What decision will you take?
Since the beginning of the pandemic, I have reflected a lot about our plummeting into a collective uncertainty, and reasoned about the concepts of closeness, freedom and relationship, and, analysing our daily circumstances, I surprisingly had to admit that social distancing had not been caused by Covid-19. We are separate islands, victims of our individualism. The virus has emphasised the loneliness of the contemporary man, forced to build for himself a fictitious life of affected hugs and smiles, endless queues in shopping centres and aperitifs, quick trips to the park and hours spent chatting online, all to escape the primordial fear of inner emptiness gripping him. Silence descended like a veil on the routines of our so-called “normality”. After singing on balconies, the fragility of human relationships revealed itself between the four walls of our homes, when the mantra “everything will be fine” lost its effectiveness, because it was not supported by real change. The virus has made us face an epochal turning point. Shops were closed and our movements monitored, the places of culture, and in particular the museums that were already less crowded, had to close their doors, the economy was suffering, close contacts were banned, the lost beauty of mental and physical feelings awoke us, showing us the evil of a society devoted to appearance, deprived of contents and full of superfluous needs.

Hence my decision to enter into a pact with Mother Nature, making an act of commitment with which to drive a cultural, social and economic re-evolution to carry out with creativity and imagination, colours and materials, for a future that re-establishes the broken connection between nature and us, according to a sense of circularity and reciprocity. Up to today, we have walked the path of meanness, justifying our behaviour with the false promise of improving the quality of life of the single individuals, of being able to buy wellness and freedom at low cost from the shelves of the great distribution, when in reality our aim was to subdue the natural order of things and dominate over the other forms of life, in order to feed the ferocious beast hidden in our souls sick with attention-seeking behaviour. The problem concerns us all, each miniscule portion of consumed earth, each contaminated field, each abused plot of land, as well as the compromising of protected habitats and the ruthless exploitation of the planet’s resources, in addition to causing sufferance to insects, amphibious animals, birds and mammals, forced to live in degraded conditions, has also polluted our days, I too am guilty of so much pain too often spread in the name of a shallow fun that steps on the dignity of others, in the illusion of remaining unhurt. The arrogance of man, the result of a tested omniscience of our own species, has made us controllable, and our blind trust in the supremacy of technology has made us carriers of infections, mainly spreading lethal illnesses like indifference.

Covid-19 ripped from us our beloved routine, our loved ones, and with us thus spoiled, a desire for authentic relationships and for a new (in fact ancient) intimacy between our souls, which had reawakened after a period of hibernation, started emerging from between the cracks of our caged identities. The big lesson was that stopping does not mean wasting time, but rather reclaiming time for ourselves, the right to a waiting period and to a suspension of time, where either nothing or everything can happen. We just have to listen and walk the territory, leave the range of possibilities open to meet people, to benefit from a gesture, a word, the line of a smile. Wandering among spontaneous herbs, admirable archaeological ruins, tortoise nests and the footprints of people that have come before us blending with those of people that will come after us, in the merry-go-round of history, while watching the dance of sea and sky, I met Bruno di Loreto. I asked him if he felt like reflecting with me “on the connections between health, ecosystem and creativity, that is generating healthy and ethical communities through art”. He said that he did.
Bruno di Loreto. Among the many important statements, I was particularly impressed by the following: “Make people reflect on the connections between health, ecosystem and creativity”. A claim that concerns one of the central topics of my personal and professional research. Where, how and when did the many interwoven threads that had always linked these three themes dissolve?

Bruno di Loreto: between health, ecosystem and creativity
Let’s think about the myth of the ‘ideal city’ and about the mystic sense of the “Italian garden”, admirable projects and achievements from the Renaissance period produced by this magical interweaving that somehow became a reality. Outside the metaphor: ecological and zero-impact cities and villages in transition (which already exist) integrated into uncontaminated agricultural and natural ecosystems are the best general premise to maintain and improve the health status of human, animal and vegetable populations. Such a ‘miracle’ does not obviously occur on its own, we are talking about an enormous transformational and organizational effort necessarily requiring the participation of all social elements. It is an epochal endeavour whose implementation does not only need top-quality planning and operational abilities, the minds and above all the hearts of those involved also need to change. I am saying the hearts because it is an endeavour of a poetical even more than spiritual nature. It is a hand held out to our historical and moral roots, that world whose presence has always been testified by the artistic phenomenon. A phenomenon that is a messenger, image and tangible testimony of the role of values in the development of an authentic ethical conscience and of our own personal function in the general balance of the planet and of the populations. The relationship between oneself and the world is either co-creative or it does not exist. This is because life and its countless manifestations unfold as a state of permanent creation in constant co-evolution, as anybody engaged for example in deep ecology knows well.

