But do places have a soul? Introduction to Quaderno18 edited by il prato publishing house I have been asking myself this question quite often recently, I even wrote about it some time ago, when I had already made a distinction between identity and soul.
My answer to the question is YES, without a doubt on my part. But really, I’m thinking about this matter over and over. I think there is a crucial distinction between identity and soul if we want to develop a real sustainable tourism. So, I will try to answer myself. Again.
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Identity or soul
Here I go back to my initial question and introduce the identity variable. Nowadays it is quite common to link the word identity to places. In my opinion this word is divisive, we are looking for the characteristics that differentiate one place from another rather than what they have in common. A phenomenon that I find worrying since I have the clear impression – walking around the villages – that they are all becoming the same, with similar promotions and with a strong emphasis on food and wine and typical products. Don’t get me wrong, typical products are fine but when, to push a product and a territory, tourist operators invent “the way (cammino) of the prosecco hills” you can easily understand that it is not a pilgrims’ way […]
At the beginning there were 3 of them. The three Rs that represented the cardinal principles of respect for the environment:
Reduce the amount of waste you produce. A recognition of the difficulty of a world without waste, but certainly the key principle to start managing the next steps.
Reuse for a different purpose what you already have and that is no longer useful for the initial purpose. An extension of the life of what you have. Give or exchange what you no longer need, but which can serve others
Recycle everything that you can’t reuse, through waste sorting and composting
By increasing the awareness, two more Rs have been introduced. The change of principle is clear, as the new concepts have an important potential impact on the market, and therefore on the world economy.
Recover / Repair. Almost an extension of Reuse / Recycle, with the awareness that our planet is not a world of “endless resources“, and that the concept of “throw it away and buy one again, it costs less than repairing it” is not feasible endlessly. Just think about how many printers you have changed.
Refuse purchasing products that do not have the possibility of being reused / repaired. The refusal is destined to become the cardinal rule, the first on the list, the one that can actually change the way of conceiving the production of goods, but …
Awareness versus price
…. What about the collision course of awareness with a very powerful variable: price? Buying disposable products is good for the economy, disposable products are cheap, they are always new and above all they make industry work, and with the industry they make us work.
Faced with this, our awareness fades, personal responsibility is replaced by a more generalist concept that assigns to someone else (governments, institutions, scientists) the role decision makers, transforming us from actors of a change to passive spectators of the choices of others.
A step back
We must take a step back, to understand this concept, and understand what we did wrong.
In the 60s and 70s, the years of the economic boom, the orientation was directed to the production of consumer goods accessible to all. A house for everyone, with bathroom, heating, appliances. A car for everyone, finally free to move and travel. It is obvious, nowadays, but not when the consumption spiral began.
Energy. We needed a lot of energy, but access to fossil fuels made it cheap, easy to have. Plastic seemed a democratic way of producing durable, low-cost goods, and the pollution was an acceptable price to pay.
Today we know that this was not the case and that the reckless use of energy – an energy that the first countries of the world use in an extreme way and that emerging countries want to be able to use in the same way – has shifted the heat balance of the planet, and did it in a much faster way than expected. The basic problem, which is often diverted to “secondary” problems, is that at this moment, with the reduction of those natural mirrors that are glaciers, our planet reflects much less solar energy than in the past, and therefore heats up faster. and faster, making the thought of “stopping” the current energy consumption almost pathetic.
It is no longer a problem of “energy resources”, the point is that the use of those resources will have to be reduced dramatically, in order to imagine to try to slow down the global warming.
A new way of thinking. The sixth R
It is no longer just a question of reducing energy consumption, it is a matter of Rethinking and Redesigning a way of life, giving it a shape that we cannot even imagine at the moment. It is the sixth R.
The idea that we can “maintain the status quo” in a “more environmentally friendly” way is a contradiction in terms, which will not lead us anywhere. Of course, thinking about “green” is important, doing our part is important, because it increases awareness, but “getting the right conscience” will not get us anywhere unless we start thinking that our life will have to change radically. Our life will change anyway, whether we like it or not.
Give up all hope …? Absolutely not. Abandon the technology? Not even. It will be the technology, in the hands of less conditioned minds of ours, the hope of an evolution of our way of life.
A different way of living, which I’m not able to tell. For now I can only imagine ….
100 hours for Environment, the event that took place from 5 to 9 June, whose full title was “All you need is a flower – 100 hours for environment” “Ci vuole un fiore – 100 ore per l’ambiente”. The entire event, 5 days, was included in ASVIS Festival Program, the annual Sustainable Development Festival the greatest event in Italy dedicated to the 2030 Agenda
The flower is a symbol of changing perspective, as in our cover photo
The small, delicate blue flowers are in front of a devastated area in Italy. We will not show the devastation, we will not specify the place, what is enough to know is that “ All you need a flower”
We have collected most of the speeches of the 5 days event, which took place at Negozio Piave 67 , in a short video, just a few minutes. In a couple of months we will have a publication. What is important, and that has emerged with the power of the speeches, are the results of climate change. For the environment but above all for humanity “we are running out of time”. “We must change our way of thinking” and consequently the way we act
But … can a flower be enough to start over? No, it is not enough. Not at all, it is in any case hope from which to start again. Hope that needs to be supported with concrete actions, as we have clearly understood in June.
Happy watching and keep in touch. Don’t miss our publication – in a couple of months – with the collection of the speeches.
Finally our new Quaderno . A man made of plastic, a title that contains all the aspects you will find in this issue. A Quaderno, number 9, with multiple aspects. It retraces our Manifesto and highlights our mission. “To make easier the interaction between culture and business in order to create new economic opportunities by starting from what already exists”.
Our journey started two years ago. It is evolving. Sometimes we were at a stalemate, sometimes tired but always ready to start again with even greater enthusiasm.
A man made of plastic gives a deeper emphasis to the relationship between territory / culture. Besides it highlights the increasingly complicated relationship between Man and the Environment. If we were to give an explanation in two words, the focus of this issue would certainly be Trees and Plastic. Trees and plastic depicted as a story, as a poem, or as news, as science fiction. Trees and the Plastic become for the authors the vehicle to talk all round of culture and the re-reading of territories, environmental emergencies and possible corrections. And above all, of man as a sentient being but also a being made of plastic. Sometimes a non-man, unaware of what he sees or, better still, of what he does not want to see.
A company point of view
A company point of view enriches this Quaderno. The article has been written by an important Venetian company dealing with automation systems for the plastics transformation. Are today’s companies responsible for plastic contamination? If so, to what extent? Are they making any correction? Or, what is under our eyes is the result of a lack of vision that brings us back to the sixties, when Giulio Natta is awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the construction of polypropylene and high density polyethylene?
As usual we ask questions. As usual our purpose is not so much to give answers but to provoke an autonomous and critical thought.
