Free Apunae © AL
Dozens of volunteers from the Apuane Libere association displayed protest banners during the first Florence-Rimini stage of “La Grande Boucle”: the most famous professional road cycling stage race in the world, which this year saw for first time leaving Tuscany. A huge red sheet of 180 square meters with the writing “Let’s liberate the Apuan Alps” and a smaller yellow one with the French and English translations of the motto “Help the Apuan Alps”, were displayed near the finishing line of the Mountain Grand Prix at the Valico Tre Faggi on the border between Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna.
“There are still too many people in the world who ignore this real ecocide that is pulverizing an entire mountain range that arose from the sea millions and millions of years ago, rich in exclusive flora and fauna and enclosed within a UNESCO World Geopark, only for vile private interests related to the extraction of marble. With this demonstrative gesture we wanted to inform sportsmen from all over the world that with the marble of the Apuan Alps, known worldwide thanks to the sculptural masterpieces of Michelangelo, Canova and Bernini, today they only produce cement glues, toothpaste whiteners and toilets for the palaces of Arab sheiks and this is why we point the finger at the wicked environmental policies, carried out for decades by those who govern the Tuscany Region.
In fact, thanks to this ecological short-sightedness carried out in recent decades on this mountain range, many extraction sites now renaturalized and closed for decades have been eagerly reopened, bringing further millionaire profits to the devastating mining industry to the detriment of people’s health and the environment, the whose peak is represented by the pollution of the largest drinking water system in the entire Tuscany region.
“If there is a biological holocaust in Italy – explains President Gianluca Briccolani – it is prevalent in Tuscany in the Apuan Alps, where our activists do not hesitate to produce environmental complaints for overbuilding and pollution of the beds of ditches, streams and rivers, animal species and endemic floral plants completely wiped out by the fury of the caterpillars, wild deforestation of Natura 2000 sites, the presence of real open-air landfills of rubber, plastic, ferrous materials and even asbestos, damage to treasury assets due to evasion of millions of euros, not respect for workplace safety (resulting in deaths and injuries) and infiltration by organized crime. We launched our cry of pain right from the hills above the cradle of the Renaissance, that beautiful Florence which received so much from the precious belly of the Apuan Alps, to say enough to this vile massacre: we Florentine and Tuscan environmentalists will not remain idle in the face of this ecological and ecosystem drama.
We demand from the Tuscany Region – continues the president – the establishment of a National Park where finally the animal and plant species, the geological, landscape and microclimatic peculiarities, the historical archaeological heritage and the natural elements such as water and air, are truly safeguarded: even more so after the approval of the brand new European regulation Nature Restoration Law, which obliges member states to restore all compromised habitats: starting from that now halved hydrographic network that has led to the reduction, destruction and pollution of the vital element water, which in the Apuan Alps represents the primary good for the entire population.
We are certain – concludes Briccolani – that a noble and clean sport like cycling will not remain indifferent to this environmental disaster of global proportions and will help us take our fight for environmental justice beyond national borders.”
For information
Apuane Libere Press Office
Phone + 39 3338514003
e-mail [email protected]