Let’s therefore analyse, in the brief time we are given, the current relationship between ecosystems and health, as well as the one existing between two twins, art and science, separated at birth. This is to prompt a reflection on an ethical use of creative talent with the aim of producing working prototypes of ecological, self-sufficient and zero-impact communities functional to the theoretical and operational redefinition of the short- and long-term objectives of our present model of civilization. Dealing with the themes of health, humanity and natural environment has now become an urgent issue that cannot be deferred. Man heavily pollutes in many ways, water and food are in short supply, the integrity of the environment is more and more seriously damaged, and this is exponentially harming the whole mankind. Sick ecosystems create societies of sick people. Who is responsible for this? You would of course instinctively say that the model is.
Let’s start with our brief analysis of the ecosystems. Question: “Is it possible to remain healthy while living surrounded by ecosystems that are heavily polluted and on the brim of collapse?”. The answer is obvious. In this instance, we are only talking about physical health, about the environmental polluters that we absorb with the food we eat and with the air we breathe, which for decades have been leading to consequences that we are only now learning to recognise and fully evaluate.

If we also want to take into account the psychological damage, we just need to consider the increase in use of specific prescription drugs (antidepressants, anxiolytics, etc.) registered all over the world, to understand that the harm done to the ecosocial contexts, i.e. cities and countryside, is dramatic beyond tolerance. We are unwell, and we are getting worse and worse, in the fragile illusion of being well, of getting better and better. Ours is paradoxically called a ‘society of wellness’. But we are unwell, to feed a ‘developmental’ model that imagines and proposes an endless growth in consumption on a finite and limited planet. An obvious and tragic contradiction in terms, as Kenneth Boulding said: “Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist”.

Anybody operating in the mental health sector knows that the origin of most of the general discomfort suffered by individuals and communities is to be found in the multiple and quickly worsening stress factors generated by the toxic socio-economic models currently prevailing. In other words: it is becoming more and more difficult to keep healthy given that society is sick. Who is responsible? The big multinational companies? The governments? Who are the bad people (apparently wanting everybody to be poor and sick) this time around? Responsible and informed therapists know perfectly well that it is not at all easy to heal a patient who lives, body and soul, the serious ecosystemic and socio-economic contradictions of the present. They might be able to provide temporary relief, but the omnipresent causes of the many and frequent kinds of uneasiness remain. For some time, groups of therapists have started being active in different and diverse collective contexts, with the declared aim of extending a more sensible and structured approach to physical and mental health into the social body as a whole. One theme deeply connected to what has been said so far is that of creativity as a useful and essential tool to search for new and effective solutions to apply to the scenario outlined above. “Creativity is the art of manifesting the implicit in order to overcome the explicit, what has already been said”, a colleague once said to me. And he continued: “An evolutionary process must entail a creative process antithetical to the foreseeable”, meaning somehow antithetical to what has already been seen, what is already known.

Sometimes something urgent, not said, not fully examined dawns just below the thin threshold of our regular routine. Sometimes an inexplicable uneasiness, sometimes a message from a friend or a sentence read somewhere strikes us like a mallet, the implicit – that inner content we struggle to declare even to ourselves – discretely knocks on our door asking to be let in. If we do not concede, it does not usually hesitate to kick the door in and complicate our lives. This passage clearly and loudly indicates that we are on the verge of a revelation that concerns the sense of our life itself and contains the keys to access at last those difficult truths that are at the constant horizon of our life progress. Creating is therefore also giving voice to these not-said and not-heard words, giving space to other visions and images, awakening the perceptions and the senses from an involuntary anaesthesia.
From an ethical point of view, creating means revealing part of those truths whose denial originates what we call evil. When creativity is at the service of ethics, it constitutes a tension towards the good. In this case, it is the vehicle for a possible journey back home, back to that primordial harmony which creativity indelibly traces and inevitably calls to. A prolonged and attentive observation carried out by artists, philosophers, literati, scientists, doctors, activists and social operators, communicators, journalists and researchers from different sectors at least in the post-war years (to narrow down our field of investigation) has highlighted how the triad health (wellness, food, lifestyle, urban environment, etc.), ecosystems (natural environment, pollution, deforestation, mass extinctions, desertification, climate change, etc.) and creativity (social innovation, paradigm changes, network solutions, shared economy, open source, etc.) has been essential in feeding a critical analysis of the actual foundations of our civilization.

The extended and deep critical analysis I am referring to has represented, together with other social factors, the cultural environment that has allowed the many active forces operating in recent contemporaneity to generate something we could define ‘the Earth’s answer’. An answer that is currently embodied by the creation and propagation of sustainable and resilient – not necessarily resident – communities oriented to the attentive and responsible care of the natural, social and cultural contexts and of our inner beings, values and relationships. For a sort of spontaneous anthropological alchemy, these communities are now where the different and diverse fields of the great 20th century culture merge: scientific and philosophical revolutions, social innovation devoted to the quality of life and of the environment, pacifism, environmentalism, and the arts as search engines for the research and development of a renewed ethical conscience.

