Venice and its Lagoon: A Problem of Local Sustainable Development

Abstract

Man is a biological species with peculiar characteristics within the ecosystem of which he is a part; this is because he possesses tools of interaction with the environment which no other species can use. These tools allow him to alter the balance between the evolutionary developments of his own history and the development of the biological ecosystem. This capacity to alter, which is connected to the discrepancy between historical timescales and biological timescales, lies at the root of the problem of sustainable development. However, the capacity to control this alteration, by reducing the results of the discrepancy to a minimum, is also the key to solving the problem.