The Forest Annihilation of Sardinia

1. juniper in the dunes of Piscinas, Arbus, Sardinia.

"Once poor Sardinia was called a granary of Rome;now it is not worthy of such fame.The garden, the farm, the olive grove of ancient times, has become a sad and thorny calvary.Woods in which never filtered sunshine, wretched jackets have clothed and place have stripped. Majestic trees that shed houses, to make the continental fat, have defied tides and invisible waves [...] He is a coward who opened the doors to the stranger who came with a saw to make this place a desert. The Vandals fought furiously coming from far away to share the fruits, after the earth burned.Let us hope that this painful state of affairs will soon end: too many of us are tired of suffering"

Translation of an extract from the letter to Nanni Sulis, by the poet Peppino Mereu(1895).

2. Eleonora, judicata of Arborea, last autochthonous judged of Sardinia to be ceded to rulers outside the island.

Until 1827, throughout the Sardinian territory, remained in force the Carta de Logu, a collection of laws written in Sardinian language, proposed by Mariano IV judge of Arborea, and updated and promulgated on 14 April 1392 by his daughter Eleonora d'Arborea. It was then the King of Aragon Alfonso V "the Magnanimous", in 1421, to confirm the Charter of Eleonora within the seat of the parlament of Cagliari, extending its applicability to the whole island.

The text, through a series of rules that survived despite the succession of foreign dominations, represents an important point in the path towards the current "rule of law"and a very modern vision of key issues such as the importance of coherence in social relations, the protection of the position of women, the defense of the territory: To the latter, in particular, the right of private property was not applied, and identified the large woodlands as commonplaces, accessible to all the people, who could benefit from it and, at the same time, have the duty to take care of it.

3. Sardinian mouflon

It was therefore a question of protecting a millenary tradition, through which the life and livelihood of the Sardinian people were inextricably linked through a symbiotic relationship with those forest, plant and fauna resources, which were kept luxuriant thanks to the preservation carried out by its own inhabitants. All this guaranteed the maintenance of the humid and temperate microclimate that had always characterized the territory. This report, however, was torn, if not incinerated, by the regime of the viceroy Carlo Felice di Savoia (the lord raised to a statue in Piazza Yenne in Cagliari), and by the Royal Edict of the closends in the Kingdom of Sardinia: issued on 6 October 1820 by King Vittorio Emanuele I, it formalised the authorisation of the enclosure of land which was traditionally considered to be of collective ownership, on the pretext of modernising its appearance and accelerating the development of an agriculture considered antiquated. With the privatization of land began throughout the island a spread of abuses by those who «They had no loathing to encircle immense areas of land [...] to the sole object of making peasants pay a high price to the shepherds for the right to sow there and the right to graze their herds.»

The Kingdom of Sardinia was in fact formally incorporated into the domains of the House of Savoy as an effect of the Treaty of Utrecht from about 1720, but the new rulers in the whole century never visited the territory directly, and appointed a viceroy to carry out the administrative activity;The situation changed when the family was forced to take refuge in Cagliari following pressure from the Napoleonic army in 1799. The interest in the island resources (which until then was limited to the maintenance of relations with the noble class) was kindled by the aforesaid Royal Edict of the Closends of 1827 and resulted in the Perfect Fusion of 1847, that is the political and administrative union between the Kingdom of Sardinia and the Mainland states owned by the Savoy, with the consequent application of the Albertino Statute. In addition to the destruction of the Sardinian regulatory and governmental system, An unconscious campaign of forest exploitation was launched to feed the nascent industries of northern Italy and to provide raw materials that the Savoy kingdom traded in Europe for the maintenance of good diplomatic relations with the other European states of the time.

4. Primary holm oak in the forest of Montes, in the Supramonte of Orgosolo. Photo by Franco Delogu

The documents testify that it was between 1820 and 1883 that the forest cover of the island was reduced by four fifths reaching the maximum intensity of deforestation in 1847, made to provide raw material to foundries and for the production of coal, the creation of pastures, and wood for sleepers used in the Piedmont and Lombardy railways. After the Unification of Italy the demand for fuel became more pressing; at the same time the discontent of the lower classes grew towards an oppressive state. In the internal territories revolts broke out and then the phenomenon of banditry followed, and many were the forests incinerated to find the fugitives who took refuge in them.Between 1863 and 1910 the Italian State promoted and authorized the felling of virgin forests for the total extension of 586,000 hectares.

The transformation of the environment was accompanied by the exponential establishment of dairy farms, as sheep farming became the main activity, logical consequence of the reduction of game.The doors were opened to Lazio entrepreneurs for the production of pecorino cheese.

Antonio Gramsci, in an article published in 1918 in Avanti! entitled "Gli spogliatoi di cadaveri", exposed this destruction, pointing the finger at the great coal industrialists, who took advantage of "a people on their knees" through an exploitation paid "for little money [..] The Island of Sardinia was literally razed to the ground like a barbarian invasion.The forests fell, regulating the climate and the average rainfall. [.. ] Sardinia today alternates with long dry seasons and flooding showers, we inherited then.