Cittadellarte at the UN: a declaration of peace
Paolo Naldini at the UN for the High-Level Political Forum on Sustainability: “The third world war is here. Either we’ll win it practising total and ubiquitous sustainability. Or we’ll all lose it.”

The third world war is already here.

But it is not fought against a nation outside of ours. We are the enemy.
Our way of life.
Our allies are the ocean, the soil, the animals, the climate.
And they too are suffering hard under enemy attacks.

During the periods of war the peoples find themselves capable of impossible things. We must understand that it is NOW time for impossible things. Or perish.
How many of us get sick from lifestyle-related illnesses? The food. Air and water pollution. But also our second skin.

As individuals we have one each.
As an integral social body, we have a common skin: it is our clothes. That cover us in every moment of our life. Day and night.

Our first skin becomes ill, and at least 7% of its diseases are due to the substances contained in this second skin.

We must make peace with the planet, and be reborn with it all of us.
Peace tools and peace negotiations are needed.
Lawyers, economists, scientists are needed. This is not a new task for United Nations.

To win this war, we must first understand the enemy. How does he feed? Where does his strength come from? It is not going to be easy to accept that we are ourselves to feed it. With our choices and our surrendering.
How many must live in misery? How many without food, water, education and health? Before we understand that our way of life is killing us? We are suffocating the ocean of microplastics, every time we wash a polyester garment, which makes up more than 60% of the world’s production of clothes (a 3 trillion dollar market), we unload invisible plastic waste into the streams that kill the sea ​​and its animals: they are coming for us. Anyone who triggers these facts can not be called our friend. So our enemy is us.
We cause the migrations of the humans we see desperately trying to reach our increasingly barricaded borders. Tell me if this is not the war syndrome? Walls and police at the ports… But our enemies are not those desperate people, rather those who force them to that despair.
It is time for humans to come to terms with themselves. And see this challenge facing us for the first time in history. And truly work for peace.

We need heroes, but like any war, this too is fought and won by the millions of people who every day, in the trenches of their own organization, their life and their communities, commit themselves to practice peace. Peace means sustainability.

The good news is that there are millions of invisible or almost invisible heroes who are fighting for us. And the other good news is that we do not have to take a gun and shoot someone to fight this war; but rather we must learn to choose how to dress. How to feed. How to commute. How to work.
We need to open our eyes. To call this war by its name. And to practice peace. As a human people in alliance with the non human peoples of the earth.

We need narratives and myths. New symbols and new words. We must open the era of Rebirth and Demopraxy. Talk about all this in our homes, schools, offices, newspapers, churches and the cinemas. The third world war has arrived. We fight this through making our lives more sustainable. Nations will not win against one another. This time either we will all win, or nobody.
It is particularly symbolical now, that we are offered help by the forests, once again trees are providing us with wisdom and peace. Our second skin (the garments) made of their wood can help us be reborn. As in Macbeth a forest is walking towards us, but this time it is for our survival.