The terrible water bomb on the Marche is the news of the day. Unfortunately, the ingredients are all there: the 10 dead, the 4 missing, destruction everywhere. And of course we are all here telling ourselves that politics should be more about climate change, it should be about how to tackle it before it’s too late and how to mitigate the effects that are already there.
As if we needed a water bomb to wake us up. As if the situation wasn’t clear enough already. For weeks a third of a large country like Pakistan has been under water: there are villages that have become islands and the death toll, constantly updated, is approaching 1500. A massacre. And it’s not just floods. It has been calculated that there were 2,000 more deaths due to the summer heatwaves in Spain and Portugal alone, while in the United States there are 20,000 heat-related deaths a year. Finally, due to the drought, another manifestation of a sick climate, children in danger of hunger donate 513,000, a figure that has not been recorded for many years.
These are the numbers of a war and a war that we are losing. Yet we notice it, and yet we speak of it, only when the battle arrives on the doorstep in the form of a water bomb. That day we are all environmentalists, and then go back to life as before. I keep thinking, because scientists say it, that this war is not yet lost, that we can do it, but we have to wake up and really try to change everything. Every gesture, every word and I add, every vote, counts.