(B)LOGBOOK

Right from the start of our venture, we created an exhibition banner with a simple, yet innocent, question: why sail cargo today? All those who are fascinated by sailing linked to a necessity, the transportation of something necessary, or at least useful, perhaps doesn't ask themselves this question, which is, after all, ruthless: yes, why? A senior port official apparently asked, incredulously, "But why? Who makes them do it?" The first answer, obvious in the end, is to put a stop to air pollution, to advance the fight against climate change, to address the environmental issue.

This answer, however, does not take into account a basic distinction, two “schools”, two fundamentally very different approaches to cargo sailing. There are those who take up the discourse, abandoned in the early decades of the 20th century, moving towards classic sailing ships of proven efficiency, abandoned with the advent, after all, of the propeller. And then there are those who choose not to abandon modernity and its dogma of progress and innovation, activating themselves in the attempt to adapt large modern transport ships to an auxiliary, complementary or even prevalent sail propulsion, adopting modern systems of automatable sails, aeronautical-style wings, rotors and the like, manageable in a technological manner.

On the one hand, therefore, these high-performance hi-tech vessels adapted to the gigantic port logistics of large and medium-sized ports, and on the other a flotilla of independent, predominantly manual, process-slowing vessels.

Nico Paech, the German economist and author of “The Post-Growth Economy”, whom we had the pleasure of interviewing personally years ago, had identified two similar currents of thought in the ecology movement, which seeks to find solutions to the problems that have arisen with the realisation, since the 1970s, of the devastating environmental impact of the modern economy: on the one hand, those who are convinced that a change of energy sources is enough while maintaining the level of consumption and even growth unchanged, on the other hand, those who mercilessly look at the data and numbers, the quantities, trivially, and see that without a massive reduction is an abandonment of “growth at all costs” today's problems have no solution at all.

The Brigantes enterprise was born from this second approach, which will probably see sailing ships and high-tech ships side by side, but which, with the traditional sailing ship, manages to provide far more answers to the many questions of our time, to various problems that we all face and which we want to try to address