We are the only species that thinks about the future and the only one that steals from future generations

BarcelonaThe human species has ceased to have the survival of the species as its fundamental objective. This was the blunt statement made by the Italian biologist and science communicator Stefano Mancuso during his speech at Enfoquem, the debate forum organized by ARA this Monday and Tuesday at the Recinte Modernista de Sant Pau in Barcelona. In conversation with the deputy director of ARA, Ignasi Aragay, Mancuso admitted to having shifted from optimism to "moderate pessimism" in the face of current technological advances, but even so, he defended some "solutions" to current climate and environmental challenges, such as the renaturalization of cities.

"We are the only species that thinks about the future and the only one that takes resources from future generations," he remarked, convinced that we have "lost the fundamental engine of species evolution," which is to fight for the survival of the species, an objective that we have replaced with that of individual well-being. "Any problem, if we want to solve it by improving the individual's quality of life, has one solution, but if we want to solve it by improving the species' survival capacity, it has the opposite solution," he said.

In his latest essay, The Canticle of the Earth (Galaxia Gutenberg), the Italian botanist precisely reinterprets from a philosophical-ecological perspective the Canticle of the Creatures written by Saint Francis of Assisi, who as early as the 13th century advocated that "when you consume resources from the planet you are stealing from future generations."

Mancuso spoke of the "civilization crisis" that adds to the current climate crisis and that stems from an "economic system that is based on the presumption of a dogmatic premise that has no scientific validity, which is that natural resources are infinite." "Anyone with some knowledge of science knows that in a finite system like ours it is impossible to pursue infinite growth and, nevertheless, we pursue this model," he added. As proof of this dogmatism of economic growth, the Italian author recalled that the term most used today to define citizens is "consumers," when consuming something means "finishing it."

With a message that combines scientific data with philosophical discourse, Mancuso has focused on cities, which today represent less than 2% of the planet's habitable surface but consume 90% of resources and emit 85% of CO₂. "Compared to a living being, the city would be a monster living on top of a mountain of its own excrement," he said. And this is especially worrying when 70% of the world's population lives in cities, a change that has taken place since 1970 (when it was only 30%) and which for Mancuso is a leap similar to the one humanity made when it went from hunter-gatherer societies to agricultural ones. We are now urban beings.

Mancuso is also the author ofPhytopolis, where he advocates for the massive renaturalization of cities, and of Sensitivity and Intelligence in the Plant World, also translated into Catalan and Spanish by the publisher Galàxia Gutenberg. At Enfoquem, he also defended the urgency of this renaturalization: "To avoid heat deaths, you must cover cities with plants." But, according to Mancuso, today "no city in the world has the number of trees it should have, not a single one."

The Italian author recalled that in 2024, the last year for which data is available, there were 68,000 heat-related deaths across Europe. "When we have data from the summer we have just gone through, we will see an enormous number of people who have died from the heat," he added. Such deaths could be avoided, he insisted, with the renaturalization of cities, since "plants are natural air conditioners."

The problem stems, according to Mancuso, from the fact that "cities are human monocultures," when from agriculture we have learned that monocultures "require pesticides and herbicides because they are very vulnerable." "Ecosystems that are stable are those that are composed of many different species, together with fixed relationships; on the other hand, the metabolism of a city is terrible: it consumes enormous amounts of energy and matter and produces an enormous amount of waste."

Mancuso has put an end to two days of debates at the Sant Pau Modernista Site, which on the first day were focused on global security and technology challenges, such as hybrid warfare or artificial intelligence. On this second day, the forum organized by ARA wanted to debate the environmental challenges the planet faces and the philosophical and humanistic challenges it generates. The link is clear: "The first problem we have —said Mancuso— is that technological progress is advancing at a speed much higher than the progress of our consciousness".

"You will not be able to have colonies on Mars if they are not genetically modified"

It was precisely the issue of the ethical limits of science that was the subject of the conversation between science journalist Cristina Sáez, director of the ARA supplement Va de Ciència, and Gemma Marfany, professor of genetics at the UB and expert in bioethics. "Editing the genome, intervening in processes that until now were untouchable, and even an artificial intelligence that forces us to rethink what it is to be human," are some of the challenges, noted Sáez, that force a deep reflection.

"We scientists must consider what impact what we do may have on the future of humanity, and philosophy" and other humanistic disciplines can help with that, stated Marfany. In the field of genetics, in which she is a specialist, it is especially urgent. "What I explain in class now, I thought was science fiction ten years ago," said the professor at the UB, who defended the "crucial" need to apply "bioethics" to all the advances being achieved in the field of biogenetics.

"In the European Union, modifications cannot be made to embryos to make designer changes, but in other countries they consider it normal and it is allowed; are we more right than they are?," asked Marfany. To be able to make these decisions, she argued, it is necessary to use philosophy, ethics, and even literature. And she gave a very clear example: "Colonies on Mars cannot be established unless they are genetically modified", she stated, since direct exposure to the sun's radiation in environments without an atmosphere like those has a very large impact on human cells in the form of "neurodegeneration and cancer". "It will be necessary to make genetic improvements, to tweak them [the members of these future missions] to make them different. But who decides if this is done or how it is done?," she asked.

The bioethics specialist admitted that there are still more questions than answers, but precisely to find them, science must make use of many other tools, such as ethics, philosophy, or culture, which is different from one place in the world to another.