In the mud from head to toe to help Emilia Romagna affected by the climate crisis

While public figures such as Enrico Mentana and the Minister for Civil Protection Nello Musumeci, with a distorted narrative, have singled out environmental activists as “environmental fundamentalists”, dozens of activists of XR and other environmental movements have collected comfort goods and necessity and subsequently, from the moment in which the roads were accessible, they reached the areas affected by the region and other areas of Italy, bringing with them comfort goods and materials to contribute to the works, without television cameras for propaganda purposes, but purely solidarity towards a population affected by the climate crisis. They didn’t send around their photos, with XR shovel and logo, and in response they had to read statements like those of Enrico Mentana, who accuses them of having missed an opportunity, and of not knowing what it means to be militancy. This news is patently false. For example, the Extinction Rebellion Faenza group, supported by many XR Bologna activists, was among the first to organize themselves to go and lend a hand, without however flaunting it to the rooftops of social media and without calling the press.

We asked for their statement: “We are experiencing the effects of an already announced climatic catastrophe, amplified by soil consumption and wild overbuilding. In Faenza there is an urbanization project for villas in the Ghilana area near the river, land flooded by the flood . In Faenza we want to build a new ring road and expand the industrial plants. Between one flood and another in Faenza a biomass power plant caught fire, the fire could have had disastrous effects. The safety zone is increasingly restricted. We of Extinction Rebellion we are in the mud from head to toe like everyone else helping neighbors, friends and relatives and strangers.As in the flood, everyone does what they can and we see great solidarity, we must all take action, unite, to save what can be saved. “

We ask that news programs help viewers understand how Extinction Rebellion activists and other movements do nothing but amplify the alarm cry of the scientific community: if we continue to burn fossil fuels, we will experience an ups and downs of droughts and floods, earth fertile reduced to dust and mud to shovel and lives to mourn. On the contrary, when the count of the dead caused by this climate catastrophe is not over yet, Mentana uses his public space to argue against those who raised the alarm and used nonviolent civil disobedience to protest against inertia and the lack of mitigation and adaptation policies that stem the climate apocalypse we are heading towards.

The intervention of Minister Musumeci is also out of place: we don’t want to get used to “living with the climate emergency”, we want to put an end to this ecological crisis, we want governments, starting with yours, to get serious about it.
We will continue to fight every day, with all the means we have, to denounce the flaws of failed political management and force governments to act immediately.

(Extinction Rebellion Faenza)