50 I point out to him that this was in the 1970’s, when the ecological crisis was already being discussed, but not as much as it is today: «It is true» he argues, «the ecological crisis was present, it was visible, but it was not yet so urgent as it is nowadays, so my contribution was not yet in response to a feeling of urgency. Truth is, I’ve always thought of myself as a farmer, even when I was doing research in genetics I always acted as a farmer. If plants feel unwell, they will not produce – it will become expensive to cultivate them, because you need allies from outside, and that’s economically not intelligent, so to say. This is like working as a slave for others and not working together with nature; it's against nature. And so for me, at that time, it was not so clear in my mind as it is nowadays. It's not about ecology. Look, it's not upon us to save life on this planet, but we have to figure out how to develop strategies, how to be able to survive, to let us live on this planet. Because, in a way, we act suicidal – in all ways suicidal. We have to change our strategies, and so for me it's not about ecology, it’s about intelligence. About eighteen years ago, I began to read ancient Roman philosophers. Well, for them it was out of question to use fertilizers from an external source. If you read Pliny the Elder, who lived more than two thousand years ago, you’ll find him telling us in a very beautiful language that the olive tree is growing in the shade of the purple tree, and the fig tree in the shade of the olive tree, and then the peach tree in the shade of the fig tree. In the wintertime, the herbs and vegetables, they grow in the shade of all of them. They cultivated cereals, wheat, legumes, and vegetables – most of the vegetables we eat are Mediterranean, and they adopted and transformed them in cultivated plants. Look, the Roman Empire survived for about a thousand years, our civilization will not survive that long, I say. In a very short time, we depleted the ecosystem and brought it to a collapse». The voices of ancient philosophers often echoed his own, in his public speeches disseminating the principles of Syntropic Agriculture; in fact, Ernst Götsch often claimed that Syntropic Agriculture is a way of thinking, a philosophy. A statement whose meaning I ask him about: «Syntropic Agriculture is more a system of applied philosophy, rather than a technique. I use certain techniques and the dynamics of natural species succession, which we can describe as copying what nature does in its strategy, to move in space. For me, natural species succession means that life has developed to move in space and time. We are part of an intelligent system and part of a macro-organism. And so we are not the commanders-in-chief, we own nothing. We are only part of a macro-organism. A disharmonic behavior of parts that constitute a macro-organism induces modifications in that very macro-organism. As a result of that, the presence of the non-harmonious part may be redundant. This is what happened to the human species in the last twelve thousand years, starting from the very Roman Empire – first removing forests to plant crops locally; later on, believing that he's more intelligent, he did it regionally, causing a more powerful collapse. And finally, he did this continentally. In the Roman Empire, agriculture was dominated by huge enterprises with a lot of slaves working on huge fields. What we do now is we use machines. They did it by the employment of slaves, it was the same thing. But that is considered extremely sustainable». For this reason, Götsch invites me to read what Cicero wrote in his De Vita Rustica. «Cicero spent a lot of time on his piece of land, whenever he had some spare time, and not only to have peace. He loved to work, and he said that agriculture, in his opinion, was the most sophisticated art human being ever developed. And what do we think now? In the last sixty or seventy years, those who don't get to study medicine or law, well… the last thing they still can study is agriculture. And they don't really study agriculture, they are taught to apply a little stupid recipe, one they don't even understand. We do not know anything about what we are doing, and we consider the soil like something you
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