Accompanying Biodiversity
Road to Marettimo #3
Preserving biodiversity, an expression that has now become part of our vocabulary and so important that it has been included, together with the Farm To Fork Strategy, among the cardinal points of the European Union with the Biodiversity Strategy for 2030. But more than preserving biodiversity, biodiversity protection is not concerned with simply ensuring that nothing changes, rather it seeks to ensure that nothing changes in favor of standardization and speed of change. It is important to understand that preserving biodiversity does not mean ensuring that nothing changes, but rather ensuring that nothing changes unnaturally, violently, too quickly, and for “avoidable” factors (artificial, human-predators).
Statistics tell us of impressive surges: “Since 1970, the global human population has more than doubled (from 3.7 to 7.6 billion), increasing unequally across countries and regions; and the gross domestic product per capita is four times higher — with increasingly distant consumers shifting the environmental burden of consumption and production between regions. The average abundance of native species in most major terrestrial habitats has declined by at least 20%, especially since 1900,” the UN Report Nature’s Dangerous Decline ‘Unprecedented’; Species Extinction Rates ‘Accelerating’ tells us.
The loss of biodiversity becomes serious when there is no time to adapt. In Europe, at least 1,677 species out of 15,060 European species assessed are threatened with extinction, according to IUCN.
It is therefore important to accompany biodiversity to allow Nature to adapt and not to undergo too violent changes. If we take the case of Marettimo, Egadi Islands, Sicily, this is a real explosion of biodiversity which over the centuries has become characteristic of this corner of paradise. In Marettimo, the diversity of flora is impressive. Thanks to its early detachment from Sicily, about 600,000 years ago, compared to the other surrounding islands, Marettimo has seen the development of endemic plants, present only within its territory. The research work carried out on the flora of the island has brought to light 612 entities, of which 26 are endemic to the Italian flora and eight are exclusive to the island. The endemism present comes from Asia Minor, from the Tuscan-Lazio area, and then there are some local endemics.
We find as an example the brassica macrocarpa, a species of cauliflower that has been studied also by American professors at the University of Atlanta, that is present only in Marettimo and unfortunately, it is becoming extinct. There is also the horned poppy (locally known as “caulo marino,” sea cabbage) which grows near the sea and is used to make poultices pounded with salt, oil, and vinegar. It is also found the sea fennel, which is part of the European red list of endangered species. Once it grew only on the seashore, but with the arrival of tourist donkeys, these eating the fennel and then defecating, carry the seeds, so that the plant is now found all over the island. The richness of plants present on the island is so surprising that the botanical garden of the University of Palermo has brought some of the plants to study them.
But biodiversity is not only evident in flora and fauna, but has a direct consequence on human biodiversity, as Pope Francis calls it in the post-synodal apostolic exhortation, Querida Amazonia. The biodiversity of the flora allows the development and maintenance of trades that are linked to it. Between Sicily and Marettimo, the beekeeper Leonardo Parisi tells us about the peculiarities of this craft unknown to many:
“Beekeepers move around chasing the flowering: the flowers I find here in Marettimo I cannot find in Sicily and vice versa. Some hive families I move them to Marettimo around October and then to Sicily and back to Marettimo… it’s normal for beekeeping to move bees.” So there are nomadic professions, such as that of the beekeeper, that depend closely on the biodiversity present in a given territory. “I do this but beekeepers in the eastern part of Sicily go to Calabria or Basilicata because there are more orange trees in those areas. The tropicalization of the climate is moving upward, perhaps, but it’s hard to tell how the climate changes…one lifetime is not enough time to see it!”
Human biodiversity also manifests itself in the fact that Marettimari people, for example, are different from other Sicilian islanders. Marettimo has always been an island linked to the sea and not so much to the agricultural world as other Sicilian islands such as Pantelleria could be:
“Here in Marettimo we had gardens with a bit of fruit, a couple of threshing floors for wheat, but already at the time of my grandparents there was only fruit,” continues Leonardo Parisi. “Not everyone who lives on the islands are sailors. Take for example Pantelleria, where they don’t even touch the water, they are all farmers. People of the land. In Marettimo we are people of the sea.”
Whether by the sea or inland, when Marettimaro refers to Nature it evokes a part of the sacred, a sort of source of life: “When we are born we are thrown into the sea,” an inhabitant tells us. It is no coincidence that the island is known as Hièra Nesos, the sacred island. Sacred that is, surprisingly, also evoked by the Dasgupta report, a prestigious world magazine that deals with Economy and Biodiversity. Nature must be protected not for its economic value, but precisely for its intrinsic value:
“A correct way of economic reasoning is intertwined with our values. Biodiversity has not only an instrumental value but also an intrinsic value, perhaps even a moral value. Each of these senses is enriched when we recognize that we are embedded in Nature. To detach Nature from economic reasoning is to imply that we consider ourselves external to Nature. The fault lies not with economics, but with the way we have chosen to practice it.”
It is often thought that the sense of the sacred has been abandoned by Western countries, but this is not so as historian Simon Schama (1995) tells us by applying spirituality to other fields and areas such as architecture or art. Why not also bring this attention to the relationship we hold with Nature, that is, the relationship we hold with the things that surround our daily lives: from travel to consumption, but also and especially food.
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