Why do catastrophic events have no weight in public opinion, beyond emergency and spectacle? Why do we not take care of the extraordinary maintenance of the house we live in?

When the acrid smell and a few wood ashes reach Piazza San Carlo, the people of Turin are alarmed.

What? The mountain burns and we do nothing? Then some councillor who wants to get rid of parking tickets or some VIP who has bothered the secretary take over the smoke-laden west wind. And the attention disappears, as quickly as it had appeared.

However the scandal, the thousands of hectares of forest going up in smoke every year, briefly touched a major city in northern Italy.

As a good landscape architect, more than the event itself, I am interested in how it is perceived, what interaction it triggers in people. Having put out the fires and calmed the apprehension, it remains to be understood what strange socio-cultural mechanism renders a collective risk negligible, even when it manifests itself as a catastrophic urgency, while an individual risk finds widespread emotional resonance, but one that is entirely potential, statistically highly improbable, such as a robbery in one’s own home.

Unable to give a single interpretative key on such a complex subject, I will try to list some ‘hot’ data (from the competent Ministry, from the Fire Brigades’ websites, from datiallefiamme.it), against which to hypothesise the deep reasons for the reactions in the current and most widespread attitude among citizens

– climate change is bringing an increase in extreme weather peaks, to which temperate regions such as ours were not accustomed. Among these, drought brings widespread and unforeseen catastrophic outcomes, such as the easy spread of fires;

– the processes of abandonment of the mountains, now fifty years old, do not show signs of stopping on the Italian side of the western and Friulian Alps (while demography reverses the depressive trend in many other alpine regions, from France to Trentino), with serious outcomes on the forest structure, which becomes invasive, difficult to manage and never clean;

– fires have been growing in Italy over the last decade, from 50,000 hectares to almost 150,000 this year: 12 times the surface area of the municipality of Turin. The historical trend of fires, over the last 20 years, has peaks and troughs that coincide, particularly in the southern regions, with legislative and financial measures on the one hand to help damaged territories and on the other to crush abuses;

– 9 out of 10 forest fires are arson. Their overall size is surpassing that of non-forested areas, particularly in the South, always in the same provinces. Every year almost 1/3 (!) of Sicilian forests go up in smoke, where more than 24,000 foresters (!) are employed by the Region;

– in Piedmont, fires are normally small, on the whole they affect less than 300 hectares per year and more than 75% involve first slope forests, on areas that were often once cultivated, close to the valley floors. The fires of recent days perhaps present a paradigm shift: they have affected almost 2000 hectares (like 4000 football stadiums!), with similar characteristics, in terms of size, spread and ignition, to those in the south.

The data are consistent and confirm: that unclean forests, in abandoned and desiccated territories, are easy habitats for those who trigger flames that the wind carries to catastrophic fires, almost always for criminal designs of marginal utility, particularly in the South and this year perhaps also in the North.

But in the face of this evidence, most of which is well known, the reaction of public opinion is weak, almost disinterested.

The media obey the general mood, quickly neglecting the news, unless there are domestic victims to mourn or serious private property damage to complain about. Those always remain preoccupied with themselves, regardless.

The impressive general obtuseness, in the face of an obvious and direct relationship between the situation of the context and the personal situation, can only be explained by a kind of sick self-censorship, a collective panic block that prevents any rational decision. We are like those who remain motionless in a risky situation, which normally prompts flight.

Can people be roused from their torpor? Perhaps. But we have to go back upstream. We must admit that, in general opinion, we do not fully believe that there is a direct relationship between us and the context. We must recognise that we have allowed a gap to grow between what reason considers obvious and the trend of collective behaviour. The intellectual and the technician who thought they were at the forefront of the frontiers of the unknown and discoveries must attest to the urgency and importance of working in this humiliating and deflating rear-guard, too often left to the politician: convincing everyone to measure themselves against reality, to take into account what we are compared to the world and not just what we want or hope for.

It applies to the Piedmontese fires, but it also applies to the parody of independence (Catalan or de noatri), it applies to electoral systems that lead to useless victories, to promises of prosperity now at the expense of our children later.

Said like that, it sounds too generic, a way of sending the ball into the stands since you can’t score a goal, but it is clear that we cannot make real progress in democracy until public opinion becomes aware of the real conditions in which it moves.

I believe that the discrediting of politics has its part to play in this process of progressive impotence that we have allowed to pervade, which no longer feels like participating in large collective projects, such as the unification of the country, its infrastructure, literacy, reconstruction. The unpunished mismanagement of a thousand urgencies has made mistrust for general solutions insurmountable, so that unless there are strong and consistent signs of a change of course, only do-it-yourself solutions are rewarded, the reduction of the horizon to individual projects. In this political climate, topics such as climate change ring hollow. Urgent and strategic environmental and hydrogeological remediations do not sufficiently involve the people to motivate concentrations of resources and shrinking rents.

On the other hand, when individual solutions to problems are the only ones to gain credence, any distinction between those that reward common interests or, conversely, personal gain ends up disappearing: the mayor who overcomes superior bureaucracy to save his country and the entrepreneur who buys the run-down factory and makes a profit by halving the workforce are praised in the same way.

The common good is no longer a discriminating value, nor is the role of the public servant, who becomes heroic if he is a fireman at work but can be challenged if he is a strict teacher or an official who fights against squatting.

It is a culture of indifference that has structural roots and will not be overcome any time soon. But one cannot begin to work on it if not from communication, from the formation of a public opinion that is shown the consequences of the different positions, that remains nailed to the concreteness of the issues at stake and does not accept those who offer unrealistic solutions or deny the existence of the problems.

Yes, because the degree zero of political consciousness, the worst, is the negationist one, which hides reality and replaces it with generic and convenient representations. In this, the landscape, the real one, the known and frequented territory, is a precious antidote to the overwhelming power of ephemeral and generic information, when not false, that the media and the network pass on. But even this is under a slap in the face: who knows the mountain slopes that have gone up in flames, who has seen them if not from a windshield along the motorway or at the back of the city, like a theatre backdrop? The city (or even our neighbourhood) borders unknown places, which could also be the backdrops of a great Truman show, for all we care…

For these situations, my grandmother used to sarcastically hum: nobody knows anything, nobody knows where he is… so the East means that he is not there… If a 19th-century nursery rhyme still perfectly sums up the obliviousness of our time, it means that we are facing a deep, resilient socio-cultural stratification, which certainly doesn’t shake for a bit of smoke in the square, and intrepidly lets everything burn, if HIS house is not lapped. IF.