The most advanced groups engaged in this transcultural reflection are now able to conceive fruitful and unifying interrelationships between disciplines and fields of research traditionally considered unrelated if not actually mutually unintelligible. Among the many ecosystemic and interdisciplinary contaminations from different fields and cultural declinations, we gladly mention the Theory of Complexity, Wilber’s Integral Theory, Scharmer’s Theory U, the Transpersonal Movement, the Regeneration Movement, the Permaculture. The scientific thought marries the ability of the arts to innovate the planning vision of scientists and researchers by feeding it with their intrinsic capability of observing both the real and psychic worlds from heterodox and unusual perspectives in order to reveal and manifest remote and unconventional perceptive aspects. Aspects completely functional to the growth of the individual and collective consciences. On its part, the world of the arts has started rediscovering in the scientific approach the investigative rigour and the adherence to observable data which it had been mostly neglecting since the beginning of the 20th century. There is in fact something true in the stereotype of the true scientist as being rigorous and pedantic and the true artist as being whimsical and creative. But as of today, it feels more and more legitimate and constructive to recognise creative eclecticism in scientists and investigative rigour in artists, which subverts the roles. The two disciplines are unintentionally creating a new hybrid figure able to combine the two traditional aspects of the human mind, i.e. reason and intuition, under the same paradigm, under the same creative tone.

We are talking about the possibility to see how art and science are two distinct but now inseparable aspects of the same ontological reality. The cosmos and its phenomena cannot be kept in airtight containers the way we inevitably tend to do by operating a more or less marked separation between the various disciplines and specialisations. The boundaries between different types of knowledge are necessarily ephemeral and conventional, often conditioned by their historical and cultural origin. We know that art and science cannot be arbitrarily mixed, that they must be able to remain distinguishable in terms of styles, fields of investigation and operational processes. However, it must be more and more emphasised that they are both eligible roads to a better knowledge of oneself and the world, as other vocations and professions, mystical experiences and philosophies also are. In fact, there no activity of the human spirit that could not be aptly transformed into a process of acquisition of knowledge of oneself and the world or, in some cases, into an initiation in that direction. The complex and critical historical transition we are undergoing is an extraordinary opportunity to systematise what we have learnt and developed in the different fields of knowledge of the universe we are living in. There are many happy islands in the most diverse sectors of social, artistic and philosophical, as well as scientific and technological research, in which fully operational prototypes have been conceived and built as expression of a new ecological, prosperous, pacific and equalitarian vision of the world.

We only need to synchronise our maps together, exchanging useful information about the paths we have treaded so far, in order to reconstruct a lost but not forgotten image of an enchanted world. The Regeneration Movement, for example, promises to significantly change the face of our planet, in ecological terms, within a decade, possibly less. Ecodesign and architecture pledge the same thing. The Renaissance showed us how a revolution in the world of thought, culture and arts led to a golden age in which the remains of the classical world were transformed, within the limits of the times, into an admirable model of political and social evolution. Contemporary arts have been sailing in open waters since they emancipated their current vision and mission from their historical biography, not before learning its lesson though. Sciences are capable of studying the natural world and the human nature with a speculative depth that could not even be imagined until a few decades ago. All this allows us to plan and build completely ecological, self-sufficient, zero-waste communities, sometimes in transition, in which social and personal relationships do not suffer from the appropriation of time and commitment that vexes current urban and extra-urban realities. There exist operational prototypes of such projects and much is being organized around these initial models. At present and in all their different forms, zero-impact sustainable communities are places of active research on the three themes mentioned at the beginning, that is health and wellness, ecosystem and environmental sustainability, and a creativity still strongly anchored to pure ethics.

The ecosystemic disciplines previously mentioned also deal with, among other things, connecting these vast cultural territories of human experience that for too long have been kept separate. This way these knowledges can be used as foundation for the new social and ecological paradigm that is being reactivated by the numerous new communal realities scattered across the planet. A paradigm established with the assistance of scholars and experts from the most diverse fields of knowledge. Scientists and artists, philosophers and literati, therapists and humanists are contributing to the implicit or explicit rebirth of centres and organizations developing a renewed and more informed spirit of community. The Italian territory, mainly structured in small villages that were originally almost self-sufficient, is slowly being reinterpreted as an ideal place for the creation of many prosperous and pacific 4.0 communities. It is now clear that this modality and these projects require the participation of multiple disciplines well-coordinated around a radical rewriting of the sense and the ways of participating in a new planning which is at last a planning of the new.

Silvia Filippi, Rebirth/Third Paradise ambassadress, art curator, national co-coordinator of the RiArtEco (Riutilizzo Artistico Ecologico – ecological artistic reuse) movement. She is in charge of Fondazione Omiccioli’s artistic activities.

Bruno di Loreto, expert in conscience phenomena, educator of sustainable and ecological communities, communicator in the field of culture of ecophilosophy. He collaborates with various educational and community organizations, among which is Italia che Cambia.