The images of the Chernobyl area about 30 years after the nuclear accident are somehow emblematic of the ability of nature to reclaim and return to occupy even the most inhospitable places. And by the meaning of this last word I would start a discussion which I think is helpful to approach consciously to the upcoming COP21 meeting in Paris.
Inhospitable to whom, then? Certainly not for those plants and animals that have taken space between roads, buildings in ruins and rusty cars. Rather, inhospitable for us humans, shipped away by a disaster caused by ourselves, exiled indefinitely from one place, this like many others, we had learned to consider "our", in which we have invested energy and resources.
We discover, then, that the animal and plant world has the ability to adapt to changing conditions; we realize, however, that humans represent, tragically, an exception: we replaced the organic adaptation to technical and scientific genius; but despite our advanced technology, this one does not allow us to overcome certain obstacles, if not at the cost, often, to create any others.
This "human exception" puts us hopelessly outside the natural system and, at the same time, we are the main causes of changes in the system itself. So the question that you should ask yourself now is: what and who we want to (have to) save?
A document that has provoked much discussion, even outside of the community of specialists, and that will surely be central to the debate at the Conference of Paris, is the encyclical document of Pope Francis entitled "Ludato sii - Caring for Common Home" . And the call to St. Francis in the title deserves a careful consideration that can help to frame the problematic relationship between man and environment.
The figure of the "Poverello di Assisi" was always struck by the sensitivity and the imagination of writers and thinkers of all ages. He was often idealized, even beyond the strictly religious message: the Hermann Hesse's Francis is the symbol of freedom and happiness that is nourished by the intimate relationship with a nature both flourishing and Arcadian; a similar interpretation is also found in Gabriele D'Annunzio who draws the figure of the saint as an emblem of the "Super Man" in which the will and action are combined in pursuing his profession of absolute poverty.
All these interpretations are affected by a decadent and pre-Raphaelite cultural climate which depicts the relationship between Francis and the Nature as an intimate communion, a utopia of man-in-Nature that it is difficult to imagine in concrete reality.
The European Middle Ages, as Jacques Le Goff has taught us, is dominated by the "silva": the forest. The forest is both a resource and a border, a place that attracts and repels, real space and magical one at the same time. For Dante Alighieri it is the "wild forest" in which the traveler is lost and from which it is difficult to get out, both physically and spiritually. Nature, then, for the man of the Middle Ages is far from being a leisure carefree place; Nature sets limits to man, forced him in the cramped conditions of the the feudal life and rare, and difficult, are moving and traveling over long distances.
Le Goff helps to dispel the idyllic fog that envelops Francis contextualizing the saint "in the heart of the phase of great momentum of the medieval West [...]. The most spectacular result of demographic and economic development is an intense movement of urbanization [...] like great waves of urban explosion of the nineteenth and then the twentieth century." Francis, in fact. belongs to a new world that moves away gradually from the Middle Ages; he belongs to a new class, the merchant class. to which the narrow spaces of "curtis" begin to feel tight. Not otherwise explain the resourcefulness with which he carries out his plan and his stubbornness even in the face of resistance by church hierarchies.
Also new is the attitude towards the environment, the landscape and the nature: the sun and the moon and any other natural phenomenon lose their mystique and allegorical meaning to become "brothers" and "sisters" human beings. Francis explicitly says to his contemporaries not to be afraid of the world around them and to follow him to areas that till then have been warned as barred to humans and dominated by dark and incomprehensible forces. This is the going to the world of the merchant but also a civilizing mission: in the stories contained in the Fioretti, Francis often appears as a new Hercules, a civilizing hero who tames wild beasts, casts out demons and returns the places to human activities.
The relationship between title and content of the encyclical document reveals a striking parallelism, a "laical" and practical approach to the complex relationship between man and nature. The problem, in fact, as noted among others by Mike Hulme, moves from the issue of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to the sustainable survival of man on Earth. He can use his primacy over Nature in two directions: just selfishly pursuing their own purposes, or by using the resources at his disposal to fill the ditches that prevent much of the world to have a dignified existence.
The message, however, does not fall into an easy invitation to pauperism or an anti-tech "Luddites"; like St. Francis, Pope Francis invites us to look at the world as an environment of opportunities to seize together and, more importantly, to imagine a future and to fight pragmatically that sense of alienation that makes us feel strangers in our own land. Social justice is identified with environmental justice, the equality of access to resources and their proper and sustainable management.
Environmental problems are once again confirmed as human problems not only in the causes but, above all, in their future development. The question is not in the bear floating over a small piece by ice, but in the recurring famines in extreme weather events, in the management of our house, of our world.
Not to realize one day, as the last rider by Stephen King, that "the world has moved on," but we hopelessly and tragically we have fallen behind.
