One of many websites the We Are Right here Venice workforce is working is on a pure salt marsh, hugged on one facet by a kidney-formed platform of infill dredged from the lagoon. In locations the place the mud is dry, the bottom has separated into patches that conjure small tectonic plates, affected by bone-white crab claws picked clear and dropped by gulls flying overhead. Three orange sticks mark the spot the place a fence between the salt marsh and the infill will probably be eliminated to permit water alternate and the motion of sediment, making the 2 ecosystems “communicate to at least one one other,” as Jane da Mosto, the chief director and cofounder of WAHV, describes it.
Tramping over the island in rubber boots, releasing gobbets of black mud at each step, da Mosto explains that “all of this represents a sort of pure capital.” Not solely do the marshes retailer carbon, however “these environments additionally help fish habitats and an enormous chicken inhabitants,” she provides. Even the samphire, an edible marshland plant, “might be cultivated like a crop.” Marshes are additionally extra environment friendly carbon sinks than forests, as a result of marshland vegetation that retailer carbon are progressively buried underneath sediment because the tide washes over them, trapping the carbon for so long as centuries.
Da Mosto sees town as one thing of a laboratory for environmental options with wider purposes. “Venice is a mirror on the world,” she says. “If town stays an instance of all of the world’s issues, as it’s now, then there’s no level attempting to maintain it alive. However we should always be capable of present the right way to flip infills into ecologically productive salt marshes and the right way to rework an financial system based mostly on mass tourism into an financial system based mostly on its pure capital.”
Catherine Bennett is a contract journalist based mostly in Paris.
