Man and nature, together we will win

In the immediate future, it is certainly a common good to take care as a priority to repair at least in part the enormous damage that the coronavirus has caused. It would be interesting, however, if the measures implemented were also aimed at changing past choices and priorities to build a new future. The right to health is closely linked to the environment. We have repeatedly told ourselves that yesterday's delays and laziness are no longer acceptable in the health system. There will be funds to reorganize it. With what national plan is it shared, with what transparency? What strengthening of the public without returning to unsustainable waste?

With what willingness to change the current system of institutional tasks between regions and the state? With what participation and information of citizens to have control? And if everything instead, the doubt arises, will it be seen once again as the possibility of managing money at a regional level outside any overall and reasoned vision? "If you think about next year, sow corn. If you think about the next 10 years, plant a tree. If you think about the next 100 years, educate (and inform) people ”(Zygmunt Bauman).

I propose you a cultural filter. A lesson that we should also have learned from this pandemic is ecological interdependencies, for example man and nature. Man cannot exist outside of nature.

Can we accelerate awareness of global and local environmental deterioration? Can we evaluate the choices in the field in various fields with the "measuring meters" of work, the environment, the social sector? Promote sustainable technologies and businesses, pay attention to the care of the territories? With an eye to the near future?
It seems to write the book of dreams, in reality you can evaluate with these parameters the goodness of the proposals that will come from various subjects (politicians, associations, institutions, individual characters ...) to evaluate our individual location, to make life choices and even those of every day.

Incomplete list of goals for improvement over the past. More comfortable homes, more liveable cities, less traffic and smog, more livable green, safer food; modification to the lack of rules of globalization; new job opportunities; in work, less physical effort, more free time; less waste in general and in every sector; change in certain spending and consumption targets by reducing debt, given that what the epidemic has brought us to both the country and us individual families will be great more relationship with nature; fewer diseases including obesity and diseases from wrong food, enhance the preventive care of the body less damage to humans and the environment due to excessive use of toxic products; more rental and widespread use of services and objects, less property costs; more capacity to use electricity from sustainable sources and widespread generation of electricity; investments in public infrastructures and their maintenance; more attention to the use of soils and territories; more safety and ability to react to catastrophic natural events; new laws and application of existing laws to protect against environmental pollution that attack health and safety; greater widespread skills, necessary for the green transition of each economic sector; use in particular of incentive mechanisms, not just penalties; dissemination of the new parameters of life cycle analyzes and the circular economy; the entry of transversal environmental interpretations into school disciplines ...

Attention to the environment will win if it is able to articulate these objectives well, demonstrating that they are better than other proposals, because they are able to respond together to various crises and problems and turn them into opportunities.

Carlo Degiacomi
NP June / July 2020