An Unprecedented Experience of Collective Bereavement: The Story of Xylella Fastidiosa in Apulia

In 2013, nobody could believe that the old identarian Apulian trees—the symbol of beauty and the building block of the local economy—were rapidly drying and dying because they had been hit by a new pathogen that had never colonized Italy and its olive trees before. But the story of Xylella fastidiosa—the bacterium that has dramatically affected the landscapes and livelihoods of the Apulia Region (in Southern Italy) for the last ten years—is a textbook example of the parallel kinetics that determine the routes of diseases in plants and human beings alike. In drawing a very efficacious comparison between the olive plants’ disease in the fields and the COVID-19 disease in human bodies, the account explains the wide-ranging consequence of natural calamities and their origins in human actions and choices. Xylella fastidiosa still menaces olive trees in Apulia, and other countries in Europe, but in ten years it has triggered off the collective psychosis of local communities, still under shock. A stark reminder that nature is not disposable and that humans are intimately connected with it.