The Italian Constitution and Biodiversity 

 The new text of article 9 of the Italian Constitution, approved on March 17 by the commission for constitutional affairs of the Chamber of Deputies, was passed with the inclusion of this sentence: "The Republic recognizes the environment and the ecosystems to be fundamental values and protects them on the basis of principles of reversibility, precaution and responsibility, also in the interest of future generations. It protects biodiversity and promotes respect for animals". This new version accepts the doctrinal thesis which believes that the concept of "environment" cannot be limited to just the "natural environment". In fact the preceding version passed in the Senate only added the words "natural environment" among other commodities protected by the constitution. 

22 years after the Rio Convention   

The Convention on Biodiversity, held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, affirms the intrinsic value of biological diversity and its various components, which are ecological, genetic, social and economic, scientific, culturally educational, recreational and aesthetical. 

Moreover, the convention recognizes that the fundamental requirement for the conservation of biological diversity consists in safeguarding the ecosystems and the natural habitats in situ, with the preservation and reconstruction of the populations of living species in their natural environments.  

In the more industrialized regions of Europe, few people have the fortune of living in environments which are in contact with nature, taking in its sounds and its perfumes, seeing and living close to plants and wild animals, noticing daily the changing of the seasons. Most of the population, in fact, lives in urban centres, surrounded by artificial environments.  

Biodiversity is the variety of the forms of vegetable and animal life present in the ecosystems of the planet. The term is also used to indicate the genetic variability that there is within a species. The survival of every species depends on the variety of the populations that compose it. Smaller variability means smaller possibilities of survival.  

The biodiversity of ecosystems refers to the different environments in which life is present: forests, coral reefs, underground environments, deserts, and peat-bogs. The disappearance of these environments involves the risk of extinction for the species that live there.  

The specific diversity represents the sum of the species that live in a certain region. Some authors define it as alpha-diversity. It indicates the taxonomic diversity, and therefore not only the wealth of species in a region, but also the relationships between different species.  

To sum up, cultural diversity, like genetic diversity and specific diversity, is also biodiversity. It can be expressed in various ways, with differences in language, culture and so on, and it represents a solution to the problem of the survival of life in changeable environments. 

Conclusions

In a world in which it is often difficult to find a certain and sure orientation, in an epoch in which  old and consolidated certainties seem to crash one after another, we instead witness the construction of a system that goes beyond (more so every day) the limit set by a human culture that for some  (historical) time  had thought to be able to build its own well-being (and its own civilization) without considering  those equilibriums and principles which, “as old as the hills”, have always been present and meaningful in the "things" of the world. The path which was undertaken in the final quarter of the last century, is slowly, and not without some difficulty, taking shape, also in those institutional and juridical aspects that are part of the construction of a new civilization, the first feint features of which we can only begin to glimpse.