Guest blog – Rebirth by Danilo Selvaggi

Danilo Selvaggi is Director General of Lipu, Italy’s BirdLife partner, having been in charge of institutional relations. He has a long involvement with environmental politics, communications and cultural ecology, and been an adviser to the Environment Ministry. A graduate in philosophy, he has focused especially on the social and cultural implications of philosophy, especially in environmental terms. As well as teaching on various Master’s courses on communications and environmental culture, he continues to write on environmental matters for science reviews and the press. Typically wide-ranging, his latest essay for the Lipu quarterly looks for a way forward and a true New Deal after the pandemic.

Rebirth              

The great crises bring lessons we must not lose sight of: they make us understand our mistakes, and point out to us new directions. And so it is too with the emergency of the Coronavirus, from which we must emerge better, with fellowship and nature at the centre.

After the Black Death came the Renaissance. The endless dark night of the world, that had taken so many lives and for decades instilled a sense of inescapable doom, was followed by a clear dawn full of great works and of talents without equal. Though it had lost half its population, Florence was at the centre of the rebirth, but the wind of the Renaissance spread far beyond the city and became the Spirit of the Age.

Crafts and sciences, economics, politics, health, philosophy, and above all the arts, grew rapidly, with the great names the whole world has come to know, such as Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo, writing some of the most memorable pages in the history of our race, pages that are not only a source of light for this age, but also markers of beauty and fellowship for those to come who see them, messages in the bottles of time. The messages tell us this: we humans are capable of atrocities but also of pure altruism and achieving great things, and that in this way we can realise ourselves, through them, and with brother- and sisterhood.

The New Deal

The Renaissance of the United States, on the other hand, was called the New Deal. It was a social resurrection that allowed the country to emerge from the dramatic period which has passed into history as the Great Depression. The Wall Street Crash, on the Black Tuesday of October 29th 1929, coming out of a combination of financial speculation and the weaknesses of the economic system, engendered a terrifying economic crisis that halved industrial production, destroyed millions of jobs and generated despair and loss of trust to leave the country on its knees for years, with devastating repercussions for the rest of the world.

Then came Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In 1933, as soon as he was elected president, Roosevelt put flesh on his idea: a gigantic project for a national rebirth starting from the foundations in the most literal sense of the word: the soil and the earth. Roosevelt made a pact, a deal with the American people: if we work together, I promise that America and the rest of the world will be changed. Roosevelt did not start from industry and finance, but precisely from trees and forests. “Trees keep the fertile earth on the slopes and the moisture in the soil, they regulate the flow of water and of streams, they moderate extremes of heat and cold, they purify the air. To sum up, they are the lungs of America and we must defend them.”

Nature, soil, water, climate, trees: this was in the thirties of the twentieth century, but it sounds more akin to the advanced thinking of the twenty-first.

Three hundred thousand young Americans 

Only weeks after Roosevelt’s election, the Deal was set in motion. Three hundred thousand young Americans between the ages of 18 and 25 were brought into the plan for the saving and safeguarding of nature in America, that fed in, among other things, to the fight against soil erosion and the planting of 200 million trees. Roosevelt added to this a ban on the sale of public domain land and a tax on the use of natural resources such as the use of land for mining and grazing, through a scheme that would now be called PES, Payment for Ecosystem Services. In 1935, on the heels of these initiatives, came the birth of the Soil Conservation Service, the national agency aimed at combatting soil erosion and depletion, a milestone on the road of environmental management.

The goods of greatest value 

The New Deal was a programme founded on the revolutionary conviction (now more than ever, ninety years later), that the rebirth of a nation, for a true and enduring wellbeing, does not simply depend on the algorithms of classical economics (the Roosevelt government, obviously, took many actions in this field as well), but above all on a truer sense of national identity. To have a care for Nature, for a State, means to count upon goods, which if used wisely, are longer lasting, of greater value, and give greater benefits in ways that a voracious economy and an ever more opaque financial system can not.

It was in those years that the America of woods, of campsites, of summers by the lake and of trips into the great national parks and wildernesses was born, that is to say the America that considered its natural heritage as a precious national asset to be valued and preserved.

