This conversation focuses on the notion of Anthropocene and the need to respect nature and its limits.
The pandemic we are experiencing highlights the excess and irrationality of our production and consumption system, exposing an evident merging of ecological and health crises. We are victims of an economic system that has been asserting itself in a growing blindness before the planetary limits, and that does nothing in the face of the health consequences of the obsession with profit.
The development model on which all economic activity is based generates colossal health risks and tremendous social and environmental impacts, while feeding an inequality that has become unsustainable. The real challenge today is to make the post-crisis an opportunity for individual and collective transformation, assuming our vulnerability and our integral condition of a planet committed to ecology, health and peace; a world bigger than ourselves, based on complicity, diversity and cooperation, capable of welcoming and caring for the plurality of life forms.
It is not a question of restoring and returning to a previous condition, but of proposing alternatives for the universal good, with creativity and cooperation, supporting the transition to low-carbon and climate-resilient activities, driven by fair investments, training, knowledge, and embracing the wisdom of the world that is after all our common home.
Pluralizing the Anthropocene was a cycle of conversations organised by the Serralves Foundation in collaboration with Research Centre for Anthropology and Health (CIAS) and other institutions. It featured anthropological reflections from major figures in the humanities and the sciences committed to opening up the plural possibilities of on-going Anthropocene debates of resilience, adaptation, and the struggle for environmental justice.
