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Environmental philosopher,
theologian, ecologist, professor at Pavia Univeresity, president of the
Centre of environmental ethics of the Lombardia Region in Northern Italy;
promoter of all those topics which teach how to recognize all that ties us
deeply to our surrounding environment. Published several books on ecology.
“Ethics and the
Environment”
The path of environmental
ethics ultimately presents itself as a complex “epistemic education”, a
form of new “human living”, a “new humanism” or union of thought and
action, theoretic reason, moral, aesthetics, religious practice.
In short, a harmonious
synthesis, to quote Heidegger: between “Heaven and Earth, the Divine and
Mortals”.
A practice and knowledge
that are deeply integrated, in whose ideal constitution, according to the
suggestion of G. Bateson, take part “science, art, poetry, consciousness,
the sacred and ethics”.
A project, in which reason
is, again in Bateson and earlier in Pascal: “heart”. The fundamental
elements of environmental ethics understood as such are:
A concept of reality by
which the natural world (mountain, river, tree, sparrow, violet) is not
seen as an object.
A concept of the subject by
which man is not only logical-calculating activity but an integrated
reality.
A concept of a non
mechanistic, open to “grace”, concept of time.
Let us study these three
aspects:
1. Concept of reality
(in philosophical language: ontological level). While modernity has
crushed the natural world (for believers: the Creation/Creature world; for
others: the physis-energheia world) to a world-object, a world without
beauty, form or dignity, a world manipulated by the will of man placed in
the role of its “owner and possessor” (Cartesio), in the 20th century, a
large part of philosophical, scientific reflection and the whole new phase
of re-discovery of the “theology of Creation” present in various
religions, brought on a re-launching of an ancient concept of the world,
already present in philosophical knowledge and pre-modern religions, by
which the natural world is thought of and respected as “presence” (Buber)
- as “you” - where with the message of Saint Francis of Assisi resumed
more secularly by the poet Rilke, this world is also seen with
sym-pathetic, “em-pathetic”, eyes, accentuated by brotherhood (things:
“sisters in the wind of silent meadows”).
2. Concept of the human
subject
Only a “new man”, an awakened man, a man re-born from deep mental and
inner transformation (Saint Paul: “metancia”) can see the world as a place
that manifests beauty and dignity. The new man: not just a
calculating-mind man, but a quaternary-man: as with the Greeks, the East,
Christianity, man as synthesis of four forms: body, soul, mind, spirit;
this new-man who can now answer the evangelic call (Mathew 6, 26-34: “See
the ‘glory’ of the lilies in the fields and the birds in the air”) and
contemplate, participate and feel this world (stone, rose, swallow, starry
sky…) as part of himself and himself as part of it. A man rich in
simplicity, in sobriety, in humility, capable of listening and seeing the
splendor that Creation offers him instead of passing by it closed and
“crass”, entrapped in his commonness.
3. Concept of time
The “new man”, capable of seeing and listening, therefore of praising,
loving all creation, watching over it and wisely administering it (in
order to remain in harmony with the thinking of Giovanni Paolo II), needs,
however, a different way of living his own temporary dimension, not
letting himself be captured in the omnivorous “steel cage” of a time whose
only aim is that which is usable, has results, is productive, worldly
successful. A time that is, namely, “machine”, “capacity”, capable of
tearing one’s own tissue where, as in “in-fancy”, as in “game”, we are
lost in the act of listening, in the act of seeing the music of life and
the invasion of such of that which is Eternal, by which an instant stops
and in contemplation appears the immense: in which the flight of the
swallows, the floating of the clouds, the countenance of a starry sky, the
autumn mist become the Epiphany of another Time, another Horizon in which
one can say: “Here, here we put up our Tent; here we set up our Abode;
here we sit at Home”. Precisely: Home-Abode-Oikos.
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