Giulia: Welcome everybody to this new episode of the Trust Podcast. You have listened to the description of the photo, and the participants are watching the photo. I will ask the first speaker of today that is Mario Giampietro, to react to this photo. Mario Giampietro works on the application of theoretical concepts of complexity to improve the usefulness of scientific analysis for governance. Mario has developed an innovative accounting method called Multi-Scale Integrated Analysis of Societal and Ecosystem Metabolism (MuSIASEM), which can be used to check the possibility of the narratives used to frame storytelling and flag assistance of a large amount of uncomfortable knowledge. Indeed, Mario has a blog and the platform that is currently welcoming sustainability discussions called “uncomfortableknowledge.com.”.Mario, can you share with us what this photo is provoking for you?

Mario: Yes, first of all, thanks for inviting me. There are many of these types of photos, and my feeling is an Indian word, a hoping word that is Koyaanisqatsi that is a famous movie with the music of Philip Glass. I suggest it to anybody, and it means crazy life, a life that lost its meaning, a life that is meaningless and therefore is disintegrating. It is life to tell us that we have to do something else because this is not going anywhere, more of the same is not an option. So there are a lot of other elephants eating inside the garbage, plastic in the ocean. I believe there are lots of these photos that all have in common that we passed the threshold, in which there is no longer a meaningful expression of activity. It is like when you lose the different phases in an emulsion. The oil goes away, the water goes away. We are losing the coherence of the meaning of what is happening. This is the message that I get.

Giulia: Okay, thank you, Mario. And let me introduce the other speaker of today, Francesco Gonella. He’s a professor of physics at the Ca’ Foscari University in Venice. And he taught at various universities in Canada, the United States, Japan, and China. After the first part of his career dedicated to the study of glass, his interest has turned to system thinking, and system dynamics approaches applied to environmental and social-economic issues. He’s also active with the scientists for the Rebellion International movement. Welcome, Francesco. Can you tell us the reaction and emotion this photo provokes in you?

Francesco: Yes, sure, thank you, Giulia, and thank you, everybody, for inviting me to this podcast. One word is the first word that came into my mind, which is ‘’unacceptable’’. This is unacceptable. There’s no need for a particular narrative to say that, and unfortunately, we are in a condition that we need to address some correct narrative to frame this picture in what is going on. Otherwise, we will never get over anything. What is this narrative? I don’t have a certain answer. It should be able to communicate that this is not something accidental. Unfortunately, it’s not some bad side effects or something else which is otherwise good. The complexity of the system that created this plastic stuffed albatross requires us to understand that we need to modify how human society relates to the Geo Biosphere. And secondly, there is something related to how I feel with the animals in general, with the categories that cannot even understand the reason why they’re living and dying, in such a hell of suffering and pain. So profound empathy, profound sadness, and unacceptability that’s the first thing.

Giulia: Thank you, thank you both. I can recognize a few versions of what you said because the emotion is a bit of frustration. And of course, the words you say means that we have to stand up and do something about this. This is a part of what we want to talk about today, while the theme of the episode is indeed the ecological disconnection. And the central question I would like you to answer is: what were the deficit factors to lead to environmental destruction and the loss of nature?. You said that we passed the threshold. You said that this is unacceptable. So how did we get there? What are the consequences of this disruption that there are? Reducing this situation and then whoever wants to start is free to start.

Francesco: Well, you asked about what this factor is. I think that there is one factor and I am sure that Mario will agree with me that the inability to muster some sort of systemic thinking in the sense that much of the problems we are facing are systemic problems. I mean systemic in an analytical scientific perspective. The idea is that the reality is not made by a collection of single pieces of stuff. This idea is deadly wrong. We shouldn’t continue to cast blame on a collection of enemies that should be internally responsible for any of the bad things we want to eradicate. We should have the courage and wisdom to change the patents, the social-economic partners that are driving all of us towards this kind of global collapse. In this sense, there is one thing that I was shocked to know that it is maybe the most idiot thing that an educated man has ever seen in the history of civilization. William North House was Noble Prize awarded for Economics now in the Yale University. Years ago was quoted to Science magazine that ‘’Agriculture, is the part of the economy that sensitive to climate change, accounts for just 3% of national output.’’.And this is what he said. That means that there is no way to get a very large effect on the economy through the failure of agriculture. Now, needless to say, agriculture is every foundation of all the economies. No anything else. To make the point clearer, we are constituted by only 7% by our blood. But this doesn’t mean that an organism would go on without blood. Okay? Well, this is exactly what the Noble low rate economists said, and this means that you know we are really in trouble if we don’t take a step forward, leaving the logic and the mindset of trade-offs and adopting a real systemic way. Well, this is the fundamental reason we are being, leading to environmental destruction and the loss of nature, as Giulia said. So, the inability to master systematic thinking is it.

