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| Betterworldclub.com |
Carl Sagan- an American astronomer,
cosmologist, astrophysicist and astrobiologist- has a quote that begins with saying that “anything else
you’re interested in is not going to happen if you can’t breathe the air and
drink the water. Don’t sit this one out. Do something.”
On the basis of our society heading towards a place where normal everyday tasks are going to become harder
to accomplish because of our present habits, I think that we do have a moral
obligation to our future generations to take action now and begin to
rehabilitate our planet. We’re currently dealing with problems that are pretty
much irreversible at the moment- like the ozone layer depletion and the loss of
biodiversity. I believe that, if we continue to ignore these problems and continuously
push them down road to be discussed at a later time, there will be no future-
and if there is a future, then that society will not be anything close to our
current society.
Because of my belief that we do
have an obligation to help, I was very happy to find out that Italy has many
organizations dedicated towards providing solutions to the environmental problems
they face.
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| Pangeatoday.com |
Italy is home to 15 out of the 30 cities that have the worst air pollution in Europe. The air pollution, due to
traffic in their most populous cities and their heavy industrialization in cities
like Turin and Brescia, is held accountable for about 30,000 deaths every year- which is about 7% of all deaths that occur in Italy annually. Needless to say,
air pollution is Italy’s biggest environmental problem.
Unfortunately, their
environmental problems don’t end there. Water pollution is also a huge problem
in Italy, mostly due to Italy's many illegal, toxic waste dumps- like the one
in the town of Bussi
sul Tirino that has been
polluting the rivers and aquifers since the early 1960s.
In 2014, from May to
December, the city of Rome- known during the Roman Empire for it’s channeling
of fresh water- was forced to put a ban on using public water. Filled with high levels of arsenic and fluoride, the water in the north western part of the city
was deemed unsuitable for human consumption, forcing the mayor of Rome- Ignazio
Marino- and the Italian government to come up with a solution in the 10-month
time span that would restore the purity in the water. By July of 2014, it was
reported that the mission had failed, prompting the European Commission into opening infringement proceedings against Italy.
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| Greenpeace.org |
While
Italy doesn’t currently have a branch of Water.org, there are many
organizations in Italy that are currently working towards making the country
better. Greenpeace’s Italian division is the most notable, and is currently making strides towards ending offshore drilling.
The current biggest Italian started environmental group- with 20 regional branches and more than 115,000 members- is called Legambiente. Legambiente (or League for the Environment) uses non-violent
and democratic methods to draw attention towards the global and international
consequences of globalization.
There’s
also a group called Rientrodolce, which is associated with the Radicali
Italiani (Radical Italians). This group focuses on the problem of overpopulation, which they consider to be the main cause of the planet’s environmental
crises, and works to introduce the idea of a “mild return” to a planet of 2
billion people. The idea, which I do consider to be very radical, comes from
Marco Pannella.
Italy
also has the Italian National Institute for Environmental Protection andResearch (ISPRA) that is a public entity under the Italian Ministry of Environment,
Territory and Sea that monitors, controls, researches, etc. everything to do
with Italian environmental life.
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