Maurizio Pallante: happy degrowth

The environment belongs to everyone. Every aspect of our life can be taken back to the environment: health, transport, construction, agriculture, refuse. The quality of our life is the environment. They want to convince us that life is a good that has value according to the number of years that we live, like merchandise that is valued according to its weight. Quality is not a value in itself. We are the only living being that does not live with zero refuse. We want to consume everything, to eat the earth itself as Terzani said. We know that that is not possible. We know that the environment is not our property, it’s not a product, a derivative, a bond. The environment is us and it is the only true inheritance that we leave to our sons. It’s not a topic for professional politicians, for bankers, for companies with shares. The environment is not money in your hand. The towns cannot make the territory into a prostitute. That s a crime, a wicked thing, perhaps the worst kind.
The national meeting of the Lists of the 5 star towns will be in Florence at the Saschall Theatre on Sunday 8 March 2009
The Five Stars correspond to five specific areas: Water, Energy, Development, Environment and Transport. Today, I’m publishing an article about the ENVIRONMENT. Use the comment facility to send in your thoughts.

ENVIRONMENT: Use of the territory, construction and town planning
”Within the ambit of “degrowth”, energy policy needs to be addressed with a priority focus on the reduction of consumption, that for more than 50% is made up of echoes. Increasing efficiency is the pre-requisite for the development of renewable sources, because the reduction in the demand for energy:
- grows their contribution in percentage terms to the satisfaction of overall need
- it frees up large quantities of money that can be re-invested in buying them
Unless the paradigm of growth is put up for discussion, energy policy is imposed on the illusory search for unlimited and clean renewable sources of energy that are capable of substituting the growing lack of fossil fuels, and at the same time eliminating the environmental impact that they generate. The cultural context used for reference of this way of thinking is the oxymoron of sustainable development. In this context, the reduction in consumption has an auxiliary role and it is limited on the whole to moral beckoning about the need to save energy in a way that can come about with behaviours based on sobriety.

1. Block on the areas of building expansion in the regulatory plans of urban areas. Incentives for the qualitative and energetic restructurisation of the existing building stock. Concession of a building license only for demolition and reconstruction of civic buildings and for the alteration of use of unused industrial areas, as long as a part of the land is used for public green space.
2. Formulation of environmental energy plans to be added to binding building regulations when there is the concession of building licenses so as to achieve the standards for consumption that are laid down by the autonomous province of Bolzano (Class C: 70 kWh per square metre a year)
3. Expansion of urban green space with a view to a reduction of the overall disequilibrium between inorganic and organic, with the fixing of annual percentage increases.


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