Franco has home in the southern part of Switzerland, in a cosy village close to Lugano Lake.
He is one of the most appreciated photojournalist specialized in underwater subjects and stories.
Franco began to dive in the 1981, in the Lake of Lugano. At the
beginning, he dived the fresh waters nearest home, especially lakes and
rivers, where the water is clearer and he was able to improve his
photographic technique.
Then he travelled everywhere he could, documenting wildlife and human
relationship with nature in environments from the Equator to the Poles.
Franco dived in all the oceans of our Earth : Pacific Ocean, Atlantic,
Indian, Arctic, Antarctic, