Rural Europe on the move English_E_version_all | Page 158

CHAPTER 13 management experts, agro-ecologists and sustainable development experts. “We believe transitional practices that work toward profound social transformation should not be limited to the cities. Rural areas can be dynamic, progressive and experimental,” Federico shares. Listening to him and the friends he brought to dinner – Carlotta, Michele and others – I am left with a real warmth. They really ‘care’ about environmental protection, rural sustainability and more just and healthier futures. It is a care that bubbles over and flows into you at the dinner table, motivates you to question your own work and get stuck in. Cultivating a new rural reality moving to the country for the first on the condition that you look after time. Several are friends of mine, the land, maintain it from fire hazard.”” keen to get their hands in the soil This land is often cheap or free and and ensure healthier air and wild play allows young people to get their foot hopeful. Sifting through these for the children they hope to have. in the door, put into practice their chapters, you get a picture of rural Porto di Terra is one such space that ideas and see if they work without Europe: its beauty and vibrancy, its connects and supports these people too much financial loss. Again, a complex history and its current and and their projects. As we have seen simple but powerful idea. It has its future challenges. Time and again, in Karditsa, in Beaufortain and in limitations though, since it does our writers lamented the loss of the Transylvania, access to land is often not provide the stability for those young from rural areas. Seeking better one of the key reasons young people leasing the land to make the kind of opportunities, across the continent, move out of the countryside. long-term plans that make peasant It is a care that also leaves me many young people have moved to cities and abroad. “We rent the land here, in formal agriculture viable. Nonetheless, at and informal loans from local, elderly least for the time being, it creates a landowners,” Carlotta Ebbreo tells kind of intergenerational cohesion Some have stayed, some have me. “They say: “Here you can have it and ensures careful stewardship of returned and some urbanites are for five years to try out your projects the land. But the story does not end there.