From the Romagna Apennines to the Amazon, from the Bidente River to the Bobonaza River in Ecuador is the leitmotif of the book edited by Federica Falancia ‘I guardiani della terra. Se il fiume mi parla’, published by Generis Publishing and soon also available as an e-book. A jurist, anthropologist and researcher at the Euro-American Research Center on Constitutional Ecological Policies at the University of Salento, a law professor at the Galvani high school in Bologna, Falancia holds seminars at various Italian and foreign universities. Rooted in Abruzzo and Santasofi, her family lives in the municipality of the Bidente Valley. And it is precisely from the forests of the Tuscan-Romagnolo Apennines and the waters of the Bidente that the author has drawn inspiration for a book that is technically well-structured, but where the feeling and love for the forest and the people who live there continually emerges. “Being in nature in the woods and along the Bidente helped me to feel more and more clearly – the author specifies – the prejudice of man’s superiority over everything that is not human and motivated me to look for people who live a relationship with nature and the planet different from the Western one. This is how I discovered the case of the Kickwa Sarayaku of the Ecuadorian Amazon and their judicial victory before the International Court of Human Rights against oil extraction”. Thus, thanks to a scholarship from the University of Bologna, she joined them in 2018 for a field research that lasted until 2021. “In 2012 – she concludes – the High Court issued a condemnation of the state of Ecuador, a historic sentence that meant a lot to all the indigenous peoples of the world”.
Oscar Bandini
