The Principles of Sustainable Development 

The Terradelsud association is a voluntary work organisation that intends to pursue its purposes through a clear and well-defined identity. 

The Promotion of Sustainable Development can be pursued only through the identification of some principles which we can consider to be fundamental. 

The principles described below represent a 

Essential Charter  

without which any approach to voluntary work and the promotion of future social system seems wrong and impossible. 

When we observe the world that surrounds us, we are always attracted by the most impressive or majestic things. 

A tall mountain, a great river, lightning in a storm…… the starry sky. 

There exist two categories of men: those people who observe all of this in a spellbound way, almost incredulous before so much grandeur, and those who have lost even this type of feeling. 

Today, however, few men reflect on a fact: so much immensity, so much organization contains in it (whatever one’s personal faith) a disturbing truth (because of the principle which generates it); the universe, the earth, a living being, are not held up by great structures, nor by immense organizations, but by things which are so small, so hidden, so evanescent, that they can not even be seen by the naked eye. 

These particles, constituted by electrons and quarks, that is to say, by infinitesimal constituents, hold an incontestable truth: they preserve and guarantee in their infinite microscopicness those laws which result in the consistency of the universe and of life. 

Up until this point this may only seem to be a speech which contains nothing more than a nice emotional effect. Yet we people of the west, we  children, grandchildren and great grandchildren of the Enlightenment, we close relatives of the  coldest school of rationality, do not grasp not only the details of this consideration, but also the most apparent questions. 

However the universe is constituted, Whoever or whatever generated it; it bases its consistence on a structuring that goes from the infinitesimally small to the infinitely large. 

For us inhabitants of the great metropolises, used to the great organizations which we see every day, swept by the rapidity of events that condition us, it becomes difficult (not intellectually, but perceptively) to understand that a good management of the world, of every day things, can start from the ability to get closer to the smallest things, to take care of them, to promote them and lead them towards their reason for being.

From politics to technology, from the economy to culture, this change is not simple. 

We have got used to thinking on a large scale, not realising that to do this we need to start from the smallest things; to reach the infinitely  large we must guarantee the infinitesimally small. 

On the one hand we have a culture that thinks to achieve consistency by reaching them from the top.

On the other, there is the increasing awareness that nature, and not just nature, is sending us a message: it is only by guaranteeing the small details, the weakest ones, that justice can be built. 

Between these two shores flows the sea which separates the old culture from the new one , man’s ancient (and by now frayed) mentality , think big, from a new one  which seeks to start from the lowest place. 

The environment, nature and man don’t suffer from a material problem but from a cultural one, which regards the ability to understand the logic on which life is founded.

If we understand this logic, together with its teaching, then we will know how to pursue its objectives; if we do not take note of what the world today is telling us, then we will not achieve anything. 

A man that does not get close to the smallest things, to those things which are defenceless, cannot create great things; a science that does not follow this path cannot be useful to anybody; a policy that does not take care of particles of sand is destined to fail, and with it fail also those who implement it and those who experience it. 

Only by learning to think and act with regards to small things and details is it possible to cooperate for the creation of a new social culture. 

TERREDELSUD wants only to indicate a way. In order to bring it about, it wants to get close to infinitesimal things; helping it to grow, helping it to build infinity.