Giulia: Thank you, thank you, Francesco. Mario, do you resonate with something Francesco said?

Mario: Yeah, yeah, of course. I will get from a different angle, but that there is no different opinion. What again gave back to the discussion is the Koyaanisqatsi concept of the object that we’re losing mainly. And the problem is that the people are feeling more and more useless and helpless and you know you can see from the fact that we are continuing to take selfies of ourselves just to be reassured that we exist. We have some role in this universe because, at the moment, our society is making us completely irrelevant. And why is that? Because if you imagine that society is the result of a symbiotic process, we are generating ourselves, giving meaning to ourselves, and I don’t know if you want to use the conceptualization given by lumen. In society, you have two things, the social system which is the all knowledge claim, the institution and what they call it psychic structure, their demotion, the feeling of the people. This idea of society would be like the Freud division in three parts, you have the id, your feelings, then you have the superego. What the institution, the science, and what is known, tells you that you should do, and then you have the ego that will be the political process which is checking whether we do is acceptable about the concern or with what should be done. And what is happening now is that our emotions, our hope, our fears are no longer relevant in the process of decision making. The processes of decision-making now took totally over in the sense if you are in a situation in which 1% of the population is richer than 99%, the decision about what happened is taken by CEOs, the chief executive officer of big Corporations. They are doing things for the investment fund, and we’re no longer in the picture. We are not irrelevant. The decision that they have taken also happens to be that society is losing the ability to give feedback based on our being humans, being part of nature. We are no longer capable of doing so, and coming to the scientific analysis, the field was capable of doing this ecology, complex things have been bypassed by economic analysis. The economic analysis gives a series of policy legends. You may have a circular economy that you can see remission in 10 years as long as you do business model and technical innovation. Everything is possible, and therefore they are eliminating the fact that we feel uncomfortable with sitting there like this picture, but there is nothing we can do, so in a way, this is, in my view, worrying some, because exactly you see this image and say “We need a war against plastic in the ocean. We need a war against climate change. We need war!” But wait a moment. If you make a war, who is winning the war? Banks and strong institutions and Transnational Corporations. So basically, our emotions are now used to stabilize the status quo rather than cheque, whether another decision there made is meaningful. So, we should make a revolution against those who are changing the climate and putting plastic in the ocean. Not war against climate change. We should make a revolution against those who are changing the climate or those who’re putting plastic in the ocean and we don’t do it. So in a way, the problem is, to me, we’re losing reflexivity. We are leaving the system to dictate our agenda. This, in my view, is really scary.

Giulia: Now you pointed out a very important connection between the disconnection, which also emerged in the episode about the spiritual divide. You said something important, so they echo divides, the ecological divides, we are assisting is the son of spiritual divides disconnection between ourselves, with our real identity, with our critical spirit, with our capacity of being aware of what is happening, and of course, they are not the fish who discover the existence of water, but at least we can recognize the narrative we are immersing in and maybe I can draw from this statement to ask how we can do to connect and to get engaged? Maybe, Francesco, you can share your experience of actively engaging in an Aletheia process, not to make those analogies clear to people.

