ARTICLE BIOEDILIZIA
BY ARCH. UGO SASSO
Does science copy nature, adapt to it, or impose laws that are foreign to it? And what is nature, something that is inside or outside of us? We certainly define as natural what has remained foreign to human intervention, such as the forests of the Amazon or meteorological phenomena; yet, on reflection, we read as “natural” even the blooming on the balcony of a flower selected over time with clever artifices. In other respects, there is probably nothing, from the ice of Antarctica to the depths of the Oceans that has remained totally and simply foreign to the effects of human action.
In other words, it seems incongruous to distinguish man from everything that surrounds him, denying the rich continuity that links our living to the world (if our deepest essence were not natural, we could truly – and with impunity – overcome the need for any contact with the outside world). However, on the other hand, it also seems difficult to look at man as a being integrated into processes (if this were the case, if everything we do were “natural” by definition, it would not be possible for us to get off the tracks of equilibrium).
Unfortunately or fortunately, this is not the case. In fact, man, although part of the world, detaches himself from it and looks at it from the outside using a grid of behaviors and social, political, religious, ethical, artistic interpretations. In the long history of the Earth, the human factor appears to be completely new in that it is capable of inventing, innovating and changing to make the relationship with the environment more advantageous. Abilities that distinguish us from our surroundings by providing us with the privilege of intervening on it, on matter (see chemistry) and even on biological evolution itself (see genetically modified organisms). These are acquisitions that generations and groups pass on, giving rise to that anthropological phenomenon called culture.
So the dialectical term, the tragic opposition of which we are spectators and actors, is not so much Man / Nature, but rather between what is natural (that is, it follows intrinsic laws) and what is cultural (that is, it is the result of human elaborations and choices). Only today culture seems to be absorbed, sucked into technology.
Even science – here is another dialectical pole: Science and Technology – cannot be conceived without its applicative finalization. This is a completely modern fact, while in the past (think of Roman hydraulics, Chinese acupuncture, the botanical uses of primitive peoples) technology was based on empirical observation, on the reading of experience, without the need to respond and fit into theoretical constructions. Those were the times in which science was aimed at understanding the world and not – as in modernity – at stealing secrets to exploit. It is difficult to say how it will end.
In our time, the conquest of the clear awareness (is it a lot? is it a little?) that the crux of the problem is not in protecting the green, in organizing traffic or in using cork instead of rock wool; that is, that the possibility of establishing a new balance does not lie in the materials, in individual choices or in technology but rather in the recovery of perspectives, meanings, horizons.
