The animal world interacts with the surrounding environment and such interaction integrates the instinctual component with the innate capability to respond to situations. From the interaction of these two factors the engine of learning emerges, which, starting from the early phase of development marks the character of the animal throughout its life.

  Learning is also one of the fundamental aspects of humankind, but unfortunately in modern times the natural, instinctual component has being relegated to an inferior aspect which is to be contained, curtailed and ultimately eliminated. This new collective psychology has been taking the west towards a system ever more detached from the natural component, which has traditionally been the fundamental counterbalance with respect to the mechanistic rationality that has been governing the western part of the world for two centuries. Today there is the overall tendency to transfer such an approach to all corners of the world, even those which have tried to resist by living according to the rhythms of nature, and the beautiful as well as irrational aspects of live. But development must proceed in its forward march, because it brings welfare to local populations, in Mauritania just like in a forlorn Alpine valley or a hillside Mediterranean village.

  The concept behind this kind of reasoning is simple. Transportation infrastructure will enable higher mobility and increase rapidity of movement of goods and people, so as to valorize resources and products of that territory and favor tourism in the forgotten land or forsaken country, where people has thus far subsisted on a dollar a day. But does it make sense to use our parameters with respect to places and cultures that have values utterly different from our own, and were self-production, collective consumption and reciprocity have been the norm? The answer is always one-sided: the globalized model must increase production for its growth and thus needs ever new consumers to conquer and territories to destroy. How many times have we heard that public spending should be used to boost consumption? Such statement is pure lunacy from the perspective of somebody looking at the environment as a vital parameter in individual and collective welfare.

  We build dams to produce more energy, highways to move around faster, malls to facilitate abundant consumption, often of useless and unneeded products that require the pillaging of precious natural resources. An increasingly artificial world cannot but worsen our physical and mental health, but there is a market remedy to this as well: hospitals and private clinics equipped with the most extraordinary technologies that are able to cure the illnesses of opulence, i.e. cancers, heart diseases and so-called deviant behaviors, since in our system whatever rough edges emerge we smooth them out immediately, rather than rethinking the system itself. Good lies in being aligned, while evil is invariably disorderly and out of line, or so we are told. In fact, this is overall principle by which we are educated in school at all levels up to the MBA, whose objective is teaching the annihilation of competitors and the pursuit of maximal efficiency. When we've done our job, we take time off at the year's end to enjoy holidays in some far-away paradise, which therefore has to be completely different from the world we contribute in creating with our professional and consumer behaviors in the developed world. And when we go travel to these remote locations we end up transferring our habits and production and consumption models, with the effect of destroying the very corners of the world that have allowed us to escape from an increasingly unloved world. How else to explain the constant desire to escape city life at the earliest possibility, as if we had build giant urban prisons making us constantly yearn for freedom. We have to start digging in our collective imaginaire, if we are to find a solution to our planetary sustainability.

by Francesco Bertolini,
Faculty Member, Master in Economics and Management of Energy and the Envirornment, Bocconi University