Francesco: Yeah yeah, but you know what? Science has never been listened by the politicians, and in a sense, they are not required to listen to the scientists because they are required to listen to the electors, you know? The position in science is to inform the politicians correctly about what is going on, but at the same time to inform the people correctly because the people are the real communicator towards the politicians. Unfortunately, we have been made by Darwinian evolution to think differently concerning the thought we should adopt to face the emergencies we are facing now. And this is a problem, but scientists must be activated to do that. And actually, scientist activism is the new board reality, at least after, you know, I say Russell’s letter against the proliferation of nuclear weapons. But now science is cold to sensitize people and, at the same time, to tell the truth. But not only in the sense that we have to force a politician not to lie, but they must not keep silent about what is going on and this is what’s going on. When Antonio Guterres, the General Secretary of the United Nations, says that governments use taxpayers’ money to finance hurricanes. Well, I would like to see this on the very first page of every newspaper. These are the news that society would share and should share with the people! And this is not going to happen, and there is a complete lack of correct information at all levels. And unfortunately, it is a very difficult to face this problem. It is very difficult. And whatever is going to be the future of our planet, you know the first to pay the bill will be that part of creatures, included animals, who are already threatened for survival. The poorest people, the people forced to migrate—the people who pay for the economic conflicts, land grabbing, and inefficiency of the sanitary infrastructures. And so we are called to do something. And, for example, I received explicit calls from colleagues in England, the UK., and the community of the English physicist contacted me saying, ‘’Okay, stand up, do something, we are trying to do something. Wake up the academic community, do something with the hope that people listen to the science.’’. A thing that politicians do not do ever. That’s it.

Giulia: Thank you, Francesco for sharing your experience, because it allows me to ask Mario to engage in the academic movement towards the word unveiling all those narratives that get us disconnected. Also, the social reality where we are in.

Mario: Yeah, I just finished a big European project for a year called Magic Moving to adapt governance in complexity. And this was exactly about the role of science. And because science is good and bad at the same time, in the sense that the bourgeois used him after the Enlightenment, to replace religion, in a sense before you were doing things, because religions God was delegitimized of the social structures. You have to pay the tax; why this? Because the King says so, and why does the King know? Because the King is there because of God. Now, we are in a situation where you have to pay taxes while remaining at home. You have to take him, Maxine. And why is that? Because the government says so. How do they know? Because the science says so. So basically, at a certain point, science got a very delegate role of stabilizing, illegitimatizing power, so then is always legitimizing the scientist. That is the real issue. And then, of course, at this point, we are getting in a situation in which economic narrative and economies took over because they can provide to the governments what they want. Yes, we can never be, whatever problem you had. That’s a matter with more business models, and in technology, you can solve it, is the economy of the social-technical imaginaries we are leaving now? In our project, we went one after another to all the commission policies; the agricultural policy doesn’t make any sense. We are importing from all the European countries; a few times more landed they have just in terms of feeding animals and electricity. All these alternative dinners do not work unless you have a large quantity of storage that we don’t have, to buy your fuel is an embarrassment that we’re talking about that. Efficiency is on another level. Europe is using 120 million workers, equivalent to what we are importing. So, if there is a country in a geographical area, I think not sustainable, not efficient. What is Europe? But that’s a matter we cannot see because we are using a set of policy legends. This is supported by scientific bat analysis, which makes it possible for us to see the dates, and then this is problematic because we cannot even say if scientific is true. Because there is this movement called post about science that makes the point that you cannot find what is the truth if you have a weak problem. The ultimate truth is about something because you can frame the same issue from a different perspective, different dimension, different level, different people and then you will have different scientific truth, so unless you do not as a way of discussing the concern, because before a technical solution you have any identification of a problem that is related to the identification of concern. So if you are different people with different concerns -I work at times in Africa- if you go in a shantytown in the, you know, shut it down this fabulous in Cassiano, the poor area around cities in Africa. You see things that work in this picture, and then they are worried about climate change? They couldn’t care less. So you know, the point is that the perception of the problems depends on who you are asking. So the problem is that, in a way, science is used and this is a very nice paper of Rayner that I suggest to you which is the social construction of ignorance. It’s the way you are framing problems. We had capital in, so people were complaining about Lisbon like Marks and the other, and then the first thing is denial; not everything’s okay. And then the next thing is there is some problem. We can still fix it than you get when you no longer can say everything is okay. Then you go into a diversion. We no longer have a problem with the capitalist. We have climate change. Do you know? If we had a machine that takes out Seattle from the atmosphere, everything would be fine, which is not true. We will have a problem, biodiversity, soil, water, energy, peak energy, peak oil resources. I mean, climate change is one among thousands of other major problems we’re living with, and it doesn’t matter. They managed to move from denial, dismissal, diversion. When you get direction, you get a problem that is not the real problem and you are everyone agrees that this is the problem on which we can make it work. Then you go displacement. Displacement is you start solving the problem not for real but in the models. So what is the problem now? Is finding the right price of carbon okay? So by pricing carbon making tax will solve our problems. The problem of capitalism, you see the problem? You have a social system that is generating social practice. They are incompatible with the way nature works, and then we want to solve it by making the right price of CO2. What is the problem here? That we are human. We are part of nature. There is no division between us and nature. The division is between the economical, the rational man, the one that is in the social system, the one that the institution describes as the consumer, the rational consumer law in the nation. Yes, but not my ass. The real problem is that we are no longer in the picture when it comes to deciding how we interact with nature. We’re not into the picture. What is deciding there are the big CO, the one making regulation in the European Parliament, the things but for us outside of the decision process? They are deciding for themselves. So we are getting into a Cyborg in the section of our society. Society decides based on economic themes, economic rule, policy legend, Andrea Rules in the Institution. We can no longer say anything. We have been taken out as humans as part of nature as friends and relatives of this single. We are no longer able to do anything because the things that are happening are decided by types that do not have feelings. So this, in my view, is a science, unfortunately, has been appropriated by the types, not by us. So this is what we have to do: reappropriate science and say that it’s not about rational behaviors, but about making compatible the expression of feeling and passion and emotion with the decision or what we should do. So there are no optimal decisions. They are decisions that have to be co-produced. By a true social bonding, affecting relation. No rational relation; I don’t know if it’s confusing or not.

