VIRIDITAS
Stella Levantesi
Drought

This content is part of the new digital section of the museum called VIRIDITAS, created to offer the public a tool to enrich their gaze towards the climate change.

I don’t usually point my lens towards the ground. But it is often necessary to change your perspective. The cracks in this dry land force us to overturn the gaze. Suddenly everything we imagine about nature and the earth is suddenly different. What becomes prevalent is loss. The loss of abundance, of resources, of variety and life. The loss of viriditas. In Botswana, the place where I took this picture, the rural zones are increasingly vulnerable to drought caused by climate change. One example is the Okavango Delta, one of the largest inland deltas in the world, rich in flora and fauna, and the home of local communities. The climate alterations produced by the activities of human beings are already having an impact on these lands and many other areas of the planet. The cost of failure to take action on the climate is a very high one. The cost is life.

 


 

STELLA LEVANTESI is a journalist and photo reporter; she is the author of the book I bugiardi del clima (Laterza, 2021). She studied journalism at New York University. Today she works with Italian and international publications, and her contributions have been published in The New Republic, Internazionale, il manifesto, 7 Corriere, Wired, LifeGate, Domani and others. She concentrates above all on the environment, the climate crisis and conservation, and she specializes in coverage of climate denialism and scientific disinformation. Stella Levantesi is a TEDx speaker, and her TED Talk on climate change denial is titled The dominance illusion: who is lying about the climate and why.