But It Omits To Administer Its Own Laws With Becoming Severity.
A few
exemplary fines and imprisonments would have a more salutary effect than
the commissioning of a thousand inspectors whom nobody takes seriously,
and the printing of ten thousand reports which nobody reads.
With a single stroke of the pen the municipalities could put an end to
the worst form of forest extirpation - that on the hill-sides - by
forbidding access to such tracts and placing them under the "vincolo
forestale." To denude slopes in the moist climate and deep soil of
England entails no risk; in this country it is the beginning of the end.
And herein lies the ineptitude of the Italian regulations, which entrust
the collective wisdom of rapacious farmers with measures of this kind,
taking no account of the destructively utilitarian character of the
native mind, of that canni-ness which overlooks a distant profit in its
eagerness to grasp the present - that beast avarice which Horace
recognized as the root of all evil. As if provisions like this of the
"vincolo forestale" were ever carried out! Peasants naturally prefer to
burn the wood in their own chimneys or to sell it; and if a landslide
then crashes down, wrecking houses and vineyards - let the government
compensate the victims!
An ounce of fact -
In one year alone (1903), and in the sole province of Cosenza wherein
San Giovanni lies, there were 156 landslides; they destroyed 1940
hectares of land, and their damage amounted to 432,738 francs.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 327 of 488
Words from 87760 to 88011
of 131203
