Open letter to environmentalists from an environmentalist

I want to tell you my little story of environmentalist, born in a time when there were no social networks, not even mobile phones and television took a few minutes to light up because of the valves that had to heat up.

I do not have a clear memory of my love for nature until I reached the age of 6, in fact at that age of my life, my luck wanted me to attend my first school, which was defined as experimental.

It was 1970, and teachers adopted a teaching system that, in addition to traditional notions, tended to develop knowledge for the beautiful, therefore, among many things, also the knowledge of nature, which allowed students to experience it closely, through lessons in which you felt part of her.

I immediately fell in love with it, without second thoughts or compromises, even if the word “ecologist” did not yet exist in people’s vocabulary.

In the backyard we had three very old pine trees, and on one of these, when we were 8 years old, about 15 meters above the ground, I built my refuge in nature, using three axes that I found in my father’s garden.

I spent the afternoons after school, climbing up there and going down using a pipe of pvc water tied to a branch. I was happy with what was around me.

After adolescence, acquired autonomy, I often returned to look for nature, I wanted it: absolute, wild and lonely. So I chose mountaineering, even the solitary one, to live as an adult and under a more extreme form, the feeling of happiness that I experienced as a child on my pine.

I have climbed in summer and in winter, looking for hard, complicated itineraries and in solitary environments to fully enjoy the beauty of nature without compromise.

After some work experience, I managed, even in my work, to make sense of my passion for the environment, being able to deal first with the production of manufactured items made of recycled plastic and then in companies that were responsible for recycling plastic waste .

It was the closure of the open circle when I was a child, to continue to safeguard, in my small way, the environment in which I lived.

Today, where everything is fast, where the means of communication allow unthinkable times in the past, to mobilize hundreds of thousands of people, in a swarm of goliardic with emulation slogans, where the idea of ​​the majority is immediately yours, where it counts to stay “inside” and who is outside, worse for him.

This huge hatred for the plastic that has become the flag at all levels of the common people, where we move for slogans, always made by others, where we do ‘the race to post photos of the sea in which the micro plastics float, with the hope, day by day, to receive a like more than yesterday or more than the others.

Surely the campaigns are worthy to limit the use of useless plastic, as long as it does not replace it with something that consumes the resources of the earth, of the willing people who gather to clean the beaches, who do the shopping with cotton bags or not plastic.

But I never saw a bottle and a pail of detergent that, hand in hand, along with their legs, walked the road to the sea and, when they reached the beach, because of the great heat, they plunged into the sea and then stay there for life.

So, given that the plastic bottles and the pans of detergent, for example, do not have legs, I think that is the man who causes the environmental disaster in which we find ourselves and therefore the enemy is not the plastic , but we are the ones who take it to the sea or we make it through the rivers.

A torrent of millions of dollars is coming to advocate this ecological cause, also financed by companies that primarily fueled ecological behavior in contrast with the environment, which finds its scapegoat in plastic.

It seems to me a great marketing operation, to dress with a new suit, those who feel guilty.

But if it is the man who pollutes because he does not recycle enough, we invest in culture and we teach people who do not have the possibility of schooling in advanced countries, what happens and will happen to them, and our lives, if they do not understand the gravity of a non-ecological approach to everyday life.

I, as an ecologist, do not hate plastic and I think plastic waste is also a resource to save environmental resources, turning them into fuels and new products. But I can not stand the ignorance and manipulation of people who seem to me to be happening with art.

Automatic translation. We apologize for any inaccuracies. Original article in Italian.