Giulia: No no, it’s perfect. It will be perfect also to introduce a meditation with Valerie. You claim back the humanity in place, I guess. To sum up the latest claim and I thank you for that.

Mario: Yeah, just a second. If you are writing a scientific paper, you cannot say I experience ID. You have to say it is done because it’s supposed to be scientists about humans. I mean, this is important. Because that started the issue, there are types. You are a type. They observe times about typology of events, emotion, or effective relation are not considered unscientific. That is the issue.

Giulia: It’s kind of funny because we came up with the same conclusion during the episode that we analyzed the spiritual divide. We have to acknowledge our feelings to be said for something to be happy for something. But first, we connect with our human ascent just saying, some cultures even named nature as nature because there’s no other thing from us. I mean... Francesco, please.

Francesco: I got something. Okay, I know I completely agree with what Mario is saying, and I would like to add something that by the activism I am carrying on with the Extension Rebellion. I learned that science is not made only by hard Sciences but also social Sciences, in the sense that, for example, extension rebellion starts from strategy, which is scientific. And comes from a statistical analysis about the effectiveness of nonviolent strategies throughout the history of the last century, and there are surprisingly some threshold values. For example, the frequency of street protests multiplied by the percentage of the population doing these protests. That shows how above a certain threshold, old protests had complete success, and this is incredible because this means that there is a strong base also for human aspects of involvement in the protests, not only the scientific part and on the other hand, and I would like also to say that, of course, nobody can know exactly what is going on, what is going to be the future. But several scenarios are proposed and this is typical of science. A prediction takes with it some kind of viability confidence interval, you know uncertainty, but this does not mean that we cannot make predictions, and unfortunately, the possibility of a catastrophic triggering of, for example, of Ray forcing feedbacks. The planetary scale is not negligible, followed possibly by the extinction of mammals, including humans, and so you know, the collapse of agriculture may create a series of feedbacks that drives us to the extension. So I have a metaphor that is always proposed by colleagues of mine from England that used to ask people: “Would you ever take an airplane if somebody told you that there is a let’s say 50% probability that the plane crashes down?”. And everybody answers no, of course not. Well, let me tell you that you are already on board. And that the play is on the wrong way. This is the power of this metaphor in addressing the urgency of the emergency and its seriousness. So science as a manifold, you know, task to carry on now, and I appreciate that as soon as you put together two scientists like Mario and me, immediately gets out all different aspects involved in what the scientist is going to do now.

