Page 177 - Supplemento 2-2016 (ENG)

Tackling Environmental Crime throUgh standardized Methodologies

and not on the economic system. Here is the same chart we have seen previously
which can be reassessed: now economic growth is not qualified to determine
well-being but development is. What is development? It could be defined as the
set of capacities that are attributed and made available to human beings in order
to realise their existence. The wider this set of possibilities, the greater the deve-
lopment, the greater the prosperity, and the higher the quality of human life.

The environment cannot be considered anymore as a means of produc-
tion, but it must be one of the ends, i.e. the capacity of the environment must
be preserved. Without the environment to support humankind’s activities, there
is no possibility of activities for humankind. Therefore the environment cannot
be exchanged with other factors of production. Rather it too must be regarded
as an ultimate end. At this point justice will assume an altogether different
dimension compared to its narrow place in the traditional approach to econo-
mics. The problem of justice is inevitably raised by the finiteness of resources
and their distribution. The impossibility of growth without limitation, at least in
the time frame necessary to change our production and consumption models,
compels us to abandon the point of view of the traditional economic approach,
which has often marginalized the environmental and social dimension.

We need to get past an economic system in which economic growth must
always be maximized and the environment is the dependent variable. It doesn’t
work like that; science tells us that it’s not like that; we need to think of a system
in which the environment is the independent variable and economic growth is
the dependent one: as much economic growth as possible, but without the
damage to the environment. This also concerns the relationship between the
north and south of the world and the idea of justice.

On these subjects Pope Francis concentrated his attention in his encyclical.
The Pope insisted particularly on the idea of ecological debt between north and
south, the trade imbalance and the long-standing disproportionate use of natu-
ral resources by some countries. The truth is that part of the world ended up as
a source of resources for the more affluent countries. This situation is even
more unfair because global warming, caused by the rich countries, as the Pope
says, has repercussions in the poorest places on earth, especially in Africa, where
the increase in temperature, combined with the drought, has disastrous conse-

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