Nature and History in Modern Italy

Chapter 8: Act Locally, Think Nationally: A Brief History of Access Rights and Environmental Conflicts in Fascist Italy

Chapter 8 Act Locally, Think Nationally A Brief History of Access Rights and Environmental Conflicts in Fascist Italy Wilko Graf von Hardenberg This essay provides an overview of the evolution of nature conservation and resource management legislation and ideology in Italy during the Fascist Ventennio period (1923–43). Further, it explains the local environmental impact of Fascist policies through the analysis of two exemplary case studies: the Gran Paradiso National Park and the province of Novara. Crucial in the time line of the regime’s interaction with the natural world was the period from 1929 to 1934, which marked a fracture in Italy’s environmental history. In 1976, Zeev Sternhell suggested that fascism represented the very first “environmentalist ideology of [the twentieth] century.”1 This interpretation of the relationship between fascism and environmentalism most probably arose from the fact that fascism, paradoxically, combined the attempt to modernize the industrial and agrarian systems with an ideological revolt against urbanism and industrialism. Anna Bramwell gave a short account of the possible existence of a generic fascist environmentalism. Italian Fascism seemed to her to have had a conflictual relationship with  | Wilko Graf von Hardenberg the natural world: citing Giovanni Gentile, she asserted that for Fascism, “nature was the enemy of human culture, and hence a danger to be fought” and a threat for “the autonomy of the state, and man’s fully human culture .”2 Bramwell thus denied that Italian Fascists had any interest in environmental issues and concluded that National Socialism was the only fascist movement that had serious environmental concerns. The question of whether Nazism may be interpreted as a movement that was intrinsically environment-friendly has been debated repeatedly since the mid-1980s.3 In many cases, for example, Adolf Hitler’s alleged love of animals and the drafting of a series of laws between 1933 and 1935 regarding the preservation of nature and the protection of animals have been used as proof of the existence of a “green wing” within the Nazi regime or even of a comprehensive Nazi allegiance to ecological policies. However, no actual, tight link may be traced between environmentalism and the government practices of any of the fascist and pseudo-fascist regimes that ruled over various European countries at different times in the twentieth century, Nazism included. One of the main means used by the Italian Fascist regime to represent itself was the physical creation of a“New Italy,”through environmental management and nature conservation. The transformation of wilderness into “productive nature” became one of the symbols of the regime, and the conservation of natural beauties (bellezze naturali) was seen as a propagandist means to consolidate national identity.4 Ruralism and anti-industrialism, inspired also by sectors of Italian elites imbued with classical culture and neoidealistic aesthetics, represented important elements of Fascist ideology . Indeed, criticism of the modern way of life arose in Italy more from strictly aesthetic considerations than from concerns about the state of the environment or human health.5 For instance, laws regulating the institution of national parks were rooted within the jurisprudence on the preservation of beauty, a concept encompassing artistic, historical, and environmental goods in a wider sense.6 And ruralization was a matter of great importance in Fascist propaganda because of what were deemed to be its beneficial effects on the morale of the country and of its role as a symbol of the New Italy. Environmental Legislation between Continuity and Rupture Just two months after it assumed power in October 1922, Benito Mussolini ’s government established a national park on the Gran Paradiso massif, between the current provinces of Turin and Aosta in northwestern Italy,7 and acknowledged the park instituted by the preservationist association Pro Montibus in the Abruzzi region.8 In the following months, some Fascist Access Rights and Environmental Conflicts in Fascist Italy |  leaders attempted unsuccessfully to create a park in the mountainous area of the Sila in Calabria.9 These early acts of nature conservation,the propaganda effort, and the Fascist resoluteness in decision making had a positive impact within the preservationist milieu. The similarity between the Fascists’ enthusiasm for the project and the sudden interest for nature preservation shown by the Nazis just after their rise to power is noteworthy.10 In both the German and Italian cases, the new authoritarian regimes adopted assertive decision-making strategies to impress public opinion. However, most of the laws and the decrees they drafted in their early years were not original outcomes of their ideologies but...