), during the last cut, I had a great idea: grass patches with clover were not cut. Now it's buzzing and buzzing all day long.
It's great to try to motivate your city council (no hope here, last elections were past Sunday), congrats!
I think that private people have a great knowledge gap, and should be educated in biodiversity on their doorstep / in their garden. They claim that there are no more butterflies or birds or else little fauna, but have nil idea that they are responsible therefore.
Another wonderful contribution to protect diversity is less light during the night. This is a french association motivation politicians therefore: www.anpcn.fr, they are member of an international association (darksky.org), surely you can find an equivalent one in Italy.
Best regards, Chimu
Dear Chimu
thank you for your kind words, your lovely piece and for your link which I have noted.
I think the knowledge gap is everywhere. Local councils are obsessed with tidiness because the local people are. I think they are still influenced by the days when there were still flowers and insects and reptiles and all forms of life in the countryside which could only be kept at bay through hard physical labour.
Then tidy formal gardens were a manfestation of the control that could be exercised by the wealthy or local authorities.
Increasing intensification of agriculture - machinery and chemicals meant we could now easily exercise dominance over nature in the farmed countryside, which gave us a situation in which man dominates every part of his environment. This has removed the distinction between the countryside and urban environments. Everything is now tamed.
Until very recently all generations had lost contact with our rural roots. Children are totally ignorant of the plants and animals that surround them and have therefore allowed nature to be destroyed. I agree wholeheartedly with your suggestion that nature studies. ecology and the identification of common species should be taught in all schools. Fortunately people are now talking about a school examination in this field , though I feel that it should be on the curriculum for all children.
Local councils have suffered from the crises and many of them do not employ ecologists, or if they do do not listen to them. The people who make the decisions about the management of green spaces are the first graduates of the nature-ignorant generation and they also need to be influenced.
Nature has been relegated to subservience in favour of economic short termism and this has now been institutionalised by the election of cynical eco-criminals like Trump, Johnson, Bolsonaro Modi and some of the eastern European leaders who have taken adavantage of coronavirus to destroy European forests..
Some people are waking up to this, thanks to the XR and Fridays for Future people. I now live in Italy but my roots are in England and sad though it is to see the wilful stupidity of our ruling elite there is a great deal of opposition to them. that opposition is not yet mainstream but every one of us must do something.
I spoke to our gardener (condominium garden) and he is sympethetic. He will let the hedges grow taller and he has also left patches of ox-eye daisies so they can set seed. I did bring this up at the condominium meeting but handled it poorly politically and did not get everywhere, though at least I was able to stop them cutting down old diseased white maples and pruning them instead-
Chimu - let's keep in touch and try to ask people to be kinder to nature. I am making a few simple presentations to send to people in the comuni - or maybe the newspapers - because in some cases small changes could have great impacts.
Could you send me your personal mail? Mine is dmshaw_uk@yahoo.co.uk
Add a Comment