“The ghosts of the landscape whisper the futures of this land”.
Centuries-old desiccated olive trees burn in the Paduli park, a beautiful and fertile valley of Salento that was known as a “farmed forest”. During the hot summer, fires break out very easily, with the flames consuming the dry grass in a matter of minutes. It is only after a while that smoke begins to rise from the trees, which then burn for hours until they collapse under their own weight with a terrifying sound, leaving a pile of smouldering ashes.
Most of the olive trees of Salento are now dead or dying, and with most of the region's youth emigrating of eking out a living in the tourism industry, the Xylella outbreak has meant the definitive abandonment of vast swathes of the countryside, with nobody tending to the fields and cutting the grass. Combined with increasingly dry and hot summers, this abandonment means that during the summer months Salento is essentially a tinderbox.
This summer, the authorities reported more than 60 fires per day, stretching the emergency services beyond their limited capabilities, and leaving a persistent pall of smoke over Salento. Some say the fires are lit by the owner of the trees themselves, frustrated at the complex bureaucratic procedures required to eradicate the dead olive trees in order to re-plant. But while Italian law still protects olive trees even when they have been dead for years, nobody cares if they burn.
It can take thousands of litres of water to extinguish a burning olive tree, an effort that seems somewhat pointless considering that the trees are already dead. As a result, the fire brigade and the civil protection volunteers limit themselves to making sure the fires don't spread to the neighbouring fields, and leave the olive trees to burn and crumble into ashes.
After years of arguing about how “to save the olive trees of Puglia”, there is something strangely cathartic about walking through a burning olive grove at night. Whatever one's opinions are about about the Xylella fastidiosa outbreak, about the measures put forward to contain it or about the monocultural nature of olive oil cultivation in Salento, it is obvious that a thousand-years old story is coming to an end, and something new is about to begin.
An olive tree affected by Xylella fastidiosa. It is becoming increasingly hard to find non-affected trees in Salento, with symptoms appearing as far as 80 km away from the initial outbreak. And yet there are still some healthy olive trees, whether because they are of the Leccino variety, which appears to be able to withstand the bacteria, or because of some other reason that we still don't understand.
What remains of the Giant of Alliste, possibly the largest and oldest olive tree in Puglia. All sorts of treatments and remedies have been inflicted on this majestic tree, all to no avail.
As olive oil production plummeted, a new kind of harvest began appearing in the yards of Salento's countless olive oil mills: firewood. As owners eventually give up and the eradication of the dead trees gathers pace, the price of firewood has plummeted to almost nothing.
A banner reads “every monoculture is destined for extinction” at the “Notte Verde” of Castiglione d'Otranto, a yearly gathering of environmental activists and farmers. This year, the theme was “reforestation”, in a sign of how the death of the olive trees is finally being accepted by the population, with the debate moving on what to do after the trees are dead, and an entire territory must be re-imagined.
After watching all of his olive trees wither and die, and after several years of complex bureaucratic procedures, the owner of this large olive grove has finally been able to secure both the authorization to eradicate and a European Union grant to re-plant.
Olive wood is notoriously tough, and years after the trees are dead, chainsaws are often to unable to cut through them, which means that large machines must be used, their noise echoing through the deserted countryside.
The owner of this field signed a contract with a firm, which also operates the largest olive oil mill in the area, to have all of his trees eradicated, ground into chipped wood and shipped to a biomass power plant in Calabria, some 500 km away, a sorry ending for these majestic trees that used to be the pride of the region.
A young farmer planting new olive trees where his grandfather's trees once stood, in an area of Salento where almost all the trees are now dead. He left his job in the north of the country and moved back to help his father through this difficult time, and hopes to be able to produce some olive oil in a few years.
“My family has produced olive oil for generations”, this young farmer told me, “and now I find myself buying oil at the supermarket!”
