Green Knights, Shady Cows, and the Comedy of Modern Virtue

Dear Dante,

It was something I read this morning that set this whole train of thought in motion. You’d appreciate this, I think: I was catching up on the news—no, not from a town crier or gossip in the piazza, but from that digital oracle I told you about, the one that beams voices and headlines straight into my living room. (Yes, oral news is alive and well, only now the heralds are pixelated and sponsored.)

The story? A powerful company, Energy Systems, wielding a SLAPP lawsuit like a medieval mace, tries to silence another company that dared to interfere with their grand designs. The twist is that their reasons for doing so are actually, on paper, admirable. There’s hope there if you squint hard enough. I’ll get to that.
But what really caught me wasn’t the headline or even the legal jousting.

It was the memory it triggered: a flashback to the 1980s, when my father, with a glint in his eye, explained the fine art of tax avoidance among the well-heeled. “You want to make money and keep it?” he’d say, “Forget banks, start a charity. Something noble, like planting trees so cows can have shade. You get donations, and you pay yourself and your friends a salary, tax-free, of course. Who could object to such a worthy cause?”
The cows get their shade, the donors get their halo, and the board receives a sun-dappled income. Everyone wins—except, perhaps, the spirit of charity itself.

Now, here’s the real twist, Dante: the very organisations we now see as the righteous defenders of the planet—Greenpeace, for example—didn’t start as slick global machines. No, their origins were as ragtag as your average Florentine uprising. Imagine, if you will, a place called Vancouver—a city on the far western edge of a landmass called Canada, surrounded by forests and the Pacific Ocean, and, at the time, not yet a century old. 
In 1971, a handful of activists, modern wandering knights but with less armour and more facial hair, gathered there, united by their concern over the United States’ plan to detonate a nuclear bomb on a remote island called Amchitka, off the coast of Alaska.

These activists, whom we’d today call “environmental activists”—people who campaign to protect the natural world, including land, sea, air, plants, and animals (yes, sadly necessary) set out on a small fishing boat to protest the test. They called themselves the “Don’t Make a Wave Committee” but soon adopted the name “Greenpeace,” blending the ideals of a green earth and peaceful action. Their maiden voyage didn’t stop the bomb, but it did capture the world’s attention, and the movement grew from there.

Of course, as the years rolled by, Greenpeace grew up, acquiring offices, international boards (yep, you guessed), fundraising drives, and eventually, the kind of legal headaches and internal squabbles that would make even your Florentine council blush. But in the beginning, there were no salaries, no tax loopholes, just volunteers, a borrowed phone, and a lot of shouting across the street when the phone rang.

And Dante, I must confess: if you were to look at today’s eco-activists, you might see them as a new breed of wandering knights, errant in their quest for justice. You wouldn’t know Don Quijote; he’s a few centuries off yet, but trust me, you’d recognise his spirit in today’s green crusaders, tilting at wind turbines instead of windmills. The armour’s greener, and the horses are usually bicycles (or electric vehicles), but the idealism (and the absurdity) is timeless.

So, as I narrate our present inferno, know that the comedy persists: virtue is commodified, activism is litigated, and simplicity is lost beneath layers of legal and cosmetic artifice. Yet, as you taught us, the path through the dark wood requires both clarity and a healthy dose of irony. And if the cows end up a little cooler, well, at least someone benefits from the farce.

May Clarity find us,

Irena Phaedra

P.S. You’d be amused by our modern steeds. The bicycle is a two-wheeled contraption, no horse, just human legs spinning pedals.  Here in the Low Countries, we’re practically born with one between our legs and can peddle through rain, wind, and snow with the same stoic expression we use for everything else. Sweating is optional; complaining about the weather is not.

As for the electric vehicle, imagine a carriage that moves without horses, smoke, or even a whiff of dignity, just silent wheels powered by bottled lightning so we can glide past the problems we’re supposedly solving. In our age, progress means getting somewhere without breaking a sweat or making a sound unless, of course, you count the noise we make congratulating ourselves.

P.P.S. “La mia vita è un gioco
E non ci gioco più
Ho perso tutto quanto
E non ritorno giù…” Clementino a “poetic spitter” who hails from your adoptive town, Naples.