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Description

HERE is the original Italian version.

Part two

2020 has been declared the International Year of Plant Health by the United Nations General Assembly. I did a short comic on the matter, much more didactic than usual.
It’s made of two parts, each composed of two pages that put together create a single, bigger image. This is the first splashpage, dealing with agriculture and the causes of soil erosion in the west (especially Europe and my country, Italy).

It traces a path underlining the now well-known ubiquity of these problems. It connects my country and, more locally, the territories where I live and which I'm more familiar with, to halfway round the world. To the tropical forests that with their unrivaled biodiversity -botanical and otherwise- are the first places that this theme suggests.
Plants are pivotal for environmental equilibrium as the first mediators in the ecosystems that intertwine earth and air especially, but also water. They're obviously indispensable for life, as food and also for the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide, which they have the precious role of absorbing. The soil in which they grow also handles this exchange, and the waters even more so.
A strong presence of flora not only contributes to reducing the effects of emissions of industrialized societies but also to the water cycle and so it has at least a double role in the climate crisis we're facing. Freeing vast areas of their presence and variety exposes the terrain to warming, causing dryness and droughts. It's the process of desertification that is more and more common around the world, especially because of practices that destroy essential ecosystems.
Industrial agriculture tends to diminish the fertility of the soil eliminating the nutrients and microorganisms of which it is normally rich, by compacting and plowing it excessively and then showering it with pesticides in order to maximize the yield of monoculture plantations.
The massive use of phytopharmaceuticals generates a vicious cycle since they deprive the soil of its natural resourcesnecessary to grow vegetables, so that in turn the crops can only be farmed with their forced insertion through synthetic fertilizers. Which often causes further imbalances, introducing an excess of chemical elements that ends up invading for example the waters, reaching up to the oceans.

The development model that sustains industrial agriculture is the same one that brings forth most of the deforestation that menaces the rain forests. Which are mostly remote zones where the extraction of fossil fuels like oil is practiced. Where mining multinationals can cover their devastation with a facade of green-washing like the planting of so-called corridors for forest regeneration which are in fact monocultures of a single species of tree completely inadequate to restore the richness of those territories. They're often short-lived, useful to produce more income with the raw material they will provide and the perfect excuse to keep doing their business as usual.
Deforestation and soil degradation are also caused by the farming of products exported on the global markets. Those in our daily dishes, the trendy exotic ones, those becoming feed for the livestock that we know is the first cause of this process. Livestock farming itself directly requires ever so much space in those same regions.
It's the same speculative model that consumes terrains far beyond sustainability, as happens in the most urbanized regions of Italy (like mine, Veneto, and Lombardy) or to make space for the umpteenth public infrastructural project so often left unfinished or useless if not for the pockets of very few.
Terrains that are made more vulnerable to the ever more frequent natural catastrophes, due to the sum of causes I tried to recap in these pages, including them only in the drawings where the space for texts wasn't enough.

It's a model that should be revised with a scale reduction of the economy. By favouring forms of less intensive agriculture, centered on local products, on a greater variety of vegetables and their intercropping. More respectful of seasonal rhythms and of the pre-existent ecosystems, able to leave a margin and coexist with spontaneous, wild vegetation and organisms which can, in part, become allies. Ways of farming that consider the characteristics of soils and the specificity of territories, whose erosion can still be reduced, restoring their resilience, their carbon storage and capacity of absorption from atmosphere.

Initially I wanted to add to the comic the flows of chemical elements that are exchanged in the natural and artificial processes depicted, with formulas and arrows everywhere. Then I gave up the idea, thinking it would have just overcrowded the thing even more instead of clarifying it.

Description

HERE is the original Italian version.

Part two

2020 has been declared the International Year of Plant Health by the United Nations General Assembly. I did a short comic on the matter, much more didactic than usual.
It’s made of two parts, each composed of two pages that put together create a single, bigger image. This is the first splashpage, dealing with agriculture and the causes of soil erosion in the west (especially Europe and my country, Italy).

It traces a path underlining the now well-known ubiquity of these problems. It connects my country and, more locally, the territories where I live and which I'm more familiar with, to halfway round the world. To the tropical forests that with their unrivaled biodiversity -botanical and otherwise- are the first places that this theme suggests.
Plants are pivotal for environmental equilibrium as the first mediators in the ecosystems that intertwine earth and air especially, but also water. They're obviously indispensable for life, as food and also for the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide, which they have the precious role of absorbing. The soil in which they grow also handles this exchange, and the waters even more so.
A strong presence of flora not only contributes to reducing the effects of emissions of industrialized societies but also to the water cycle and so it has at least a double role in the climate crisis we're facing. Freeing vast areas of their presence and variety exposes the terrain to warming, causing dryness and droughts. It's the process of desertification that is more and more common around the world, especially because of practices that destroy essential ecosystems.
Industrial agriculture tends to diminish the fertility of the soil eliminating the nutrients and microorganisms of which it is normally rich, by compacting and plowing it excessively and then showering it with pesticides in order to maximize the yield of monoculture plantations.
The massive use of phytopharmaceuticals generates a vicious cycle since they deprive the soil of its natural resourcesnecessary to grow vegetables, so that in turn the crops can only be farmed with their forced insertion through synthetic fertilizers. Which often causes further imbalances, introducing an excess of chemical elements that ends up invading for example the waters, reaching up to the oceans.

The development model that sustains industrial agriculture is the same one that brings forth most of the deforestation that menaces the rain forests. Which are mostly remote zones where the extraction of fossil fuels like oil is practiced. Where mining multinationals can cover their devastation with a facade of green-washing like the planting of so-called corridors for forest regeneration which are in fact monocultures of a single species of tree completely inadequate to restore the richness of those territories. They're often short-lived, useful to produce more income with the raw material they will provide and the perfect excuse to keep doing their business as usual.
Deforestation and soil degradation are also caused by the farming of products exported on the global markets. Those in our daily dishes, the trendy exotic ones, those becoming feed for the livestock that we know is the first cause of this process. Livestock farming itself directly requires ever so much space in those same regions.
It's the same speculative model that consumes terrains far beyond sustainability, as happens in the most urbanized regions of Italy (like mine, Veneto, and Lombardy) or to make space for the umpteenth public infrastructural project so often left unfinished or useless if not for the pockets of very few.
Terrains that are made more vulnerable to the ever more frequent natural catastrophes, due to the sum of causes I tried to recap in these pages, including them only in the drawings where the space for texts wasn't enough.

It's a model that should be revised with a scale reduction of the economy. By favouring forms of less intensive agriculture, centered on local products, on a greater variety of vegetables and their intercropping. More respectful of seasonal rhythms and of the pre-existent ecosystems, able to leave a margin and coexist with spontaneous, wild vegetation and organisms which can, in part, become allies. Ways of farming that consider the characteristics of soils and the specificity of territories, whose erosion can still be reduced, restoring their resilience, their carbon storage and capacity of absorption from atmosphere.

Initially I wanted to add to the comic the flows of chemical elements that are exchanged in the natural and artificial processes depicted, with formulas and arrows everywhere. Then I gave up the idea, thinking it would have just overcrowded the thing even more instead of clarifying it.