This is not about leaders

This month marks 800 years since the death of Saint Francis of Assisi. He passed away on October 3, 1226. He was 45 years old and practically blind. It is believed that the progressive loss of vision, and the tearing that affected him, which is reproduced in some paintings, was the result of a painful infectious disease: trachoma, which causes wounds on the surface of the eye and the cornea. He must have contracted it on his trip to Egypt in 1219. The visionary man who had sung to "brother Sun" was entering into darkness.

Stefano Mancuso, a humanist botanist, has written with the help of Francesc a particular Canticle to the Earth (Gutenberg Galaxy, in translation by Maria Llopis). Advocate for plant intelligence, who believes that sometimes they have more sophisticated behaviors than animals, and for the need to regreen our cities (he argued in the essay Phytopolis), as the founder of the Franciscans and the Poor Clares believes that the human being is on the same level as any other living creature, in the midst of a natural network of equals of indescribable beauty and wonderful complexity. If Francis embraced the energy of the Sun and the Moon (27 million times smaller than the Sun), of the wind and the water, of the fire, the animals and the plants, Mancuso takes his vision to bring us closer to the stagnant reality of our planet, to face the climate crisis, which is also a crisis of civilization.

Greenhouse gases have broken the miracle of life that Francis captured so well, a miracle called photosynthesis, with plants as priestesses of the Sun, mediators of its energy, in charge of the "harvest of light" that they transform into food. Mancuso realized all this as a child, in a nuns' school hippieswho held classes in the open air among wild plants and insects, and who on any occasion cited the Canticle of the Creatures of Saint Francis. That revolutionary friar wrote it shortly before he died, between 1224 and 1225, increasingly blind.

Perhaps today, with "in his own words" we could "save all of humanity in danger", says Mancuso. This humanity that has acquired the ability to change the destiny of the planet. "The Anthropocene is precisely this: the certification that man has become a telluric force". Faced with this power, are we willing to listen to Francis?

Amidst the floods, storms, and fires that besiege us, the Italian biologist applies science to the poetic intuitions of the monk from Tuscany, to his environmental philosophy filtered through the lens of religious faith. In the sequence of factors necessary for life, even though Earth is the blue planet, after greeting the Sun and the Moon, Francis first speaks to us of the air, of brother Wind. Somehow he knew that without the atmosphere there can be no water. What, then, would he say about the hole in the subtle ozone layer (2.4 to 4.5 millimeters thick), this thin shield of a poisonous gas that protects us?

Then he addresses the "very useful and humble" sister Water, which today we know covers 71% of the planet's surface. But fresh water is only 2% (and of this, 96% is unavailable because it is stored in polar ice caps, glaciers, and snow cover). The destruction of the Aral Sea (the fourth largest lake in the world) is "the worst natural disaster in history," says Mancuso, who warns us that the same is happening with Lake Chad, the surface of which has shrunk by more than 90%. Water is life and it can be death. In 2500 BC, the Sumerians were already waging wars over water. Mancuso believes that Francis, who professed poverty and rejected private property (nature belongs to everyone), would tell us that water is worth much more than any diamond.

And what about brother Fire? As humans, it has made us more powerful, long-lived, and wise (it has enlightened us), but for it to exist on Earth, plants had to colonize it about 470 million years ago, releasing enough oxygen to allow for combustion. And finally, before reaching Death (which is part of the cycle of life), Francis ends with "mother Earth," which "sustains and governs us." Mancuso wants to return to the Franciscan idea of "care" for our "common home," as another Francis, the previous pope, said recently. Human life is not about leaders, but about collaboration and natural balance. At the base of natural selection is not the individual, but the group. In scientific terms, the true driving force of evolution is not competition between species, but collaboration. Saint Francis already knew this.