Without Integral Ecology there is no future

Without Integral Ecology there is no future

Is the crisis that current history is going through a phenomenon to which there is a solution or are we slowly but progressively moving towards the end of this civilization?
And, above all, what are the factors behind this?
We are obviously facing complex questions and apparently even more difficult answers.
Against the background of this crisis, however, the concept of “ecological crisis” resonates like a mantra.
A crisis that can be overcome, provided there is still time, if the ideological, and therefore cultural, approach prevailing of our civilization is put in the correct way.
Suffice it to say that the current concern of most governments, of the so-called “developed countries”, is to overcome the crisis with the so-called “Ecological Transition” which is a remake of that concept of “Sustainable Development” that has so much contradiction and so much inconsistency has resulted in the economic and environmental policies of the last half century.
Suffice it to say that Sustainable Development began to be talked about in April 1968, when a small group of diplomats, industrialists and academics from all over the world gathered in a Roman villa, at the invitation of the industrialist Aurelio Peccei and the Scottish scientist Alexander. King.
In 1972 the Club commissioned a first report from the Massachussets institute of technology (MIT), which went down in history, on “The limits of development”, also known as the Meadows Report.
It is the prelude to the long list of intergovernmental conferences that will lead to the Stockholm Conference of 1972, to the Brundtland Report of 1987, where the concept of Sustainable 1992, onwards, have marked the most recent history.
The question is: what has changed at the socio-political level? Virtually almost nothing if not an aggravation of social and environmental issues and, certainly not least, of the continuous wars and guerrillas that constantly bloody the territories of the poorest peoples but, ironically, born in places often rich in deposits and resources.
It must be said immediately that the current state of affairs is not an environmental crisis (this is the tangible effect) but it is a crisis of the human being with respect to his philosophical and intellectual limit of not understanding that natural limits cannot be overcome through the technique, which led us to build a deep rift between human beings and nature.
This error is in fact perpetrating itself in the concept of Ecological Transition which, as mentioned, is only the attempt of a transition towards a different technological model but which does not involve customs, relationships, connections between human civilization and the environment; in short, a civilization that is not synchronous with the principles of Nature and, therefore, still in conflict with it.
Faced with this scenario, unsolvable in these terms, it must be said that the basic error is of an ideological nature and of a short-sighted gaze since neither politics and, too often, even science have never tackled the issue with a complex approach. and integral.
We are facing a crisis which, even before that, is cultural. A void that we are unable to fill as we have entered the daze of words: progress, development, wealth, etc., without corresponding to them something real and concrete and, above all, without an intrinsic value.
We have built a financial economic model that already, in itself, reeks of cheating.
Just think of the world economic system which, born in the aftermath of the Bretton Woods Accords of 1944, which effectively sanctioned the beginning of a liberal financial model, disengaged from the patrimonial capacities of the planet and culminating in 1971 with the Smithsonian Agreement of 1971, under the Nixon government (coincidentally one of the least loved presidents by the Americans).
Without going into the details of these agreements, however, it must be said that all this has led to an economic-financial system in disagreement with the rigid structures and principles of ecology and thermodynamics of natural processes.
In this way the economic system of the so-called rich countries has moved further and further away from the tracks of a correct ecology, shredding everything under it: rights, principles, values, ideals.
To put it simply, the liberal economic system is based on a concept of an unlimited world, with perpetual motion and infinite expansion; the ecological system is instead and inextricably linked to the principles of thermodynamics (which is the economy of the space-time system) and which, in a nutshell, moves on a plane with well-defined limits, of an inertial nature (there is no perpetual motion ) and with increasing entropy.
To put it in even poorer terms but understandable to all, ecology is based on an economy shared by everyone (from the most microscopic beings to the great phenomena of nature), the liberal economy makes of subjugation, exploitation, colonialism mercantile (and not only) his creed and his bible.
In this direction, one of the few voices, but certainly the most authoritative, that has risen against this culture of death (as John Paul II called it) is that of Pope Francis in the concept of “Integral Economy” contained in his encyclical ” Praised yes “; the only one that represents an important solution that many still do not understand (or want to ignore).

