If we think about the economic and technological progress of the past centuries, the one that brought to some of us – humans – incommensurable benefits at the cost of destruction of the environment and widespread ill exploitation of resources – human and not – one image might pop up in our minds. It is rather a clichéy image, of which coarseness strips down the jagged complexities of history, but it contains nevertheless many grains of truth: our Fathers have fucked Mother Earth so badly, and we are left with a degenerative progeny of unsustainable lifestyles that we are still fully embracing, in spite of all the rational analyses on our condition.
First they were simply rocks, but now our fathers have added value.
The main problem here is that the adaptation required by now is equal to a massive shift in our habits, to be accompanied by a drastic reconfiguration of the unstoppable terraforming machine of modern technology. We found ourselves in the embarrassing position of not really knowing how to deal with this devastating heritage that is slowly killing our species, starting from the less fortunate ones. Can we also adapt our stance toward the ones that have come before us? Or, more precisely, could the judgement against our careless Fathers inform the actions we should partake to adapt our lives on indifferent Mother Earth?
Our ancestors pretty much didn’t know what they were doing. Well, the ones in power, they might have known that they were causing suffering and destruction for their own benefit. But what about the miner, the logger, the fisher, the harvester? Shall we forgive our Fathers, because they didn’t know what they were doing?