Giulia: But I have to say that immediately comes up also the willingness to be active because you transmitted a lot of energy and a lot of awareness. I mean it is scary what you said but is also the starting point to act. And I take my chance also to introduce to the conversation Chiara, she’s a PhD student here at Politecnico and I’m curious to know what Chiara is thinking about this conversation, I’m bringing the voice of students in.

Chiara: Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you, Giulia, for inviting me to this very interesting conversation. Thank you also to the speakers for all the words and their feelings and the knowledge they said till now. So, yes it is very interesting what you were saying because I think that among students is rising awareness and they are self-organizing in some activism and some activism actions somehow, and so a point and something that I was asking to myself and that I would like to ask also to our speakers is, Which hardest key is that students should develop to be able to face these challenges? Also, which are maybe some complimentary experiences? Some activities that we as students can undertake during our educational path so activism can be maybe a choice or there are other educational tools, other experience that can put these different elements together?

Francesco: I have a direct answer, and this is yet I am. I’m trying to teach to the students not only at my University. Fortunately, I am called in different parts, even at the international level. It is system thinking. I can teach you how to read the PNR. You know that is going to be prepared by the Italian government and to show you why. Most of the things contained in that are based on business as usual in a sense cited by the mind. Okay? Those are some, you know, conceptual tools that may be developed and that should be taught at any level in all universities that allows you to understand what is narrative and what is reality. And to see the difference between the narrative and the reality of it.

Giulia: Thank you, Francesco. Mario, please.

Mario: Yes. By chance, I’m working in an institute where we are probably the most famous group for the growth in the world. And we have a lot of activities. We have drawn Martinez on here, one of the founders of Mycological economics doing the environmental justice movement. So in a way, we have a lot of activists. So, on the other hand, I can appreciate the work among them. It is always important for students to be able to keep the distinction between how to guarantee the quality to the production and use of scientific information and then from your personal feeling in the sense when I think what should be done. So I’m using my passion, my want aspiration and thinks, I have the same weight as a taxi driver, the person cleaning the street over the pricing of the republic in a sense we are humans, we are all the same. As a scientist, I am supposed to try to guarantee the quality of what you do. So basically, as a student, what I would expect or what I see, the students are very good, one student taking systemic thinking on this. Sure, they have critical thinking; you have not to believe what you are told because the vast majority of the framing of the issue we live in, like in the matrix, I don’t know if you are too young. But there was a movie called Matrix in which people were living, but the reality was not real, was generated by a computer. So we have to be very careful with all the information that we get. We are going a sustainable developer, gold, blah blah blah... Look at the vaccine now the only people who get the vaccine are the rich. All the rhetorical and hypocrisy of sustainable development goals disappear overnight depending on your problem. So one has to be very careful in being critical, like vegetarian or vegetarian here saving the world and they are eating asparagus coming from a refrigerated airplane from Peru. And then if you’re looking at the cost of post-harvest, things are much better-eating chicken rather than fresh vegetables from Peru. What I’m saying is that we’re living in a world so complex that, especially if you are a student, you are at risk of being overwhelmed by all the information you get, and you do not have the tools for filtering what relevant and robust information that can be used to develop a career rather than a lot of.. this is a bad word, let’s say things they are not particularly robust graph alone, stories, policy legend ... There are useful and you have to admit that academia is paid for generating policy legend. I mean you get the circular economy, I believe it is the most extraordinary thing. An economy is a metabolic process. You get resources; you use them, you throw them away. So it’s an entropic process, an open system. It cannot be close, so the idea of circular economies against the end he lows physical or none is against thermodynamic principles that but okay, this is used World Bank, the European Union, all the government, all the University everyone goes for a sequel, Arianna because he’s worth the money is so if you are a student so you are not robust enough to understand why having a critical view, you are at risk to West a lot of time in things they are not useful for your future. So it’s Buddhist advice, it is very important what you don’t do, so if you have some sort of doubts about the robustness of what they are proposing to you, stay away rather than spend four years, six years in doing a program and then you discover this program is not particularly useful. It’s just a generator or policy legend for stabilizing the system.

