They speak Arci Massa Carrara and Arci Toscana clubs: “The off-air statements released by the owner of one of the major Carrara marble companies, according to which the workers who suffer accidents in the quarries are improvident morons, themselves the cause of their own misfortune, says a lot about the way of thinking of the class entrepreneur from Carrara and Apuana. If it is not possible to generalize, it should be highlighted that the same “friendly” reaction of the president of Confindustria Massa-Carrara, present at the interview, certainly does not help to nourish more positive thoughts other eras whose impact, as the everyday news reminds us, is still very present not only in the most backward areas of the south but also in the north, in Tuscany and in Massa-Carrara. A similar ancestral subculture is capable of largely nullifying the more modern regulations regarding workplace safety and, in the case of marble quarries, public safety itself. As ARCI we ask ourselves whether, faced with an employer of this kind who, in addition to a clear indifference towards the environment, demonstrates a cynical contempt towards its own direct collaborators, the State, in all its aspects, must develop adequate action at least to contain so much cynicism and so much voracity. Recently, together with other national environmental associations (CAI, Legambiente, WWF, Italia Nostra, Mountain Wilderness), we declared that the Apuan Alps are strongly compromised by a voracious extractivism which has reduced an already flourishing marble area into a mining district, with a consequent loss of knowledge, employment, wealth and, last but not least, social cohesion. Together we have recognized that, also in other parts of the world, through the appropriation of natural riches but also, more generally, of data, knowledge and skills, economic powers tend to place themselves in a commanding position in the overall structure of the capitalism and therefore also of conditioning, if not of employment, of the same institutional structures.
Strongly concerned about an inadequacy of the regulatory framework that regulates the carrying out of extractive activities in our region and the protection of the Apuan Alps, a unique heritage of bio and geo-diversity, we have identified some transitory but achievable objectives in the short term, in the presence of a strong political will that opposes the heavy industrial offensive for further “expropriation” to the detriment of local communities and Apuan ecosystems, an offensive that makes its way through the spaces permitted by current regional legislation and in inertia, when not in the complicity of different institutional levels. First of all, a redefinition of the quotas that can be excavated in the Apuan Alps is necessary based on the sustainability of its ecosystems and the processing capabilities of the local stone product chain, not on the potential deriving from the demand of the construction industry and foreign exports, in other terms of the voracity of the world market. We have also identified the need to overcome the mining monoculture by encouraging the reconstruction of a modern marble supply chain and the concrete encouragement of virtuous socio-economic processes, through the establishment of new, more eco-sustainable activities, but also the urgency of refinancing and reactivating the checks on the quarries by ARPAT and other judicial police bodies, as well as leading to a real and progressive exclusion of any extractive activity in the Apuan Alps Park. Last but not least, the full reaffirmation of existing public and collective properties in the Apuan Alps, which over time have been the object of usurpations, occupations and claims by the extractive industry. Like Arci, looking beyond the delirious utterances of a marble entrepreneur which, in the light of experience, we could all imagine, we reconfirm our commitment to a profound transformation of the current Apuan-Versilia economic model which has inevitably brought about the indifference towards nature and contempt for human beings, themselves an inseparable part of nature”.
