Ferdinando Cotugno: “In return time I tell the climatic crisis starting from my family founded on fossil fuels”

**This entry is posted on number 12 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until March 18, 2025. **

«The climatic crisis is a photograph of the last four generations and of all future. It is important to find ourselves in it, because as long as a theme is collective and never personal it will always be a procrastinable problem ». The new book of the environmental journalist Ferdinando Cotugno, Return time (Guanda), tells the era in which we are experiencing, the anthropocene, through the history of his family, an “any Neapolitan family, without any exceptionality”.

The book begins and ends up in the sea of ​​Bagnoli, west Naples. Why?
«2024 for the oceans has been a year of collapse which, among all those that our biosphere is experiencing, is the most serious, but that we speak less. In addition, that sea is where my search for a personal and family anthropocene takes place. Anthropocene is a scientific concept on when, where and how our physical impact on the geology of the planet began ».

When does “his” history begin?
«Before I was born, as I made myself told by my father, born in a seafaring village that was then incorporated by the Etalsider of Bagnoli, who as a steel mill is the most polluting factory of all. That same Bagnoli where in the 19th century we went on vacation ».

He writes that his family “is a small nation based on fuel”.
«My grandfather, an Italian worker, worked with coal. My father has started a self -praise company and maneuvented, therefore, another source of energy, oil. And then there is me who in life I decided to deal with the environment, put in crisis precisely by fossil sources ».

When did this interest started?
“I think I” radicalized “between 2018 and 2019, shortly after the birth of movements such as EXTINSTION REBellion and the latest generation, the Encyclical release Laudato yes of Pope Francis and the Paris agreement. Then, just Vanity Fair He sent me twice to the Allavalbard islands, the point of the most suffering globe for the climate ».

Are the movements in crisis today?
«Yes, because the spirit of time has changed. Large historical events – pandemic, inflation energy crisis, wars – have slid the climatic urgency in the background. Furthermore, lately, we are witnessing an unprecedented attack on science, which is the foundation of all these conversations ».

Why does he say that ecology is the love of those who have no alternatives?
«With our planet we have a monogamy relationship because, trivially, we don’t have another option. What was perhaps the most effective slogan of the movements of the ten years said that “there is no planet B”. Today that looks like a cliché, but it is a cliché that remains true. Everything we compromise this planet does not have an alternative to another, even if the turbocapitalism here has all these fantasies on Mars, of escaping from the earth. But the truth is that our planet does not include escape routes. Not only is there not a planet B, but we do not even have a plan B. and therefore in this sense, ecology is love for a place to be preserved and whose preservation we must accept the many compromises “.

This is also a female story. In what sense?
“The history of” petro-patriarchy “is an imposition history of the male gender over all nature. It follows that climate change is sexist, because wherever women are the first victims of events such as drought, hurricanes etc. So, certainly, a fight against all this is also a fight against Patriarchate ».

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