In fact, although it is very simple (and almost elementary in its principles – as Nature is) it is very difficult to put into practice, because it requires a profound change and, precisely the change, would question everything we have built up to now. .
To give another example, which often argues, we cannot think of continuing to produce food by carrying out a real ecological genocide (with a loss of fertility and gruesome biodiversity) when the principles for a model of producing food have been known for years. and to distribute it respecting the ecosystem, its rules and the rights of those who work the land, often trampled on. From it new slavery, new deportations (this time induced by the great escapes and migrations of the poor) and great ecological devastation are born.
In fact, the liberal model is a war and conflict model (dressed in evening dress) that does not foreshadow anything good.
This system is generating social relations that are increasingly disrupting relations between states, accelerating an arms race to guarantee the supply of resources for this industrial machine, and provoking, in the name of liberalism, a competition for the conquest of power that it is also what was at the basis of the two world wars. Precisely the end of the Second World War, with the explosion of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, made it clear to everyone that technology could no longer be at the service of the common good of humanity, but it was able to destroy the existence of human being on earth.
We cannot get out of this liberal lie if we do not address the issue from the point of view of that Integral Ecology where either there is respect for everyone or there is no future for anyone.
There is no future civilization if we do not inject the coexistence virus vaccine. I cannot produce food if to do so I have to devastate entire ecosystems with insecticides and herbicides; I cannot maintain the industrial liberal system if to do so, for example, I have to subjugate the peoples of the Congo in the extraction of the cobalt that we feed (none excluded) every time we change our mobile phones.
We cannot expect to resolve the ecological crisis (which is even first of all social and rights) if we do not disarm this crazy economy.
For this reason we must change our attitude, a conflictual system (increasingly bitter even among individuals), a development paradigm.
In all this we must also dispel the false concerns supported by big interests (banks in the lead) and by large multinationals that continue to propose technological solutions arguing that they are the only ones to solve issues such as: hunger in the world, energy availability, resources, etc. It is a lie that can be easily refuted by making some thermodynamic and energy balances.
There are the resources, the land, the energies, to make many more people live on earth (just look for several publications on the internet in this sense) but not with this economic model born of a sick culture; the same culture that provoked the various genocides in the name of development and colonial liberalism; acts that have often canceled entire civilizations.
Not for nothing, Pope Francis again, in 2021, followed up with another Encyclical entitled “All Brothers”; this too perhaps little read and less understood that focuses on a different “political and economic” relationship between peoples, generated by the same principles on which Nature is based and, therefore, universal.
Now it is up to us, all together, to understand that there is no politics, science, culture and so on, outside the rules and principles of Nature: this time dressed as Samaritans and not environmentalists.
Now, above all, we must be wary of those who make confrontation, hatred, arrogance, division and discrimination the foundation of their language or activism.
We need builders, a laborious silence, to lower the tone and to look up towards a new vision of history.
There is no conspiracy (with all due respect to those who think so) but a great ideological deviation on the truth of Life, constantly and continuously trampled on in the name of an empty and devious doctrine that wants to divide the world into two categories: producers and consumers and to do so, flattening everything, first of all the consciences.
Faced with this lie that flattens and cancels everything and everyone, it is Nature itself that with its crisis is clarifying this great ideological and cultural error.
We get out of this crisis by placing humanity at the center and not as a corollary of an empty environmentalism made up of disconnected pieces.
All this demands a paradigm shift, an “Ecological Conversion” which requires a fundamental cultural change, not least from an economic point of view. We need to change the utilitarian vision of the human being and reject the temptation to globally standardize the different cultures (social ecology), which are as precious as the animal and plant species, as nefarious.
Just think of the various ethnic groups destroyed, as well as the Amazon and its inhabitants, destroyed every day by the culture of economic exploitation of resources.
A culture of Western economics and politics that is founded on the belief that there is a different value between people and cultures (and also between different living beings), that there are cultures to be discarded as not deserving of respect and living beings expendable (insects, birds, plants, etc.). The poor become victims of the system to which even the right bends: from an instrument to build and guarantee the common good to an instrument of oppression of the least.
Words like love, neighbor, brotherhood, closeness, etc. have been transformed into something else or have completely lost meaning.
The time has come to look at the reality that surrounds us, to get up, to resume the journey but all in the same direction.
The rope of life is breaking and if we don’t believe in the future let’s do it at least for us. This is the only selfishness we can practice.

Guido Bissanti