From extractivism to energy in common
The story of a southern struggle.
by Sara Manisera
This is a small story. A story of resistance and citizenship. These days, people call it “active citizenship”, although in reality, it should simply be normal. It almost doesn’t matter where this story took place. And yet, we write it down for posterity, in black and white, to say that this is a story from the South, from a kind of “Global South” within Italy—always considered a dumping ground, a margin, a place to conquer, exploit and discard. A place that, instead, rebelled and wrote a page of History.
Terroni, Moroccans, Tunisians, Mediterranean people, mountain dwellers. People deemed worth less, judged by dominant narratives or by the citizenship rights that were never truly recognised. And yet, it is precisely in such deliberately “marginalised” places that historic struggles and rebellions have emerged—struggles that marked a before and an after. Fragments of resistance that settled into the spirit, the stones, the land.
This is a small southern story. A story set in Auletta, a village surrounded by the Alburni mountains, on the border with Lucania. A story that begins in June 2023, when a brilliant journalist — Federica Pistone — working with limited resources, checks the municipal registry and publishes the news of a council resolution to change the zoning plan and install a massive biomethane plant. From that small piece of local news, I began to investigate.
This is a story that could just as easily take place in the countryside of Mantua, in the solar parks between Tunisia and Morocco, or in the Salar de Atacama in Chile. Because it speaks to our time: the energy transition, green rhetoric, top-down investments sold to the public as “development”.
And above all, it concerns the margins. As bell hooks reminds us, the margin is not only a geographic location—it is a political and epistemic space: a territory of radical openness, where visions emerge that do not belong to the centres of power, and where crisis—or polycrises, climatic, social, democratic—can become generative. In Italy, margins often coincide with the “aree interne”: territories narrated as empty, declining, “to be accompanied toward irreversible depopulation,” as the latest report from the Presidency of the Council states. Places treated as sacrifice zones for high-impact plants, landfills, and energy servitudes. And yet, these very territories now hold extraordinary imaginative and regenerative potential.
When a town discovers what’s happening
After discovering the resolution, something began to move. I started investigating together with local residents. Journalism, when rooted in territory, becomes a tool of collective self-defense. It is no longer only storytelling, but a device that makes opaque processes transparent, circulates knowledge and awareness, and enables a community to see what is happening through its own eyes.
Before long, we discovered that behind the mega plant stood a holding company registered in Luxembourg, a network of companies that had never been operational, inconsistent balance sheets, contradictory documents. We found biomass supply contracts allegedly signed by farmers who had never seen them, fabricated technical estimates, and incomplete authorisations.
We discovered that the €14.5 million of Italy’s NRRP (PNRR) destined for the plant could have been used instead to secure the Apennines, strengthen local healthcare, or repair aqueducts and water infrastructure. Instead, the money would have gone to an operation built to attract public funds—not to produce energy in service of the territory.
This is how the Auletta Casa Mia committee was born: a human weave made of journalists, lawyers, technicians, farmers, students, artisans, bartenders, teachers. People who chose to come together and study. The public assemblies became moments of collective analysis; shared dinners moments of exchange; films projected outdoors ways to imagine alternatives; workshops with young people a means to teach citizenship through posters, flags, public art.
The victory no one expected: the €14.5 million is revoked
After months of meticulous, transparent, community-based work, the truth emerged: the project had no technical foundation, no legal basis, no ethical justification. The European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO) opened an investigation. The Anti-Mafia District Directorate took up the complaint. The irregularities were acknowledged.
And the unthinkable happened: the €14.5 million was revoked.
In a territory accustomed to resignation, this victory overturned entire imaginaries.
It showed that a margin can speak, can defend itself, can change its own history. It showed that when journalism is a common good, when knowledge is shared, a community gains strength.
From “No” to “Yes”: imagining another energy, building it together
But this story is not only about resistance. It is, above all, an act of imagination. During public assemblies, we began to say: “If we are to carry out an ecological transition, then let us be the ones to do it.”
From that intuition, FER-menti, Auletta’s energy community, was born.
Energy produced on rooftops, not on agricultural land.
Energy shared, local, fair.
Energy that lowers bills and funds social and cultural activities.
Energy that does not belong to a holding company, but to those who live it, use it, produce it. FER-menti is more than a project: it is a different way of understanding energy—not as a commodity but as a relationship. It is a political act asserting that the real transition is not something one undergoes, but something one builds together. A process rooted in responsibility, cooperation, care.
Inner areas as spaces of imagination and regeneration
Auletta is not an exception. Italy’s inner areas, long accustomed to depopulation and marginalisation, still hold deep ecological knowledge, light economies, proximity-based relationships, and a non-commodified connection to the land.
As Silvia Federici writes, they are places where it is still possible to “re-enchant the world.”
Here, degrowth is not a renunciation but a liberation from the imperative of infinite expansion. Here, the ecological transition can become real because it is rooted in local practices, everyday life, and relationships.
Why this story concerns all of us
Auletta’s case reminds us that journalism is a common good, that information is not a secondary service but a democratic infrastructure, and that an informed community is one capable of defending and imagining itself. But it reminds us of much more than that.
Auletta shows that it is possible to transform the margin into a place of imagination and regeneration: to move from denunciation to proposal, from resistance to the construction of new economic, social, and ecological practices. It shows that a just ecological transition cannot be imposed from above but must emerge from participatory processes, from aware communities, from collective forms of energy self-governance capable of rewriting a territory’s priorities.
The significance of this experience goes far beyond the victory against one plant: it offers a framework for rethinking ecological transition as a process of doing — concrete, daily, rooted in place. From this perspective, the energy community FER-menti is far more than a technical model: it is a socio-ecological peace-building device, capable of moving us out of a war-economy — based on unlimited growth, territorial destruction, and concentrated profits — toward a just, local economy grounded in care, proximity, and shared responsibility.
In this sense, margins are not what lies outside modernity: they are what can reorient it. They are the spaces where we can rethink commons, reinvent the economy, imagine societies capable of sustaining life rather than consuming it.
And this is why this small southern story speaks to all of us. Because it shows that another way of living, producing, and sharing energy already exists — and it is being built precisely where no one expected it: at the margins.
