Valerio Rossi Albertini, a well-known popularizer, physicist at the CNR, and professor of science popularization at Uniroma2, immediately got to the heart of the matter. The problem of pollution, and in particular of plastic, does not only concern distant lands and seas but is very close to us, to Northern Sardinia and the La Maddalena Archipelago National Park. An island of plastic is in fact located not far from here, between Corsica and Elba, mockingly in the Cetacean Sanctuary; an island of plastic made up of tons of waste. And a particular wind combined with the currents would be enough to dismember this mass of waste and transport most of it to these still uncontaminated or almost uncontaminated seas of ours.
The alarm was raised last May 4, during the conference that the well-known popularizer held in La Maddalena, organized by the municipal administration, entitled: "What is the circular economy really or why it will be a shrimp to save the world". In the last century and a half, the earth has suffered an aggression never seen before or in the previous 3 billion of natural history, an exploitation of the soil, the subsoil and the air determined by the continuous search for ever greater profit, which has determined an ever greater exploitation.
"We are an invasive species that has arrived in every part of the planet and has plundered it", stated Rossi Albertini; Therefore the invitation was to reflect on our role, "on the damage we bring to the environment and the planet and on how we could intervene so that our action becomes beneficial rather than destructive". Therefore avoiding pollution, waste and recycling; these are the cornerstones of an action that can be and must be restorative.
«Living species, in nature, have maintained themselves for billions of years»; based on principles that we have broken and are suffering the consequences. There is a balance of nature that is being lost and the fear, the risk is that, if a stop is not put, a remedy, the damage caused could be «irreversible». What must be done, said the scientist, is to follow the model that nature has always used, a cyclical model, which consists in making available again from nature itself or from the environment, in a circle precisely, the materials already used. Valerio Rossi Albertini therefore illustrated the model, the Ecosphere experiment, which is nothing other than a glass globe filled with brackish water, hermetically sealed, in which only 3 living species live and coexist: a green algae, bacteria and shrimp; a self-sufficient, balanced interdependent world, in which the shrimp "acts correctly, instinctively, and nature has acted in him so that this instinct would lead him to the preservation of himself and his species." A model this "that can inspire us"