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My Anthropocene


Secchia's Flood - Soliera, Modena, Italy - December 12, 2017. Photo by Giorgio Galeotti, Courtesy of Creative Commons.

(Editor’s note: With this post from the Italian novelist Giacomo Sartori, the Massachusetts Review inaugurates “After Us,” a new blog series that will focus on the climate crisis and the ongoing, devastating toll wrought on our planet and all of its creatures by the human species.)

It was beginning to rain in Genoa, just as I left the bookfair where I’d come to take part in a roundtable about literature and the Anthropocene. In the following days Genoa was deluged with rain and floods that brought the city to a standstill, floods caused by heavy construction on the hills above that has shorn the mountainside of its natural defenses so that every few years the rivers swell up and dump their muddy load downstream.

We can certainly disagree about whether the concept of the Anthropocene is useful, whether it tends to disguise the causes of environmental havoc and who’s responsible for it. Still, the Anthropocene—the damage our species has done and threatens to do to the biosphere, driven by the determination of a few—is now undeniably evident to all, and every day more so.

The damage, in other words, was not by any means inevitable, as is often assumed; it’s not true that demographic growth explains everything, or that human beings are all equally responsible. In the course of my life, I met the Anthropocene long before the term was coined. And later it would become a permanent fixture in my professional life.

I was six years old when my family moved from our rented apartment in a northeast Italian city to my grandmother’s villa in the hills. Only a handful of kilometers away, this was another world. It was a complex ecosystem largely composed of vegetation, domesticated but still proudly autonomous, with its growing cycles and its lymphatic energy, and with subordinate structures—walls, paths, woods, tiny hamlets with farmers’ houses and a few stately villas—neatly fitted in. A place where animals of various sizes and dispositions were at home. And human beings, too, along with their customs and their language.

Among them, I was a foreigner. I could worm my way in and make myself accepted, forming intrinsically asymmetric friendships, as I have since done all my life, but I remained an alien.

The working cohabitation of vegetation and other living creatures depended on long-established habits of continuity and repetition. Every element in it harked back to the distant past, lending an inertia reinforced by the language spoken here, different from my city language. Any novelties introduced were as explosive as a meteor sailing in.

The fact was, everything was changing. One summer a motorized mowing machine appeared, driven by a boy not much older than me, seated as if on a motorcycle, who with his two big lobster claws could do in two hours a job that cost a man with a scythe many days of hard labor. The next summer it was a Fiat caterpillar tractor that advanced, stubborn and menacing and making a junk metal racket, with hard claws that dug into the road bed and made our old house tremble like an earthquake. The oxen disappeared, although I didn’t at first connect the two things; suddenly they were archaic and in the way. Suddenly too, packsaddles, bridles, whips and wooden plows became dusty relics, objects of curiosity.

The old road that climbed from the valley, lined by a two tall and brilliant white stone drywalls, became a banal two-lane asphalt roadway with curbs of cement, on which a bus could travel with ease. Asphalt advanced like a greedy tongue, gobbling up the final ups and downs to arrive at our gate on the old Roman road, the Via Claudia Augusta. For decades only the piazza in the village resisted the asphalt, but when it filled up with cars, it, too, was paved over. In just a few years plastic invaded our houses and barnyards, trash proliferated like fungus, and our diet changed. Cornmeal polenta gave way to pasta, eating meat became normal. Concrete apartment blocks and parking lots overran the flats on the outskirts. Life was simpler and much less arduous.

None of the young people were now full-time farmers; that was a second job if anything, for when the factory shift let out. Before drinking water from the fountain, you had to look to see that it said “potable.” And you couldn’t eat the fruit from the trees anymore. Fireflies and swallows grew fewer and fewer and then they disappeared forever. The brownish smog that by now clung permanently to the valley began to drift up toward us. When the damage had been done, the lethal radioactive cloud from Chernobyl arrived. Many people died of cancer; what the precise causes were, we didn’t know.

