Editorial

Other Ways to Inhabit the Earth

Forty years ago a conference brought together scientists from different disciplines from across the world under the banner of ecology and complex thought. Its message was that we must find new ways to apply science and of inhabiting the Earth. The call today is more urgent still: if we have the well-being of the planet at heart, we must regenerate both consciousness and nature, and in this way save the birds.

In Florence in October 1986, at that time European Capital of Culture, more than seventy scientists and intellectuals from around the world gathered for a symposium titled Physis: Inhabiting the Earth, to launch ‘the challenge of a global organisation with the power to exit the twentieth century developing a new alliance between man and nature’. It was an ambitious and compelling objective, above all in terms of the vital aspect of seeking an end to the long war between humans and nature, or to be more precise, to the maltreatment of nature to which humans have so often had recourse. To put a new harmony in its place. It was also ambitious in terms of the method by which this was to be conducted: not according to the traditional models of the disciplines, which usually operate along rigid and clearly demarcated lines, but as a field of shared knowledge that would emerge out of the interaction of different materials, scientific, social, humanistic and political.

 

Contents

• Other Ways to Inhabit the Earth
• Citizen Science: Key Concepts
• The State of Birds in Italy
• Annual appeal

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