The results of the meeting on Biological Extinction and Proposals to Safeguard the Natural Environment, on which humanity depends, were presented this Thursday in the Holy See Press Office. The workshop, which was held at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in the Vatican, began on February 27 and ended on March 1.
Professor Werner Arber, Nobel Prize in Medicine and President of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences intervened in the conference, as did two of its academics: Peter Hamilton Raven and Partha Sarathi Dasgupta, and its Chancellor, Archbishop Sanchez Sorondo.
We are convinced that “human activity with fossil elements, mainly oil and carbon, end by producing global warming, altering the cycle of water and causing the extinction of biodiversity,” pointed out Archbishop Sorondo, adding that activities of this type are engaged in primarily by industrialized countries, and everyone feels these changes, but poor populations suffer it especially.
Industrialized countries are primarily responsible, but also poor populations, which need to sell their jungles and forests at ridiculous prices to be able to survive. The solutions proposed are: “change towards clean energy, new agricultural techniques, new ‘intelligent cities,’ small and self-sufficient in energy,” pointed out Archbishop Sanchez Sorondo.
However, not only new urbanizations, as there are old cities, like New Orleans, that are carryng out important changes,’ and these ‘intelligent cities’ enable “the peripheries to live better” as well.
In a more global picture, the total eradication of poverty is necessary, direct or indirect cause of this situation, “not only because human life needs it, but to live also thanks to biodiversity,” explained the Chancellor.
In regard to population, the Chancellor said that the best way to make progress is the existence of the family in the Christian sense, and he stressed that ”the carbonization of the air is not caused by the quantity of the population but by human activity, which uses fossil materials,” he stressed.
For his part, Nobel Prize Professor Werner Arber considered it very important to begin this change not only in the medium term, but also thinking of the next centuries, and educating populations from now on for that purpose.
