Dear visitors, we will hopefully translate soon the entire web site, but for now we will leave you with some piece of information.

"Salviamo le Apuane" (Save the Apuan Alps) is a grass-roots movement born in 2009 to protect the Apuan Alps, a little chain of mountains in Italy, in the northern Tuscany.A movement born to protect this mountain chain from the devastation of marble and calcium carbonate excavation. The disaster of the Apuan Alps has been called " the biggest European environmental disaster" in fact more than 800 quarries are impacting our delicate environment causing many problems to our populations.

Another big problem is the dereliction of the mountains by the institutions and the people, indeed we are trying to build alternative economies to repopulate this wonderful landscape. 

For Further information contact us on Questo indirizzo email è protetto dagli spambots. È necessario abilitare JavaScript per vederlo. and you can also read this Newsweek article:

http://www.newsweek.com/2015/04/03/bin-ladens-and-tuscan-city-destroyed-marble-317224.html

Here you are our video that proves how big is the problem  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1iLnIiOM2Q

This is our first founding/start up document: "Carta delle Apuane"

A document for The Apuan Alps
Apuan Alps, Tuscany, Italy 27/06/2010

The Apuan Alps are one of the planet’s most important patrimonies. They are important on a naturalistic, environmental, botanical, cultural, historical and anthropological level. The excavating of marble represents one trait only.

The Apuan Alps, given their importance, have been hit by a destructive process which can be listed alongside some of the greatest natural, environmental, botanical, faunistic and historical disasters of the planet.

It is particularly unsettling when this aggression touches the greatest resource of the entire ecosystem: water, the blue gold of the XXI century. Excavation activities hinder the capillaries that funnel rain water towards the depths of the earth while provoking pollution caused by mud and waste oil.

The Apuan Alps, today and for some time now, can no longer sustain the excavation economy, especially in its function as landfill for calcium carbonate: it must therefore be underlined that today’s excavation economy is no longer sustainable, according to the present day philosophy of sustainability.

The Apuan Alps are the theatre of a destructive process in contrast with Art. 9 of the Italian constitution which states: “The Republic safeguards the landscape and the historical and artistic wealth of the Nation.” Excavation activity in the Apuan Alps, as it is carried out today, being structurally and by nature a permanently destructive act, is an activity which violates the Constitution of Italy. Opposing the activity of excavation, therefore, is an act of civility.

The Apuan Alps represent an environmental, historical and anthropological setting of extraordinary interest for the development of responsible, intelligent tourism in the many morphological and diverse forms offered by the territory, from agriculture and farming using the method of ‘filiera corta’ (from producer to neighbouring consumer), and even arts and crafts linked to a very limited production of marble. We believe that the request for civic uses throughout the Apuan territory, that is to say, a “third option” that stands between public and private use can represent a fulcrum around which to collect new social and economic energy for the mountain area, especially with regards to excavation.

The Apuan Alps have been linked to a production that is, today, given the planetary dynamics in the field of tombstones, in a profound and irreversible crisis, a decline that produces unsustainable forms of exploitation of the territory and, at the same time, unlike in the past, rising unemployment.

The Apuan Alps could very possibly become the centre of a new economic model, more fair-minded and fertile, which by learning to make use of the elevated number of resources – natural, anthropic, hydro-geologic and environmental - of these lands, unmatched in the Mediterranean and in Europe, may extend to the hills and cities that look onto the sea, as well as the neighbouring parks (Cinque Terre, Apennines, Magra, San Rossore), creating an exceptional social and economic complex, which goes far beyond the financial crisis.

The Apuan Alps have been deprived, by national, regional and local politics, of any sort of economic prospective that is different from the current one, marble. The excavation of debris and marble carried out today precludes any other possible development.

The Apuan Alps are forced to undergo this sole activity, which not only stifles them but keeps them from other potentially noteworthy economic development: we underline, therefore, that the activity of the quarries alone is incompatible with the economic development and an increase in employment in the territory.

The Apuan Alps are, therefore, a demonstration of the damage that a sole economic activity, excavation in this case, can cause not only to the environment but to the economy, creating loss of employment, especially in the Province of Massa Carrara, which will remain structural for as long as marble is the dominant activity.

The Apuan Alps are, however, must be saved in order to create economic growth in the territory: it is inacceptable that a patrimony should be destroyed in such a way when it could be put to much better use. The gradual conversion from the sole activity of marble excavation to alternative forms of economic growth will not lead to a loss but to an increase in occupation starting with the quarry workers themselves who will be able to leave an exhausting job to occupy a more favourable one quality-wise.

On the basis of this Manifesto, therefore, we underline our unyielding will to make the case of the Apuan Alps a movement that works to safeguard the environment and to create new harmonious development in the territory, in Tuscany, and in Italy. It is an initiative that must not come to a halt, nor be interrupted until the objective, that is to say the economic conversion that will see the end of the excavations, has not been reached.

Salviamo le Apuane