This project consists in a series of color photographs taken at the Parco delle Fumarole in Sasso Pisano, near Larderello. It is a small town born in the metalliferous hills of Tuscany and so renamed in honor of François Jacques de Larderel, a French engineer who during the 1800s promoted the industrial exploitation of the boraciferous shower heads present in the area, in order to perfect the boric acid extraction method.
This was the first experience in the world of exploitation of geothermal energy for the production of electricity. Here these manifestations are still visible in a natural way, although in recent years new industries are emerging which exploit the endogenous steam of which the area is rich.
Renewable energies are however not always clean. In part, their environmental friendliness depends on how and where they are produced: technology must be adapted to the environmental and social context.
In Tuscany a scientific study has shown that the main contributions to the environmental impact are associated with the high content of ammonia, hydrogen sulphide, methane and carbon dioxide and that in some cases the impact is higher than that found for the production of electricity from fossil fuels. Therefore geothermal power plants release the non-condensable gases associated with
the geothermal steam that feeds them into the atmosphere, thus creating an environmental impact due to economic activities that exploit renewable resources.
When we talk about the environment, we also refer to a particular relationship: that between nature and the society that inhabits it. This prevents us from considering nature as something separate from us because we are part of it and we are interpenetrated by it. The reasons why a place is polluted require an analysis of the functioning of society, its economy, its behavior, its ways of understanding reality.
