Desertification, the greenhouse effect, reduction of forests, species in danger of extinction, difficulties in the disposal and recovery of waste, contamination of the soil, the sea, and the atmosphere are the result of an anthropogenic activity that challenges the balance of our ecosystem. Fortunately, in recent years, environmental awareness has been culturally spreading, and we say “fortunately” because it is an essential factor in putting new development models into practice. In addition to resources, what nature can offer us is also a teaching on what a model of society can be set up from a perspective of collectivity and sharing of strengths and skills. Nature pursues evolution towards its goal of self-preservation, mankind can only draw lessons from it.

Desertification, the greenhouse effect, reduction of forests, species in danger of extinction, difficulties in the disposal and recovery of waste, contamination of the soil, the sea, and the atmosphere are the result of an anthropogenic activity that challenges the balance of our ecosystem. Fortunately, in recent years, environmental awareness has been culturally spreading, and we say “fortunately” because it is an essential factor in putting new development models into practice. In addition to resources, what nature can offer us is also a teaching on what a model of society can be set up from a perspective of collectivity and sharing of strengths and skills. Nature pursues evolution towards its goal of self-preservation, mankind can only draw lessons from it.

In this process, culture plays a strategic role, providing the necessary tools for a better understanding of the environment: "The object of learning, whether it is the environment or sustainability, is complex. In this sense, it is necessary to educate complex thought, able to relate the facts to compose reality, and to recognize different solutions. A thought that is trained in reading the emergent properties of systems, rather than reducing them to the sum of simpler components".
Coming back to the urban jungle, plant life, so apparently indifferent to everything we call culture, is the foundation and the substance of the world, not its accessory. “Botany is not just a particular science: it is a privileged knowledge on the closest and most elementary link that life can establish with the world,” writes the philosopher-agronomist Emanuele Coccia. It is not just a matter of learning, but of doing it with a new look and free from the clichés and prejudices that have populated this branch of knowledge.