Hunting in Puglia: Salento hunters unhappy with some hunting areas soon reduced to make room for photovoltaics.
Salento hunters complain that the scrub areas reserved for hunting have been and will be reduced to make space for photovoltaic installations. In fact, a myriad of companies, many of them foreign, find it convenient to invest in Puglia in industrial photovoltaics and wind power, given that the regional law relating to the production of energy from renewable sources, first in Italy proposes facilitations in the settlement phases, but all this is proving tremendously devastating for the territory, marred, in the meantime, by solar panels and huge wind generators.
The environmental associations, for this very reason, are denouncing the crime of environmental disaster perpetrated indiscriminately on this territory. The regional section of Italia nostra has instructed its lawyers to notify the administrators of the municipalities of the greater Salento (provinces of Lecce, Brindisi and Taranto) to suspend the authorizations for wind, photovoltaic and biomass energy plants with a strong environmental impact. hitherto granted with ease even on areas with landscape restrictions. "It passes itself off as an activity that would seem positive, since it concerns renewable energy, with operations that are in fact highly speculative, says Marcello Seclì, president of Italia nostra-sud Salento. In reality there are supranational interests at stake, of companies that invest large capital in this area with the sole intent of laundering dirty money. The companies almost all come from central and northern Europe; if there are local ones, they are intermediaries, mere figureheads. Southern Italy is still a frontier land to be used and exploited».