Lindipendente

While the tourist season is in full swing, it is now impossible to swim on the coast of Orbetello due to the presence of thousands of dead fish on the surface of the water.I am already over one hundred quintals of carcasses collected, while the dense, brown water flows out of the lagoon and into the Tyrrhenian Sea, making the beaches inhospitable, where there are such high levels of Escherichia coli and intestinal enterococci that they have pushed the authorities to prevent bathing.The mayor of the Tuscan town he called for a state of calamity and aid from the government.According to experts, two factors caused the disaster:fertilizers and the extremely warm temperature of the waters. From the first light of dawn on Saturday 27 July, operators have been busy monitoring, controlling and collecting fish carcasses in Tuscan waters, also with the aid of small boats.Orbetello is a lagoon with poor water circulation:for this reason, the fertilizers used in the fields that flow into the sea e...

Not only in Sardinia, the great works of the so-called "green energy" have arrived throughout Italy, starting from the south and reaching the center.This is the case of Tuscany, where for a year now citizens, committees and environmental groups have been fighting to preserve the the Mugello area is already at risk.The project for the Tuscany Region is always the same:planting towers 170 meters high, «as high as two Giotto bell towers one on top of the other», in natural areas close to the mountain, close to protected reserves, with reinforced concrete bases the size of half a football field. Land consumption, serious impact on the environment, hydrogeological instability, these are some of the risks faced by Mugello, reported by a group of groups in one open letter against wind speculation.Among these, the Committee for the protection of the Mugello ridges, one of the associations active in defense of the territory, which explained to The Independent the situation...

Ikea returns to the center of the storm, after a final investigation by Greenpeace following which the environmental organization launched an unprecedented petition:“Ikea says that the home is the place where everything begins”, but we must prevent “old forests from ending up in our homes”.This is the slogan that revolves around the new collection of signatures of the environmentalist organization, founded on a latter investigation which notes how seven Romanian companies that work and produce furniture for the Swedish multinational appear to obtain their wood from some of the last old-growth forests in Europe, located in the country's Carpathians.These, specifically, are forests that should be particularly protected because not affected by human beings since ancient times, and therefore equipped with characteristics similar to ancient primary forests.Although they are in theory protected by EU legislation, the Romanian forests and their probable exploitati...

On Tuesday 6 August the Meloni Government appointed Enrico Caterino, former prefect of Rovigo and Ravenna, as extraordinary commissioner to deal with the emergency linked to the proliferation of the blue crab in Italian waters.This decision responds to growing concerns regarding the serious economic and ecological impact caused by the spread of this invasive species, particularly in the Adriatic Sea.According to the Minister of the Environment, Gilberto Pichetto Fratin, the blue crab is threatening not only various economic activities, but also the entire marine ecosystem. The invasion of the blue crab (so called because of the color of its carapace), known scientifically as Callinectes sapidus, has started to cause alarm since 2020, despite the fact that specimens have been spotted in our waters since the mid-1990s.Native to the western coasts of the American continent, the blue crab arrived in the Mediterranean Sea via the “ballasts” of transatlantic ships, which capture...

In Serbia there is once again a major open conflict between the government and the peasants.The object of the dispute is the project, on which the executive led by Aleksandar Vučić has put the brand, of open a huge lithium mine in the agricultural valley of Jadar, in the western part of the country.In fact, the area contains one of the largest lithium deposits in Europe, an essential mineral for the production of electric car batteries.And while the government emphasizes the fact that the mine is a great opportunity for the economic development of the country and for the multiplication of jobs, farmers, environmentalist movements and critics get in the way, stating that the operations would produce an irreparable pollution of groundwater and rivers that cross the valley, with possible contamination of agricultural land.Today, in Belgrade, a large demonstration will take place which will bring together thousands of people, who will ask for a law that bans the extraction of lit...