But what does it mean today to be an ecologist?

Many saw the Covid emergency as proof that ecologists were right. The dramatic effects of the pandemic have been read as the consequence of a humanity that is increasingly artificial and distant from nature, which is indeed often trampled on by human beings. Thus viruses "attack" our species because we invade more and more natural spaces and they are so dangerous because our health is already stressed by the pollution with which we especially poison our metropolises. However, just as many overturn the question and claim that it is precisely the ecologists who have not understood anything. In their adoration for all that is natural, "wild" and uncontaminated, they have forgotten how dangerous, merciless nature can be. The only way to contain the dangers is therefore to make the most of technologies and tame the environment that surrounds us more and more.

For Roberto Della Seta, ecologist for more than thirty years and president of Legambiente between 2003 and 2007, these two opinions, so distant from each other, both contain some truths, but they are afflicted by the same, disabling vice: that of oversimplifying extremely extremely themes. complex. And complexity is the fundamental characteristic of the world around us as well as of the problems that afflict it.

The essay "Ecologist to whom?" (Salerno Editrice, 2021, pp. 232, also e-book) in which Roberto Della Seta not only traces the history of ecological thought, but tells us how being an ecologist is today a necessary, but not sufficient, condition. fight for the protection of the planet, a safeguard that mainly concerns us human beings who simply cannot live without certain environmental and climatic conditions. However, it cannot be done if the ambiguous relationship between ecology and modernity, between ecological thinking on the one hand and scientific-technological progress and economic development on the other.

For Della Seta, ecology cannot simply be synonymous with abandoning the progress achieved, an imaginary happy degrowth or a return to an Eden that probably never existed. Ecological thinking must be able to imagine a new type of modernity, based on a very strong alliance and interrelation between technical progress and the safeguarding of environmental balances. And it must do so also looking at the economic aspect of the question because it is not conceivable to think of protecting the planet without there being greater well-being for everyone. The challenge, for Della Seta, is to be able to preserve the desire for change and rupture that ecology has always carried within itself, but to combine it with the desire to do, build, design, without privileging criticism and opposition in every situation.

In political terms, we could say that the author of the book imagines an ecologism of government and not just a barricade. In fact, ecological thinking has often looked at man as an "intruder" in the natural world but at the same time, in the wake of Darwin, as an animal species integrated in evolutionary processes. This contradiction has not prevented the ideas of ecologists from conquering public opinion, from penetrating the contemporary mentality and above all of the new generations. But in the face of the pandemic and an even more serious crisis, the climate one, ecologists must, for Della Seta, dissolve their ambiguities, putting aside prejudices and mistrust towards science and technology: or, as a solution to the ecological crisis, the green thinking risks becoming part of the problem itself.

A form of nihilism that leads to nothing and only risks doing damage.