Everything was changing, and my grandmother bristled at that, she felt that she couldn’t just sit by and watch. She was already elderly, and virtually nothing remained of the family fortune, but she felt she had to act if she wasn’t to become irrelevant. She was mistaken here too. She bought a skinny, irascible horse that never took orders from anyone, and a cart that was so heavy, it never made it out of the garage. She didn’t understand that the revolution would be radical—although her long-ago years in America should have alerted her to this—and would depend on engines. As it happened, the slopes of her vineyards were too steep to use machines.

Doubtless my decision to study agronomy grew out of that tangle of nature and human technology that made such an impression on me. I enrolled at the University of Florence, a department that harked back to the nineteenth century, if not to the Renaissance. Scientific farming was once the pursuit of the class that owned the land, and my fellow students included a few counts and several fair young gentlewomen who might have been painted by Bronzino. Computers, statistics, and mathematical models were completely absent. But there was a famous school of soil studies, and I wrote my thesis in that field, and have continued to work on soil my entire career. We specialists have shouted ourselves hoarse warning that the soil was suffering, dying, being washed away. No one listened; they thought we were sad old fossils. Only in the past few years have people become aware that cultivable soils are fragile and growing scarce, and that no substitute exists. But often, this knowledge comes too late.

My studies focused on mountain soils, even less interesting to the great world. One afternoon I overheard the director of the institute I worked for making fun of my antiquated equipment. But then a professor from Zurich sought me out: he thought my old-fashioned studies linking the characteristics of the soil to altitude, and thus to climate, could be used to predict the effects of climate change. Nobody in Italy talked about climate change; across the border, it was taken for granted.

We worked together for many years. The professor was the man responsible for bright new ideas, I was the labor force organizing our investigations, the man who knew mountain soils and all their woes inside out. And I too participated in the scientific ferment.

Until the economic crisis arrived and put an end to our studies, that is. Now there would be no more, not for any kind of environmental studies. Nevertheless I had learned that we know almost nothing about many basic questions—and above all about the tangle of correlations typical of complex environments. And you can’t make models of something you’re utterly ignorant of. This is why I’m diffident about so-called climate models, and even about science itself; alone, without taking into account human beings and their strange passions, models tell us nothing. In the years that followed, I had to fall back on studying the soils of apple orchards and vineyards, and I told myself, somewhat optimistically, that knowledge about them would permit us to limit the environmental damage. This too, didn’t and doesn’t interest almost anyone, apart from the big ideas. Our research institutes spend their words and their money on “precision agriculture” as if basic scientific knowledge, which is sorely lacking, could be replaced by GPS devices and drone sensors, by artificial intelligence. They’re inebriated with genetic engineering, as if the problems of dirty energy resources and pollution can only be met by creating new species. When anyone knowledgeable about the world’s agriculture—and not just that of the wealthy countries—knows that it is the traditional, time-honored practices that feed, and will continue to feed, most human beings. Not only that, they spare our environment. Only by refining those methods and improving them, can we ever perhaps hope not to destroy the planet.

But so many of the Anthropocenists, themselves inebriated with highflown and unrealistic technical fixes no less damaging than the ones they deride, don’t know it. Or maybe they simply don’t want to know.

"My Anthropocene" appeared in Nazione Indiana, October 19, 2019.

 

GIACOMO SARTORI is the author of I Am God, (Restless, 2019) along with six other novels and several collections of short stories and poetry in Italian. Baco (Bug) his most recent work of fiction, will be published in translation by Restless Books in 2021. By training, Sartori is an agronomist. Born in Trento, he lives in Paris.

FREDERIKA RANDALL grew up in Pittsburgh and has lived in Italy for more than thirty years. A journalist and translator from Italian, she has written cultural reportage for numerous US and Italian publications. Along with Giacomo Sartori’s I Am God, she has translated Ippolito Nievo’s Confessions of An Italian, and fiction by Guido Morselli, Luigi Meneghello, Ottavio Cappellani, Helena Janeczek, Igiaba Scego and Davide Orecchio, as well as three volumes of nonfiction by the historian Sergio Luzzatto. Her awards include a Pen Heim grant, and with Luzzatto, the Cundill Prize for Historical Literature.

Photo Credit: Giorgio Galeotti, Secchia's Flood-Soliera, Modena, Italy-December 12, 2017. Courtesy of Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International.


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