During a TED talk in 2013, the ecologist Allan Savory got a standing ovation for finding a solution to soil desertification. The ecologist, born in Zimbabwe, after decades of work questioned the traditional methods. In fact, he noticed that, reducing the circulation of livestock (which is considered the first cause of desertification due to food and water that it gets from the ground), controlling the herds, even by killing hundreds of animals, and concentrating them in delimited areas was not bringing the expected results. On the contrary, the situation was even worse. Savory tried to observe Nature, questioning its logic, and came to the opposite conclusion, that the herd lives in symbiosis with the Earth and with predators and that animals, if left free to grow and move in search of food and water, can revive the soil and nourish it, spreading their excrements (natural fertilizers) and walking on the ground. As he himself explains, he began to work “with” Nature and not “for” it, and developed a planning system of pastures that mimics the logic of herds in the wild. He defined it Holistic Management because it takes into account the complexity of the issue. The method was tested in Africa, one of the most critical areas of the planet, recording extraordinary results in a very short time, so much so that currently there are more and more breeders and farmers who apply it and who see their lands reborn within a few years.
During his talks, Savory says that human beings must realize that they’re not capable of managing and of dealing with complexity of Nature and that everything they have done so far has been harmful to the environment. The only chance is to do the unthinkable. How can we do this? Starting over and regaining the ability to look somewhere else.
Mountains in between, Italy
20th of October 2021
reading time: 6’ 40’’
Savory’s one is a lesson whose value transcends the field of application and that may be revolutionary for planning. We present a parallelism between herds and humans, between desertification and abandonment of the landscape.
Let’s think about what has been done in the name of specialization and standardization related to agricultural, industrial and tourism production processes. The concentration of production activities and labour in the plains and hills has caused, from the end of the 19th century until today, a progressive abandonment of the difficult territories or in any case, such as to make industrial logistics complex.
In Italy, these territories have a name: mountains.
To try to reverse the flow of events there are two possibilities: to use captivating slogans such as “adopt a village” or to learn from Savory’s lesson and observe yourself with new eyes, an issue that, for some months now, has been causing a lively debate.
Let's go back to the beginning. In April 2020, architect Stefano Boeri presents to La Repubblica (a national newspaper) his vision of an Italy of villages which, although utopian, was able to open a debate. In fact, a few hours later, the national President of Uncem Marco Bussone replied to the archistar with one letter in which he clearly expresses his perplexities regarding the “spot” solutions advanced by tourism and the new rural movement, emphasizing instead some priorities, such as the construction and strengthening of the internet network infrastructure. He took the opportunity to make an explicit request to architecture: to create strategies for transforming mountain areas into laboratories rather than in picturesque views more suited to social media or electoral propaganda than to real life.
In the same months, the geographer Mauro Varotto1 published the book Mountains in between. A new geography (“Montagne di mezzo. Una nuova geografia”, Einaudi, 2020) which starts with an important consideration:
For the first time in history, mountain depopulation takes place at a climatically favorable moment, which means that now it is economic, and therefore political, factors that condition the territories.
Vardotto explains how it was the “rules” (including community rules) that transformed the complexity of the mountain into a weakness rather than a resource, causing a cultural impoverishment that affects us all. He underlines how much the rhetoric of tradition and the narration of “pure is beautiful” are confusing, by making us believe that reliving the mountain is a return to the past in its romantic sense. Instead, in order to develop a plan that will last over time, it is necessary to build a completely new lifestyle, never seen before, based on multifunctionality and complexity. In other words, just as Allan Savory did, it is necessary to start all over again and reconsider the human dimension of the landscape and its wisdom that manifests itself in the relationship, ignored by modernity, between orography and anthropology, between mankind and its way of inhabiting the planet Earth. The direction recommended by Varotto is to reconnect the links between the plains and the mountains to transform it into a multifunctional territory that thrives on the spontaneous circulation of people and resources, and of activities and cultures. Architecture, as a discipline that designs physical infrastructures to support the social ones, is called upon to respond and provide solutions.
An excellent example and a forerunner of the times is the laboratory village of Ghesc in Val d’Ossola, in the province of Verbano-Cusio-Ossola (VB), in the extreme north of Piemonte, almost on the border with Switzerland, born from the vision of Maurizio Cesprini, former teacher and with a degree in environmental science, and by his partner Paola Gardin, architect, who twenty years ago decided to transform a ruined eighteenth-century village into a professional and personal opportunity, giving life to an educational laboratory for the recovery and enhancement of local architecture.
The project is headed by Canova Association, of which Maurizio is a partner-founder and which has its headquarters in Ghesc. It’s an international organization that through educational and artistic activities allows students from all over the world to approach the concepts of recovery and sustainability and its related know-how. “Rebuilding starting from what exists”. The local and global results are many and extraordinary, we can say that Maurizio and Paola’s project is a template to subvert abandonment and recover the origins of a know-how in symbiosis with the territory.
Ghesc demonstrates that it is in the complexity of those lands that the resources can be found to start working WITH the territory rather than FOR the territory.
We must spread the word and think of that 23.3% of Italy, corresponding to over 7 million hectares of abandoned territories that call for a paradigm shift and holistic management.
If you’ve read this far… THANK YOU!
If you liked this post, why not share it?
and if you have any comments or suggestions, write us!
See you for the next Postcard!
Geographer at the University of Padua and coordinator of the Highlands Group of the Central Scientific Committee of the Italian Alpine Club.