The House of the Sardinian Family

The community of those born, emigrants and residents, constitutes the Sardinian family, and the island of Sardinia is its home. Each family guards its own, with care and love, being the place where intimacy and solidarity, joys and sorrows, belonging and sacredness live. It is the place of perennial values and affections that always make us return when we leave it. It is the place where the spirit of the family that inhabits it extends and pervades every corner, shape, color, smell; in which we find refuge and protection from birth and whose violation arouses aggression, sometimes even decomposed. And it is the place where we wish to find the last comfort, at the moment of departure.

Now, let's look carefully at the map on the first page of the newspaper: this is how the Casa della Famiglia Sarda, Sardinia, has been and will be worse reduced by the claim to burden it with the burden of producing a large part of the electricity from renewable sources, which is necessary for national needs.

In addition to the planted iron left to rust and smoking and polluting chimneys; mining and industrial waste to form mountains of red color, harmful to the aquifers; steel installations emanating lethal scents and vast territories bombed in frequent military exercises; industrial development turned out to be fictitious, with paychecks and layoffs supported by public benefits claimed under employment blackmail; landfills of sewage sludge from the continent, ours were not enough, we add the sale, or barter, of strategic public activities, such as banks and airports, and destruction, in the silence of most, of the former local Airline, formerly Alisarda, a wealth of skills and unrepeatable technical and human professionalism, with fifteen hundred layoffs in one fell swoop.

To this disaster are added large portions of landscape marred by wind turbines planted on the gentle profile of hills and mountains and immense expanses of photovoltaic panels, spread over fertile countryside and fake greenhouses for the sole purpose of earning substantial public contributions. Not a few are now preparing to give the last assault to the little that we have left, again installing wind turbines and photovoltaic panels on the ground, and closing us in a marine enclosure of rotating steel towers, to form palisades hundreds of meters high that they will deprive residents and guests, children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, of the poignant emotion that the beauty of the free horizon of our sea offers us.

The God of the universe - or nature - gently placed the island in the middle of the Mediterranean sea not because it was disfigured, violated, exploited and squeezed, but admired and coveted by peoples who had discovered it, welcome guests if respectful of places, identity traditions and hardworking people engaged in the arduous path towards modernity.

Instead, it has happened that many fierce borrowers - and a few enterprising entrepreneurs, unfortunately - have always met here, determined to make the best of it and leave pollution, unemployment and landscape and environmental disfigurement. And widespread poverty and suffering. This says our map, to want to read it without the veil of hypocrisy.

Our landscape is now a scarce environmental resource, the last one we have, and as such of inestimable economic and moral value.

The growth of the tourism industry and the agri-food and artisanal, manufacturing and services sectors is of vital importance for the increase in per capita income, now half of that of the most developed regions, and its growth will depend on what we do to defend the House of the Family. Sardinian. The umpteenth assault on the landscape of land and sea, if it succeeds, will compromise protection and development for current and future generations, in a negative sum game for the island. In fact, the energy produced here from renewable sources serves and will serve to run industries and heat and cool homes and offices in other places, so that in addition to the structural economic dependence we will also have total energy dependence, connected to the "continent" by a cable. electric that will keep us on a leash, submissive, humiliated and finally defeated.

It would be different if the energy produced here by sun and wind, but in appropriate places, were used to produce green hydrogen, a fossil replacement fuel to run energy-intensive industries, boilers and air conditioners, cars and kitchen stoves. Since when it burns it emits water vapor and zero harmful emissions for the atmosphere, our House would become the first Bioregion in Europe!

Some not disinterested accuse the Sardinian Union of being against companies and entrepreneurs, companies and private, public and para-public funds. None of this. On the contrary, we have respect for people, companies and institutions, without however being impressed by threats and complaints that have the purpose of inhibiting the editing of this newspaper in the honest and free exercise of the journalistic profession. Rather, we are against acts, behaviors and facts that damage our common home. And we look with disenchantment at those who still try to intort us, telling the fable that the compromise of the landscape is necessary for development and employment, while it is a question of destruction or hoarding of value.

We do not believe the bloated bullshit of these people when they come here, worried about unemployed young people and redundant parents, only to discover that it is only hairy attention while what they want is just sucking our lifeblood.

We know why some visit us, honeyed and obsequious: to multiply the invested capital n times with the stratospheric income guaranteed by ministerial connivance and some even local. Billions of euro of stock market value are confiscated, with no real and positive repercussions on the territory marred by ruinous ugliness, often with only the authorization in hand that, kneeling, someone gives them.

This says the map of our House.

It would be different if they came to invest in productive activities worthy of the name: we could spread red carpets at their feet, to accompany them on the path of protection and development of Sardinia.

We all have the moral duty to defend the house that is falling into ruin, in the common interest and not to expose ourselves, guilty, to the severe judgment of history, children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. So let's leave aside the reasons that divide us, as per tradition. Let everyone profess the political ideas they like best; which discusses maximum systems: independence and sovereignty, war and peace, geopolitics and international law. And let the virus of social envy continue to gnaw and consume us as well. But on the concrete interests of Sardinia we do, each of us, something to defend them. Even a little, but let's do it. We will gain in self-esteem, and with pride we will be able to tell it to children and grandchildren.

Regional and local institutions, parliamentarians, mayors and clergy; universities, professional associations and business, trade union and environmental associations; media outlets on paper and on the web and the world of arts and culture: let's unite, at least once, on one point: let's defend the House of the Sardinian Family, to hand it over in all its beauty to future generations. And let's do it full of hope, like the miller who said confidently to the overbearing Saxon prince, who wanted to prevent him from using the river water for his mill: "There will even be a judge in Berlin!" So we: there will also be a judge, somewhere, in Cagliari or Rome, in Strasbourg or in Luxembourg, who recognizes us the right to live in our clean and tidy home, in which to create collective wealth and spread well-being. The weapon of legitimate defense is the challenge, in all locations, of every single bureaucratic step, even the smallest one, concerning activities harmful to the community to which we belong. To those who come with predatory intent we also challenge the receipt of the coffee!

Francesco Cocco Ortu, founder of this newspaper in 1889, which he wanted to call, not surprisingly, the Sardinian Union, would appreciate, and our descendants would be happy.

SERGIO ZUNCHEDDU

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