Stories of Other Lives and Foodtech.
In these turbulent days, while the mass return from summer holidays seems to provide the only one-dimensional backdrop to current political propaganda, the third edition of the learning experience organized by FAO and the Future Food Institute has just concluded in Pollica (SA), focusing on Integral Ecological Regeneration and the Mediterranean Way of Life.
Once again, it has been an opportunity to reflect on the multidimensional reality of a country far more complex than we are often led to believe.
A country capable of overturning traditional development paradigms, recognizing the intangible heritage that all of humanity acknowledges within it, and bringing the Archaeological Parks of Velia and Paestum back to life, filling them with the voices of our ancestors intertwined with those of our children.
Parmenides, for example, who lived in the 5th century BC, spoke of the “destructive work” carried out by the “pure and shining lamp of the sun”. Certainly, in 500 BC, that destructive force did not have to contend with an atmosphere into which humanity now injects, every 24 hours, an amount of energy equivalent to 500,000 atomic bombs. As happens in 2022.
Today, we know that the destructive force is humanity itself. We possess the magnificent creative potential of technological solutions and, at the same time, the extraordinarily self-destructive power of the only animal capable of destroying its own habitat instead of protecting it.
And so, at the centre of the infinite mystery of nature — fierce and maternal — of the past and the future, of the stones we walked across in Velia and Paestum and the stars we observed from Paideia Campus, inside the Castello dei Principi Capano in Pollica, there is “you”.
This is the message we wanted to leave with the Climate Shapers.
We taught it through field experiences, intense discussions with veteran scientists and experts, and debates on food security, health and longevity, energy transition, resource protection and much more, to the 1,000 Climate Shapers we have trained over the past three years, and to the 15 participants in this latest class in Pollica.
They ranged in age from 14 to 40 and came from 10 different countries: Zambia, Greece, Germany, the United States, France, the United Kingdom, Hungary, Kazakhstan and Italy, with participants representing six Italian regions — Lazio, Tuscany, Piedmont, Puglia, Campania and Lombardy.
Don Andrea Ciucci, Secretary General of the Pontifical Academy for Life, launched our educational journey from the ancient theatre of the Velia Archaeological Park.
His words were powerful and captured the essence of our work:
“And then there is you. You and your life… your story, your words, your choices, your freedom, your gifts and your limits, your past and your future, your dreams and your disappointments. The life that is yours and yours alone. This life, your life, does not belong to you. You did not shape your own body, and you were woven in someone else’s womb. Others chose your name. You did not decide to come into the world, and you will not be able to decide not to die… Life precedes us and passes through us. It welcomes us and surpasses us. The first word of the Hebrew Bible: bereshit, ‘in the beginning’. It begins with B. Not with A. Something precedes our beginning. It escapes us and reveals itself. It makes us second!”
If we truly want to become Climate Shapers — and more broadly, agents of change — we must learn to look into this infinite mirror.
We need to stop pontificating. Stop teaching only notions. Stop teaching them through one-way communication, using methods that fail to take into account who we have become. All of us, students and teachers alike. And I am not referring only to the pandemic.
One-dimensional frameworks, the banality of good, and oversimplification stand in contrast to the extraordinary possibility of creating a new way of building prosperous communities.
A way based on creating learning environments where active listening prevails; where people interact in order to influence and enrich one another; where history is allowed to speak about the future; where Design Thinking evolves into Prosperity Thinking, and “Human-Centered Design” becomes “Planet- or Life-Centered Design”.
After all, human beings are the Planet. And the key to beginning a genuine regenerative process of change lies in the mirror.
Read the article on Nova
