Actress Helen Mirren has spent nearly a decade trying to stop Xylella fastidiosa, an invasive bacterium, from destroying Italy’s olive trees.
Now she’s back at it, with the Independent reporting this month that the disease has killed 22 million trees in the country over the past 10 years.
Ms. Mirren spoke with People Magazine about the bacterium that was first noted in Southern Italy in 2013.
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In an interview published Oct. 24, Ms. Mirren said, “It’s amazing how people want to put on [blinders] and pretend it’s not happening.”
The actress and her husband, director Taylor Hackford, bought a 16th-century farmhouse in Puglia in 2007 where she co-founded a non-profit called “Save the Olives.”
Ms. Mirren told People, “We started Save the Olives just as a way of getting information out there. Because as always happens with things like this, disinformation starts flying around and bad theories, wrong theories. We are just really fighting for people to please pay attention and realize that yes, this is happening and you are going to lose 1,500-year-old trees. And when you think that this living thing has been in the earth, living, surviving since the Romans, come on! We have to save these trees.”
Save the Olives says its volunteers include agronomists, farmers, artists, engineers, students, businessmen and researchers, and it lets donors “adopt” an olive tree, which is grafted and given a nameplate as it grows.
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