Giulia: Thank you, thank you so much Francesco and Mario. It leads me the way to introduce you, Valerie, an emotional, intelligent trainer and maybe she can give us other Buddha’s advice on how to be human and reconnect with our awareness. That is the basis I guess to take with choices then.

Valerie: Okay, thank you for this inspiring dialogue you had, and what came up to my mind was the words you were saying, like being the reality, passionate, engaged and what came to my mind was how can we not be hijacked? You know, by complexity and helplessness. And how can we get strong for not running away and getting against in what you are doing in your daily life? So I would like to invite you now for a mindful exercise and I would like to ask you to stand up now, you just you know kick it up and stand up. We’ve been sitting now all the time. And at first, I want you to get in touch with the ground, which means that you feel your feet on the ground, which means that you stand with the whole body on the ground. The ground that holds you, but at the same time, you’re standing on that ground, okay? So we will use now something what’s called that instead of going in always the automatic pilots that our mind is going through because we’re going through life often with less attention. Just automatically in routines, I want to invite you to be attentive to your body and your surroundings. So the first thing we will do is just try to push your feet a bit more on the ground just to activate this perception that your body has got that possibility of using sensors of perceptiveness using your skin, your articulations and drop for a moment all this effort because we’ve been talking now and it was getting emotional, but at the same time we need the strength of our body which goes aligned with the emotion, right? So just feel it for a moment, feel the soil. Feel your feet. And just get into that sort of now that reality the moment in which we are in that shared moment. Then sometimes we do is that we go into spaces and we think we know how these spaces are. But if you look around now, the space in which you are just takes a moment of curiosity to feel your feet on the ground and just observe as you would see it for the first time. And this if you would, you know, describe it to somebody who’s not here. Just feel the sensation of looking at the space which you are and feeling your feet on the ground. And what we will use now is like the body’s ability to be aware of different dimensions, right? You can close your eyes, but if not, I want you now just to feel the front of the body. All the space that you have in front of yourself. Starting with your body feeling the front of the body of the legs of the trunk. Even you might feel parts of your face. Just feel as if you would have only now the front of your body, which is mostly what we feel. And now we will add the back of your body. So we take the second dimension. And I want you to feel everything behind you without seeing it, but using the rest of your senses. Just to feel everything that is in the back. How does the back feel? What can it sense? What can the back be aware of? Maybe it’s the same as the front? Or is it different? Just feel it? And now we will add another dimension. I want you to feel how the left side. Of the room, of your body is, how does it feel? What do you feel on the left side? Your left arm, the left leg. The left part of your face. And space might be the temperature. Maybe light? Maybe just the sensation that comes up. And we will add to it the right side. How does the right side feel? The right part of the space you’re in. Right arm. The right leg. Right ear. Maybe you hear something on the right side? How does it sense? The sensation? And we will add the upward dimension. How are you in the space? What is above you above your head? The ceiling, the sensation, the lights. Maybe just how you feel your hair, your head, your skull. Then try now for a moment just to bring everything together. The feet on the ground. The front. The back. Left side The right side. And everything above you. Just for a moment, perceive this option of wholeness. The space in which you are. Maybe the town in which you are. Maybe the land, the country in which you are. And as we are here from different countries, just get in touch with the countries that are at the same time here. It is six dimensions. In this option of the courage of meaning of different perception, of system perception. Getting to this moment, that is real. It’s not written; it’s just the way you experience it. And that makes us part of nature. Being part of the group that we share. The dialogue in the podcast. Let’s give it just big breathing in. Then, with the sigh-outs. And I invite you to come back to the whole group setting, and I invite you to sum up each of you with three words, the podcast. What do you take with you? What was this dialog, sensation experience for you? And I would love to start with you, Francesco. Would you please tell us three words which you should take with you?

Francesco: Learning, empathy, and complexity.

Valerie: Thank you very much. Mario, please share the three words.

Mario: I would say reflexivity, social practices, and the emotions or something like that. Humans are nature, so this is too much. We have measured and we are not separated by nature.

Valerie: It’s okay. Thank you very much and I would love to hear from my student Chiara. What are the three words that would sum up this dialogue?

Chiara:Okay, the first is consciousness, systemic thinking, and also, for me, emotions are important.

Giulia: Thank you, thank you all and you made my day.