Lost landscapes

One of my abiding memories of our first trip to Puglia in October 2015 was the drive from Alberobello to the coast. The upland area around Alberobello is covered with trulli, basically they are dry-stone built cottages, but their unique conical shape makes them look like something out of Middle-earth, Hobbiton on the Hill for real. One minute we were in the Shire then suddenly we reached a steep escarpment and glimpsed Puglia's broad littoral with the bright blue Adriatic in the distance. It felt like going from one world to another, as I wrote then, 'Soon we were dropping down from the hills around Monte Signora Pulita into an endless jungle of olive groves covering the coastal plain'. 

Last week we had a coffee in Bar Perso high up above Ostuni's ramparts, it had a panoramic view too, the seemingly endless olive tree jungle still there to be seen. 

Now though it is a much rarer sight, in just seven years millions of Puglia's olive trees have succumbed to a deadly disease. The Xylella fastidiosa pathogen is thought to have been introduced into Italy from infected house plants imported from Costa Rica. The disease restricts plants' capacity to absorb water and nutrients and eventually it kills them. Xylella can infect a variety of fruit trees such as cherry and almonds but it is the olive that has been most severely affected. In Puglia millions of trees have died. Salento's ancient groves are peppered with dead or dying trees.

In some places the devastation is such that it has created a stark, almost post-apocalyptic landscape, as this drone shot taken from an article in New Scientist illustrates.

The response to the disaster has been chaotic. Some experts recommended felling the affected trees, burning them, then replanting with more disease resistant varieties. Others are developing less dramatic interventions, leaving the old rootstock in place while grafting on hardier varieties, like the winemakers did in the late nineteenth century when faced with phylloxera. The reaction among the olive growers themselves has been equally mixed, which is unsurprising given that they range in size from multi-national agro businesses to tiny family owned plots with a dozen or two trees. The corporates were reluctant to do anything for before a compensation scheme was agreed, and that ended up in a political impasse. Some of the smaller growers were convinced in the early stages that the outbreak was a hoax. Others simply could not bring themselves to destroy trees that were hundreds of years old, regarding the prospect as tantamount to desecration. By the time people realised the extent of the problem it was too late to do much about it.

After I read about the debacle I was reminded of the plot of last year's Oscar winning black comedy, 'Don't Look Up'. Faced with an existential threat, not everyone pulls together to avert the crisis, some people go into denial, others see it as an opportunity to make a quick buck, become fatalistic or blame 'the hand of God'. This doesn't bode well for our collective capacity to adjust to living with climate change.

It is interesting to reflect on how there are some big changes we can cope with but others we can't deal with at all. It was while we were cycling up the re-purposed donkey track into Lecce from Agriturismo Arangea that I began to think about all this. The arable land between the agriturismo and Lecce is divided-up by two metre high stone walls - delineating long established estate boundaries, I presume. Narrow tracks wind in-between the walls, it felt oddly claustrophobic cycling through the maze.

 

 One of them, 'Via Copertino'  has been designated as a cycleway into Lecce, though nothing has been done to improve its pot-holed surface nor tidy up the bags of refuse dumped alongside it.

Each of the ancient walled estates contains a farmhouse, some single storied, others more like villas, a couple almost small palacios. Some were still lived in, a few had been recently restored and looked quite swanky but most were half-ruined and abandoned. 

 

Big or small, occupied or derelict they all had impressive entrances with elaborate wrought iron gates and a broad drive way. Despite the occasional restoration project, it all looked somewhat forlorn. 

Not only were most of the farmhouses ruined but the land itself looked semi-derelict, not struck by a disaster like the olive groves, but abandoned gradually over the past few decades, a once thriving local agricultural economy that had simply withered away. 

I imagine the area was once Lecce's market garden, that much of the produce thirty years ago was locally grown. Then like everywhere else supply chains became regional, then national and finally global, squeezing out local growers. Italy is not quite so hooked on intercontinental fruit and veg as the UK, but still Lidl reigns supreme, and though most of the fresh produce is Italian it arrives by artic. from a distribution centre, not in an Apé from a nearby smallholding.

Not that this abandoned landscape was necessarily all about smallholdings, one of the derelict buildings was enormous, a big factory of some sort, maybe a major olive oil producer, but I am just guessing.

In my darker moments I do wonder if we face a future of lost habitats, that climate change presages a sixth mass extinction event. Our species may not necessarily be doomed to disappear, but surely our hi-tech resource hungry culture isn't sustainable in the long term. However, unless Vladimir decides to go for the nuclear option I don't think civilization will collapse in my lifetime, but quite what the world will look like when my kids are in their sixties is another matter. These are not matters I dwell upon, since it's not something I can influence nor do anything about. Instead I try to stay positive and enjoy life. However, it is fair to say my alter ego finds staying optimistic much more challenging!