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If the flock decides to raise their heads

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The flock raises its head, one of the most prophetic novels of the English John Brunner, opens with this quote from John Milton’s poem Lycidas: “The flock raises its head, and is fasting / in the wind it breathes a mephitic mist / rotten from within , struck by the contagion ».

Impossible for me not to think of those verses during the early stages of the pandemic, not only because the call to the so-called “herd immunity” that was so much talked about was immediate, but also because of the involution of our country, in which the political conscience it has been replaced by mechanical herds: masses less and less endowed with a critical sense graze in the fields of social media and propaganda, wandering believing themselves free but in reality guided by their masters-shepherds.

The flock raises its head came out in 1972, but the world it describes is ours: an exploited, polluted, sick world. Chemistry poisons food and at the same time allows more and more humanity to survive. If you want an uncontaminated egg, in that novel, you have to buy Antarctic penguin eggs. It is a world of technological progress combined with a social injustice worthy of the Middle Ages. It is our world, described fifty years ago.

A world in which the citizen has become a consumer. Our every act, our every purchase, whether we realize it or not, now contributes to destroying the environment. Our own life is death for the Earth. The paradoxical solution that Brunner gives in his novel for the planet to be saved is the extinction of humanity. Having two young children, I want to continue to believe that there is another solution. That we can still heal the world. The defense of the Earth is a battle for the future, and for a more dignified life. Some politicians and entrepreneurs, in the name of Economy and Production, in the name of GDP revered as a god, would like to use the funds destined for the ecological transition to throw more concrete and asphalt on our lands, on our rivers.

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It is a blasphemy. It is a betrayal. We must fight with all our strength so that this does not happen. We must have the courage to dream of a different development, in balance with nature; redesign our Region and its economy in an eco-sustainable key. For me, the real entrepreneurs are those brilliant young people I met in Carnia and on the banks of the Tagliamento: managers in love with our land who gave up their careers to come from far away to raise goats in our mountains, to cultivate the fields, to produce wines quality instead of prosecco made up with glyphosates, to invest in the field of renewable energy.

Enlightened entrepreneurs like Jacopo Linussio was in the 1700s, who value the territory and people rather than exploit them to death. Protecting the Earth does not mean looking back with nostalgia: those who live in the past are those who, in 2021, still dream of progress with asphalt and concrete. A past that died well before Covid-19. Third world dreams, senseless dreams also from an economic point of view, to which we must strongly oppose the dream of a new world, in the name of the Earth, for the salvation of our humanity. For us and for our children, and for the human and animal generations to come, an endless river of life.

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