Green miracle: this is how nature regains its spaces

We must try to find well in the midst of the infinite black. Among the twenty thousand hectares of skeletons and coal. The miracle is slow, weak, but resistant. Yes resistant: to the difficulties of a luxuriant territory that now seems to be covered by a flow of tar and also to the pessimism of those in these parts who live and have lost everything, of those who do not know how to start again and are afraid that the word will help end up in long list of immoral promises. While the Montiferru is desperate and the shepherds fear the arrival of the autumn rains, nature reacts. Silently and without getting noticed. For two months Sardinia has ended up in the red zone of the increasingly large map of the planetary ecological disaster but at these latitudes there is still a green hope. It is a well-known chromatic rule, you learn in kindergarten: black covers and extinguishes all the other colors and what the terrible rush of fires has left in these ridges is hiding the slow awakening of the plants.

To find traces of the resurrection, it is not enough to stop on the main roads, where there are no longer the big bushes and where you can no longer see the pastures. You no longer meet the herds of cows or wild boars on the run, on the state road that leads from S'Archittu to Cuglieri and that leads to Bosa from Sennariolo. Everything is off, but only apparently, even between the curves between San Leonardo and Santu Lussurgiu, in the hairpin bends around Scano Montiferro and Tresnuraghes. There is even an unreal silence: lunar. It all looks petrified, but it's an optical illusion. To see the slow movements of the leaves it is necessary to wander around devastated olive groves and thorny fields, venture out for a whole day among the ups and downs and be accompanied by those around here who had built model livestock farms or those who produced quality oil and cannonau. and now he finds himself without plants and without wine.

What you do not expect is a charred tree, reduced to a skeleton, but which is beginning to take on its best dress again. New leaves, still small and weak, but slowly covering the trunks. The resistance of the cork oaks is the hope of recovery. And there are also some good signs among the overturned stones of the dry stone walls, because here the rush of fire arrived with the power of a hurricane: it burned everything, but it also knocked down walls and certainties. He even blew up the great boulders: granite rocks weighing many tons were reduced to a thousand pieces. A volcano exploded on the peaks around Cuglieri and Santu Lussurgiu, but the lava left room for hope.

The encouraging cry comes from the prickly pears that reappear in the ditches, where even the weeds now bode well. In the olive groves of the Cocco family, which has been producing award-winning oil for decades, the environmental and economic massacre can be measured by eye and it is feared that it will take 20 years to make the mills work at full capacity. Because the bulk of the production was linked to ancient trees. And planting thousands of them will not be enough to restart the machine. But in Sebastiano Pisanu's vineyard, among vines planted for 120 years, hope is on the sides, near the walls, where roses have even blossomed. This year it will not be possible to harvest but those petals say that all is not lost here.

Nature, as we know, reacts in very different ways and the 150 hectares of the Chiccho Diligu pasture have become the undisputed realm of a pair of quadrupeds formed in the days of desperation left by the fire. Where there was a green pasture there are now charred bushes and in this ash desert a horse and a mule have become friends. Moreover, they seem to be in love: they only move together, they protect each other, as in a blood alliance close in the days when the animals no longer knew where to run to try to save themselves. They made it but now Chicco Diligu is no longer able to approach them. "I lost four cows, two donkeys, two horses and thirty kids - he says - I cried for a week, especially for the donkey who had almost become my son: every time I arrived in the countryside he came running towards me and showed me everything his affection ».

Antonello Meloni's boar had also become very close to his master, but he too was unable to escape the cursed advance of the fire: «I saved him during a hunting trip, yes because we hunters are not the enemies of animals. He was very small and was left alone, perhaps he had lost his mother. He wandered in despair, but still couldn't find food on his own. So I took him to my farm: I raised him almost like a child, with a bottle. He grew up here and chose not to go back to running alone in the middle of the countryside: he let himself be caressed, he behaved almost like a dog. He had become my best friend, but when the fire came I didn't have time to save him. I would have risked my life for him, but the flames had already arrived ».