The journey on the Palinuro ship: “This is how we tell the risks of the changing sea”

There is a totem that says this: 6 years, 59 days, 9 hours. “It should be updated constantly”, explains President Marevivo gravely, Rosalba Giugni. It summarizes the countdown to the so-called point of no return, i.e. the time left to limit the increase in the planet’s average global temperature to within 1.5°. The invitation accompanying it is disturbing, but absolutely necessary: ​​”The time is recorded on May 20, 2023, the production date of this exhibition. Calculate how much is left”. And Alex Steffen’s aphorism: “When we talk about the climate crisis, winning slowly equals losing”.

On the Palinuro School Ship anchored in the port of Naples there are seafaring details of absolute beauty, knotted ropes and three mighty masts, square sails arm the forward one, the foremast. A thousand square meters that enhance the seafaring vocation of the country. And it is from here that the last of the possible alarms against the climate crisis: conveyed by the exhibition created as part of the international campaign “Only One: One Planet, One Ocean, One Health“, from I am alive with Navy and **Dohrn Foundation (**and the patronage of the Ministry of the Environment and Energy Security and the Ministry of Civil Protection and Marine Policies).

The itinerary tells the state of health of the sea, amplifying increasingly disturbing alarm bells. One above all: the plastic. “Because the Mediterranean is a semi-enclosed basin which, due to the high urbanization of the coasts and the presence of the mouths of numerous rivers, is among the most polluted seas in the world, with an average density of 1.25 million plastic fragments per square kilometer – he explains Ferdinand Boer, Marevivo vice president and president of the Dohrn Foundation. That’s right: 380 million tons of plastic per year which will become 500, or more, in 2050. Hence the call to arms.

“Only through awareness can we think of facing the difficult future that humanity faces. – says Giugni – We must find a solution to mitigate the effects of climate change and, at the same time, to implement the ecological transition, a present theme in the exhibition that accompanies all phases of the campaign”.

A journey, that of Palinuro, which began in Spice and that after Naples, where the exhibition was officially presented last Monday, it will touch – with the students of the Francesco Morosini Naval School on board – 18 Mediterranean ports, including Milazzo, Genoa, Salerno, La Maddalena, Messina, Brindisi, the island of Cyprus, Athens, Montenegro, Venice and Trieste. In many of the ports, Marevivo will organize moments of study and awareness.

And the Amerigo Vespucci, another training ship of the Navy, will also set sail on July 1 from La Spezia, bringing with it a message for sustainability and the circular economy. “After all, we have been collaborating for some time with the Marevivo association, with which we share the great attention towards all aspects of the maritime dimension, from the environmental ones to those linked to food and energy transitions”, underlined the team admiral Salvatore Vitiello, logistic commander of the Navy. And therefore there is room for the issues of energy, ecological and food transition, for the concept of circular economy, for plastic pollution and on the warming of seas and oceans: the exhibition can also be visited at the national headquarters in Marevivo.

“The goal is to promote marine literacy to as many people as possible, as the European Union asks us”, adds Boero. Because if it is true, as Marevivo’s number one points out, that “fortunately there are no longer the so-called climate deniers, who have now surrendered to the evidence”, it is equally true that we do not know everything about the sea and its inhabitants, and still more than the increasingly precarious balances that govern it. “Do you know that the most important animals in the world, due to their function in the trophic chain, are the copepods, a group of very small crustaceans, rarely longer than 1 or 2 millimeters”, Boerio asks the intrigued public in Naples, in the shade of the sails of Palinuro.

And here, in a morning of discussion, we also talk about food patterns, overfishing, intensive farming, habitat destruction and deforestation, Posidonia oceanica and the tortuous process of Salvamare Law. “A true paradox is that a year has already passed since its approval, which we laboriously obtained after 4 years of battles, and the law is not yet operational because there are no implementing decrees. – Giugni denounces – It is urgent to give the go-ahead as soon as possible to a law that allows fishermen to deposit plastic recovered with nets in ports, instead of throwing it back into the sea, and to be able to install waste collection systems at the mouths of rivers”.

During the event on the Nave Palinuro the third edition of the First Green Literary Prize was also presented “Earth Pages“, designed by Claudio Cutuli and from Vera Slepoj, dedicated to environmental issues and born with the aim of placing the writer and the literary work at the center of an educational content capable, like all literary novels, of changing the vision of the world. Registrations open until 30 July, three finalists will access the award ceremony scheduled for 14 September 2023 at the Archaeological Park of Pompeii.