Wilderness Italia on the situation of the Italian Parks, how to consider them? Added value or imperial constraints? Zunino's considerations of the AIW in particular on the Ernici Mountains.
I was also a trade unionist, if only as an internal member of the Abruzzo National Park, and I had always wondered (at the time) what the unions were for, which thought of everything except defending employees from the abuses of their employers. Now I discover that the trade unionists also take care of the Parks, of their institution, mind you, not of their employees (which would be logical). Parks which are institutions whose aims are or rather, should be, the conservation of Nature, but which instead in our country have become useless wagons for trumpet politicians and their friends (also trade unionists: professions often stepping stones towards the politics, as the history of Italy teaches us). Yes, now I discover that even the trade unionists are fighting for the Parks, which do not already create jobs, but they undo them as the history of the existing Parks teaches. Yet they define the Parks as an "added value": added value to what? Added to the poltronificio of politics, I presume, given that for the inhabitants who suffer them the Parks are above all imperial constraints placed on the heads of citizens and municipalities.
The Park seen as an "opportunity for development": a contradiction in terms! But do these trade unionists know what a park means? What are its aims? If we want to create an opportunity for development, we need to free the territories that are currently bound, because only by releasing them can we then speak of free entrepreneurial initiative to create development. If anything, the solution is not to create a park, but to create protected areas limited to what is strictly necessary. In Italy the Parks should be reduced by perhaps even 50% (and in number and extension), if we wanted to bring them back to their true aims of conservation of natural heritage worthy of defense.
It is not the bad management of the Parks that “penalizes” the territory. It is their very existence! That it is the Municipalities and the private owners who establish which territories they want to be bound, they themselves assume the constraints they want to impose to safeguard what deserves to be safeguarded, ensuring all the rights of use and attendance by their citizens.
Don't these trade unionists know that all the billions that the State and the Regions pay for the management of the Abruzzo Park are used to pay salaries to dozens of useless employees (which good management should never have allowed to hire!)? They know that the Abruzzo Park is without a euro to compensate the Municipalities for the restrictions on the woods that the Park would rightly want to establish (because otherwise the Municipalities remain free to carry out forest cuts as they see fit, because in the event of a veto the the law provides for compensation; compensation that cannot be paid without money) and for sowing land in favor of the bear, not to mention the payment of damage to the fauna? Or do they believe that a park is necessarily needed to do this? The bandwagon? While municipal commitments supported by state and / or regional contributions would be enough. Or maybe you want the park just to be able to impose useless and oppressive hunting bans? Or, worse, to do everything and more as if the park was not there (as indeed happens in most Italian parks) except for the ban on hunting: this is mandatory!
A park to force municipalities and private individuals to make continuous requests for every small initiative that concerns their freedom to act in their home? Or instead, do you just want a Park to be able to give the positions of President and Director to some friends of your friends? There is no need for a park to develop a territory. A Park is to bind it! And with the constraints, no form of synergy has ever been created that creates development, precisely because it is a contradiction in terms. No municipality of Italy where there are Parks is happy with the choices made by their administrators. And to find out, you need to talk to the people, not to the mayors who may have obtained a seat on the Boards of Directors when not on the presidencies of these useless bodies. So, let's save the Ernici, but let's also save them from a Park!
Signed by Franco Zunino
General Secretary of the AIW and Director of ATC FR1
(September 9, 2013)