Never too late

Europe too found the strength and the rationale to reconstruct, doing it following the Second World War: after the concentration camps, after the destruction of the cities and the far distant rumble of the devastation wrought by the atomic bombs unleashed upon Japan (which in its turn knew the meaning of rebirth). The physical and moral rubble was scattered everywhere, as record of the horrors of which we are capable, almost as if to say, no, we have done too much harm, it is impossible to rebuild. And yet, few moments have been more vital than our second post war.

The Italy of the fifties and the first part of the sixties was a country of generous hearts and genuine sacrifice, of the desire to leave suffering behind and the wish for a new flowering of consciousness and of society.

It was the country of Adriano Olivetti and of his “community factory”, it was the country of television, that alternated between light entertainment and the work of improving literacy. “Non e mai troppo tardi” – “It is never too late”, the programme featuring teacher Alberto Manzi, went to 484 instalments to teach reading and writing to those Italians who did not yet know how to. All in all, a country which tried to look forward with seriousness, faith, and in some ways, authenticity, and in a good part of it, succeeded.

Good intentions and short legs

In effect, the moments of rebirth are the most dynamic and authentic that are given us to live. All the energies that seemed dissipated come back and are released. The clouds which obstructed our vision are scattered. Despair gives way to the joy of a new opportunity. What is the goal? It is the permanence of a positive outlook. It is to make sure that the justified enthusiasm of such moments is not wasted. To ensure, so to say, that good intentions, as often happens, do not have short legs as do lies.

Unfortunately, what has happened in Italy up to now is this: the good intentions have been quickly forgotten, and it has fallen back into consumerism, speculative building, social alienation and the destruction of nature and the countryside, mistakes for which we are all now paying the price.

Etymology of the crisis

To avoid this happening it is necessary to consider crises in depth, to analyse them, to map out their structural aspects, to avoid the temptation of regarding a crisis as a random event unlikely to be repeated. This is what Nassim Taleb refers to as a black swan: an unforeseeable catastrophic event. In some respects, however, a crisis is never a black swan event. It is a possibility at the back of everything, of our individual and social lives. At the same time, we have to be careful not  to be lulled by the consoling idea that the crisis will automatically be followed by renewal. In a complex world with such a high level of risk as ours, this is by no means guaranteed. The extent of the constant environmental degradations can unleash problems which are difficult to surmount, and in order to do this actions have to be timely, heading them off before they reach critical thresholds, and planning a better course.

The etymology of the word crisis takes us back to a Greek root: krino, meaning to divide or separate. A crisis is the boundary between a before and an after. It is the cracks in the old road, it is the finding of a different route. To emerge from a crisis without changing direction is the same as not to emerge from it. Not to resolve it but simply to let it sleep. To sum up, the crisis has to be a signpost, a lesson from life, so that the rebirth will not be a mere change of clothes and then everything the same as before, business as usual, but a genuine leap to a different level. A spillover in a good way.

Lessons from the virus

What lessons, then, are coming to us from the pandemic? Many, and all essential. The pandemic tells us that we must not dismantle our nation’s health system, which gives security to all. It tells us that we must invest in science and research, to create the best possible conditions for recognising a problem and acting on it. Again, it tells is there is a need to reinforce defences against disasters, for example earthquakes and landslides, to which our country is already extremely vulnerable (if we do it, with time the black swan will find us ready for it and able to minimise its consequences). It tells us too that our lives are often marked by excess: frenetic, dehumanised, short of time and time for nature.

Moreover, when we come to the subject of nature, it tells us not to abuse it, not to overturn its balances, and to discard practices such as intensive breeding, the wet markets and the international trafficking of wild animals. And it tells us to call a halt to the destruction of ecosystems, an extraordinarily dangerous phenomenon inextricably linked to the pandemic.

In a nutshell, the Covid 19 pandemic is a manual on what and what not to do, and of things that must be done swiftly, among which is the overriding mission to reconcile nature, society and humanity, to bring harmony to their relationships at last.

