To defeat global warming, humanity must open itself up to the network that surrounds it, including plants and animals in its life. We discussed this at Siamo fatti di terra, during the Kum! festival.
One of the most important needs of human beings is to feel part of a community. Indeed, it is on this need that phenomena such as social networks have built their empires, allowing users to share their lives with a potentially infinite number of individuals. From an evolutionary perspective, this need for belonging has long played a predominant role in the development of relationships among all living beings on the planet, both plant and animal. For centuries, humanity lived in harmony with animals and plants, creating a circular web of life that connected all living things on the same level. At a certain point, however, this balance broke down, and human beings transformed the circular web in which they had lived up to that point into a pyramid, placing themselves at the top, alone.
It was precisely the relationship between humanity and nature that was discussed at the Kum! festival, an event curated by Massimo Recalcati, an Italian psychoanalyst and essayist celebrated for his television lectures with Lessico famigliare, held at the Mole Vanvitelliana in Ancona at the end of October. This year the festival explored the origins of animal, human and plant life, and the web stretched between these three apparently separate worlds. Within this framework, the final event of the Siamo fatti di terra series of meetings was also held, organised by Alce Nero in collaboration with LifeGate. These meetings aim to understand how the concept and meaning of "health" is undergoing a revolution. During the festival, speakers included Daniel Lumera, director of the international foundation My life design, and Stefano Mancuso, director of the Laboratorio internazionale di neurobiologia vegetale, one of the world's leading experts on plants and known for his theories on plant intelligence; author of books such as Verde brillante and La nazione delle piante. The two opened a discussion on the evolution of humans, animals and plants in the world, casting a new and illuminating light on our role on the planet.
"Human beings need to be together and to forge bonds," explained Daniel Lumera. "One could even go so far as to say that the sense of inclusion is a true evolutionary urgency." But when we speak of coexistence, the conversation must not be confined solely to relationships between humans. On the contrary, according to Stefano Mancuso, "human beings need to develop a new awareness of union in order to open their eyes to the web that surrounds them" — a web that includes animal and plant species as well. It is on the mechanism of the web that the entire evolutionary process of the planet is based, not on the hierarchical pyramid according to which humanity lives, which thus proves to be unsustainable both from an ethical and an evolutionary standpoint.
In a circular logic, nature provides its individuals with everything they need, in a dimension of continuous exchanges that maintain its equilibrium, even at the cost of eliminating any disruptive factors. In the pyramidal scheme, however, human beings abuse these connections, draining them without giving anything back. "Every year resources run out earlier and earlier, terrifyingly shortening the life expectancy of the human species: in the 1970s they ran out on 31 December, this year they ran out in July. For the remaining five months, humanity has literally stolen from itself and from nature: one day it will be hungry and will have nothing left to eat because it will have already consumed everything. This is why humanity must change before the web changes it, by driving it to extinction," the neurobiologist emphasises.
As well as destroying the planet, the situation of solitude at the apex of the pyramid into which humanity has confined itself is undermining its ability to satisfy other needs too. In the 1950s, American psychologist Abraham Maslow theorised that, in order to be happy, human beings need to satisfy requirements that concern not only the necessity of nourishment, but also the sense of belonging to a community and the sense of protection derived from the surrounding environment.
Climate change, natural disasters and extreme weather events, a direct and proven consequence of human activity, are undermining these very needs. "If the Earth's temperature rises by even half a degree, the sea submerges up to a hundred kilometres of land. And where are the people who live there supposed to go?", Stefano Mancuso asked the audience at the Kum! festival. Indeed, climate change is considered one of the most serious problems facing society by the majority of people, and conditions such as solastalgia — a form of psychological distress caused by sudden changes in the environment and the degradation of the natural world — have begun to be recognised with increasing frequency. "It is young people who feel this anxiety most acutely, and this was evident during the strikes," Lumera emphasised.
Anxiety about climate change is understandable, but according to Stefano Mancuso, a simple, swift and inexpensive solution exists to stop it — one that would benefit both the planet and humanity: planting trees. "To be precise, we would need to plant one trillion trees – explained the plant neurobiologist, whose theories on plant intelligence have revolutionised science –. They are the source of life par excellence because they represent the link between life and the Sun. By planting enough of them, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere would drop dramatically, improving the quality of life on Earth. They should be placed in cities, because even though cities account for just 1.6 per cent of the land surface, they generate as much as 80 per cent of the planet's CO2."
Humanity therefore has a concrete solution at its disposal to meet the greatest challenge of this millennium. Some municipalities, including the city of Milan and the Lazio region, have indeed begun to launch large-scale tree-planting programmes to improve the quality of life for their citizens, seeking to gradually restore the lost bond with nature. The city of Lisbon was even named European Green Capital for 2019, partly thanks to the number of trees it has tended in recent years.
Humanity cannot, therefore, regard itself as the planet's superior species and impose a pyramidal logic on the environment to meet its own needs, because nature reacts to every stimulus to which it is subjected and does not operate in a dictatorial manner. Continuing with this attitude would lead only to extinction — both because, by doing so, human beings will one day have no more resources to drain, and because nature will, in some way, respond to this abuse. As Lumera pointed out, "if bees were to become extinct it would be a disaster for the ecosystem, but if human beings were to become extinct, within a few decades the web would have restored its equilibrium. This is why humanity must shift from an ego-centric attitude to an eco-centric one." Evolution shows us how plants — living beings that have learned to coexist in order to survive — made the right choice, and offers food for thought about the future that human beings wish to build. Isolation, as we have seen, does not work. The time has come to try inclusion.