Seveso 1976: What the Dioxin Didn't Tell Us

A step back into recent Italian history: Robbe's book recounts the events surrounding Italy's first environmental disaster experienced in the age of television, and the reactions of the population, society, politics and the Church to the urgent challenges that accident set in motion. We recognize, even then, the communicative mechanisms forced and conditioned by fear that, still today—like fake news online—are incredibly capable of fueling distrust and wrong or hasty choices. Politics already seems far removed from that ideal of responsible service we imagine it should embody, even if not for all the representatives of that era. What the Seveso experience produced in research on the effects of dioxin, in the laboratories and in the health observation and monitoring centers still active today, is a positive surprise. And the Church? It manages to become pragmatically close to those in difficulty, "capable of self-organizing, of responding to a need and rolling up its sleeves, of starting from reality and not from ideological designs or abstract language," as Tornielli underlines in the preface. A Church-body that knows how to take care of its members, even the weakest, when life, with its urgencies and emergencies, calls.