Buen Vivir e Bioeconomia: la cura e il godimento della vita. Alcune riflessioni partendo dalle esperienze in Abya Yala

The original peoples of Abya Yala – guardians of spiritual, pedagogical, economic and social practices based on harmonious relationships between human beings and nature – take care of the Earth. Today, as in the past, the ‘languages, times and places’ of the ancestral memory of caring and respectful coexistence with nature permeate the practices of everyday life. The ‘Sumak Kawsay’ (Sumak: fullness, sublimation, beauty, elevation; Kawsay: life, ‘to bestanding’), translated as Buen Vivir, refers to ‘harmonious relations with the whole, the universe, all living beings and spiritual entities that make it up’ where ‘the whole’ represents the essence and spirit of what science calls ‘man-nature relationship’. The Buen Vivir, therefore, represents the concrete expression of the ecological and community paradigm that contains many of the essential features of the bioeconomics theorized by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen: from a society and an economy in harmony with life and the laws of nature, to the care and ‘enjoyment of life’ as the ultimate goal of the economic process and human actions. The Buen Vivir is a concrete experience of social well-being detached from economic growth and the connected development model, which are the cause of the ecological crisis, social injustices and territorial conflicts. In this paper, based on an interdisciplinary and ‘interepistemic’ collaboration, the Buen Vivir is presented and some reflections are proposed in the light of the Georgescu-Roegen’s Bioeconomics.