Orizzonti per lo sviluppo dell’agricoltura sulla Terra: come conciliare la sicurezza alimentare per l’uomo e la custodia del Creato

[Autom. eng. transl.] The commonly recognized relationship between environmental intervention and development is not sufficient to indicate a path for the future of man. In other words, it is not enough to consider only the technical and economic dimensions. To the aforementioned report must be added a decisive component, the anthropological one. Based on what vision of man should we direct development and intervention on the natural environment? Depending on how the anthropological question is answered, different indications are also given on the mentality with which to approach the natural environment. We can see three main visions of nature. to. Nature as a sacred reality. This vision recognizes an order intrinsic to nature, governed by laws that characterize it as a complex system of multiple interrelations. Ecocentrism and biocentrism are part of this vision. It does not distinguish the ontological differences between the human being and the rest of the living, affirming an egalitarianism reduced to the biological sphere, together with a certain deification of nature. b. Nature as a product of chance. In this case, nature is not intended as a creation with a sense, but rather as a reality that exists in a certain way, but that could also exist in another. Nature's current way of existing is a result due to chance, with the consequence that man, to the extent that he knows its intimate structures, can manipulate them to his will. This is a utilitarian position, in which the ethical judgment on environmental or biotechnological activities consists in calculating the possible risks and benefits over time. c. Nature as creation. This vision recognizes that nature is ordered and is understood as a reality created by God through love. In this perspective, the person perceives the world of nature as a good that precedes it, which he can know and must respect. The human being, not being the author of the world of nature, only recognizes himself as his administrator and not his exploiter, and at the same time admits his greatness and his contingency and interdependence1. The clearest, albeit synthetic, expression of this anthropological need was expounded by Pope Benedict XVI in the social encyclical Caritas in veritate (CV), of June 2009: "Today the social question has become radically anthropological question" (CV 75) . And again: "The key to development is an intelligence capable of thinking about technology and of grasping the fully human sense of man's making, in the horizon of meaning of the person taken in the totality of his being" (CV 70).