Our Man on the Moon

Will it happen? What will Italy do post- virus, and above all, what will Europe do? What will come out of the fundamental environmental tasks signed up to by the EU, starting with the Green Deal (for which see elsewhere in this issue)? It is very much the nub of the question. With the fallout from the Coronavirus and the reconstruction to come after, a large part of Europe’s reputation is at stake. It will have to act wisely, whether in general political terms, with the laying aside of nationalisms to enter into a truly united community, or in terms of the politics of the environment, placing nature at the centre of things at last.

It is no coincidence that the name given to the European environmental Renaissance calls Roosevelt’s great project to mind. A pact, a Green Deal, that redesigns industry and the economy to be genuinely sustainable and takes into account the great community resource represented by biodiversity. “Our objective is to reconcile the economy and the planet”, has said the European Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, when annnouncing a trillion euro investment plan and dubbing the Green Deal as “our Man on the Moon”.

To this “Man on the Moon”, that is to say this attempt to do things differently, many forces are objecting and many lining up already to oppose it. Too many think that after the virus we just have to carry on where we left off, with the same heedlessness and unsustainability, in the same “general malaise” of which Pope Francis himself has spoken. Never could there be an error more grave, never a more botched calculation. 

This way, or the bottle

In the quiet of the empty city streets through the weeks of the pandemic, bright and strong, the song of tits and wagtails, blackbirds and blackcaps, has again been able to be heard. These same weeks have seen the loss of many lives, with so many of the elderly among them, more vulnerable when faced with the virus. Family bonds broken in silence, partings in solitude, grief upon grief. Financial woes for the survivors. In such conditions it is hard even to conceive of a rebirth, of Florence in the Renaissance, of FDR’s New Deal.

In The Heart and the Bottle, a touching illustrated tale for children (but not only), Oliver Jeffers tells of the relationship between a little girl of four, a lover of nature, and her grandfather, who talks to her about the world, tells her of the hidden life of plants, walks with her by the sea, showing her the incredible beauty of the vault of the sky, full of secrets and stars. She is enchanted and happy, in love with her grandfather and the world. Then, one day, the black swan. She finds his chair empty in the moonlight: her grandfather will never return. The girl’s grief is so deep that she decides to put her heart away, placing it in an unbreakable bottle. The desire to live and love is gone and the heart will remain there forever, safe from the dangers and disappointments of life. Time passes, and the girl grows to become a woman. Without emotions. Then there appears another young girl, who asks questions of her as she did her grandfather. But the answers to the girl’s questions are locked away in the heart she has hidden away, in the bottle that cannot be broken. Every attempt to break it is vain, until it is the little hands of the girl herself that reach into the bottle to bring the heart back out into the light, for it to be born once more.

Nothing can annul the pain of those who in these months have lost one dear to them, a grandfather, a grandmother. And yet there is a great capacity for regeneration that makes humans what they are. It is the inter-generational project. It is the sharing of consciousness between us, it is putting value on the good and the right things to do. It is to learn from others, to give and to receive, it is the answer from the heart that is at one with the mind and intellect. It is to follow tradition but also to break it, to enrich it with new things and introduce small mutations, to turn the evolutionary path of our culture towards a better destination. It is the message in the bottle, yet outside the bottle. It tells us that we must truly be healed, and not only from the virus. It tells us that we must rethink everything, must organise ourselves better. It is the one way to be reborn, to live fuller lives, it is to become better. To grow in the fullest sense of the term. It is either this way, or the bottle.

(Translated by Peter Rafferty for @Lipu_UK – Lipu UK is the only branch of a BirdLife partner outside the parent country – for more information contact [email protected])

Bibliography 

Telmo Pievani, Imperfezione. Una storia naturale, Raffaello Cortina, 2019

Jared Diamond, Upheaval: How Nations Cope with Crisis and Change, Allen Lane, 2015

Oliver Jeffers, The Heart and the Bottle, Harper Collins, 2010

David Quammen, Spillover. Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, WW Norton, 2012

Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Jonathan Cape, 2018

Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Random 

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