I have reached a certain point in my life, and I have suddenly understood that I have lived through historic changes and have had the good fortune not to be an outside spectator but to have stood right inside them, with all the difficulties, but also the riches, that this entails.

When I was eleven, a television news broadcast, listened to, as always, with my father, carried me all at once from childhood into adolescence. I remember that we were standing in front of the set, just switched on, when they announced the assassination of President Kennedy. From that moment my life was no longer only leaps and rolls, handstands and other exercises of artistic gymnastics. That sudden adolescence meant political interest, the study of English, and reading certainly well beyond my years. Above all, the ideals of social justice, racial integration, the defence of nature, and a concrete commitment, however childish still, to building a better world became my dream and my goal for a lifetime. To mountaineering, which I took up alongside my medical studies from the age of eighteen, I owe the great store of international experience I have been lucky enough to gather. The mountaineer is a person I like to describe as being without borders or passports, without language barriers: a citizen of the world, of that world I so longed to know and to change ever since that famous 1963. I have crossed the Berlin Wall; I have shared the hardships of friends who lived on the far side of one border or another. Many of those borders I have watched fall, and many an absurd barrier I have watched go up. I dreamed of Europe, and I saw it made real. I have fought for and helped so many of the Last, and, sadly, I have seen so many more of them come into the world. At various moments I have given substance to my adolescent dream, above all through my work with the Peace and Sport forum and with the FAO’s Mountain Partnership.

There is one change that strikes me today as more and more evident. It is the relationship between Man and the Environment. In the medical profession we studied the harm that a sedentary life does to our health (I speak in the plural because everything was done together with my husband, Francesco Coscia); but, going further, our focus became movement in a natural setting and the importance of recovering a feeling between Man and Nature. Fully convinced of this, and, for many years, regarded as the usual alternative types. Finally, almost by surprise, I sense that the defence of the Earth is no longer confined to the conferences of environmentalists but is becoming the central point of political agendas and of the most prestigious scientific meetings. At the same time, many people are realizing that the environment in which they live has a great impact on their health, and they are asking for medical explanations and effective remedies.

No longer fanciful alternative types? What happened? Climate change has become evident to everyone.

The COVID-19 pandemic set the human race before its own great fragility, despite the high level of medical science. Plague, the Spanish flu, poliomyelitis had seemed to be nothing but history. And then comes a pandemic that looks like an invincible paralysis of the world. I live through it as a doctor, but I observe it as a creature of nature. Human beings stand still, but the rest of nature carries on, and two winters go by, two springs and two summers, and then autumn once again. The Earth seems to breathe more easily with Man at a standstill, and Man feels the need to recover the feeling he has lost with nature.

Are we at a point of no return? I do not think so. I think we are at a crossroads: on the one side Anthropocentrism, on the other Biocentrism, the same old dilemma.

In 1998, fifty years after the signing of the Charter of Human Rights, we had organized a conference, “Diritti dell’Uomo e Diritto all’Ambiente.” There a great many people had come together, from biologists to jurists to economists. There was talk, too, of eco-mafias, a subject that was new back then. The positions of those who wanted Man as the protagonist and those who remained staunchly environmentalist, almost to an extreme, I would say, marginalizing the human race almost as an enemy, could find no balance. Anthropocentric or Biocentric? Today it seems clear to me that the right way is not a choice between the two but the defence of Bios. There is a single Life that must of necessity embrace both Man and Nature, restoring them to a harmonious coexistence, wherever that life may be, from the Highlands to the Deserts. The one has need of the other’s well-being.

Life after Covid will be different. That sentence must not be a commonplace, a repetition of words devoid of substance. We must, of necessity, find a different way of living. Many clearly feel this need; others need to be guided toward this new balance. I have the clear perception, as a doctor too, that today’s urgent choices will be the necessary foundation for bringing about a global ecology that will guarantee greater health for the Human Race and for the Earth. We will have to confront the physical and psychological aftermath left by the pandemic, and physical exercise in a natural setting is surely an aid in the treatment of all this.

I quote from an earlier article in this journal, The Mountain in Greek Tragedy, the Greek conception of oros, which designates as a mountain a place not necessarily high but something outside the activity of the polis, a place rich in divinities and symbols, a place of the spirit. If the human race rediscovers these places, it will surely defend them and undergo a wholesome physiological readjustment to nature. I have the pleasure of closing these reflections of mine by recalling one important thing: 2022 was proclaimed by the UN the “International Year of Sustainable Mountain Development.” I have been a member of the FAO’s Mountain Partnership since its birth, the 2002 International Mountain Year. What seems to me telling, and revealing of the work done over these twenty years, is the addition of the words Sustainable Development.

Bibliography

M. Marchini and P.V. Gigliotti, “Montagna degli Alpinisti e Montagna dei Montanari,” in La rivista della montagna, 1982

“Palestre al Sole.” Proceedings of the conference edited by F. Coscia, 1993

“Diritti dell’Uomo e diritto all’Ambiente.” Proceedings of the conference edited by F. Coscia and P.V. Gigliotti, 1998

Michele Coscia, “The Mountain in Greek Tragedies,” in Studi Umbri, vol. 11, no. 2 (2019)

“Anthropocentric or Biocentric?” Giornale Diplomatico, 2022. Webinar proceedings, “So Harsh, so Fragile: Exploring the Relationship among Man, Mountain and Dryland.” Tel Aviv 2022

F. Coscia and P.V. Gigliotti, “The Life After,” in Sport as a Lifestyle, Istanbul 2022

Paola Virginia Gigliotti was born in Catanzaro in 1952. She studied Medicine and Surgery in Perugia, where she practised as a family doctor until 2011. A mountaineer, with an especially rich record of winter exploration in the Sibillini Mountains, but also in Sinai, the Sahara, the Andes, the Himalayas, and the Alps. A member first of the Council and later of the Board of the International Climbing and Mountaineering Federation. A member of the FAO’s Mountain Partnership and of the Peace&Sport forum, Principality of Monaco. Award of the Presidency of the Republic, 11 December 2006, International Mountain Day, “For her manifold activities of scientific research in the mountains and her support to mountain populations.” She currently works in the Puster Valley as a doctor for national and international competitions and for the Covid emergency. She lives in Austria, holding the office of Consular Correspondent for the district of Lienz.