2009-05-12
PETITION AGAINST NEXT G8 UNIVERSITY SUMMIT IN TURIN
We are a group of students sensitive to environmental topics. During the mobilization against the Italian Law 133, we felt the need to start a more continuous coordinate action. Throughout the experience of these months of mobilization, we realised that the current crisis is not cyclic: is a dimensional crisis, and a symptom of the more general political, social, cultural and environmental degeneration. Capitalism, based on the exploitation “ad infinitum” of natural resources, human work and environment is not sustainable any more. The recession affecting all the “big” of the earth clearly speaks of the absurdity of an economical system based on a boundless increase of consumption and production. That machine is, by now, worn out. It is very simple, even too simple, to understand that we live in a limited planet that imposes physical limits to the economic growth (for further information: Rapporto sui limiti dello sviluppo, Club di Roma, 1972).
Climate changes on a global scale, deforestation, water, soil and atmosphere pollution: all these elements are putting in a serious danger Earth’s balance. Human kind is accountable of the great part of this environmental crisis: the production of goods and services, that should simply satisfy our needs, has become a threat for the environment, and a huge burden that will bear on next generations. And this is due to perverse trade policies. We have only two possibilities. We can keep legitimating the nefarious trade logic on which our economy is based, hoping demand, GDP, consumption and production will increase again in the future; or we can rise against the “dictatorship” of economy and change the actual model, building a new economy that puts first social equity, human beings and their real needs.
We can see this crisis as an opportunity to build a new world, far from the idea of welfare thought as an accumulation of goods, and established, instead, on local economies that can enhance environment and local features. These economies should stand out for pursuing values as cooperation, equity and local autonomy, but the most important issue is that this economy has to be new and different; In this new system there should be working opportunities in reusing and recycling of materials, in renovations based on efficiency and saving; energetic production should be diversified and diffused locally, sustainable production should be based on equity. We have to think about the environmental issue as a topic that does not only concern a field, but the whole system, and therefore develop a way of thinking that focuses itself on the local level through a virtuous dynamic sustainability, as far as environment, economy and politics are concerned. We can achieve a real sustainability only with the bravery to call into question the entire present economic model, and its concept of development, always linked to economic growth.
We only can manage to reach all that by a true “democratic revolution” that involve the concern for the common goods, the participation, and the right to decide about our own lives.
Download Manifesto: http://www.sherwoodcamp.net/en/materiali/manifesto.pdf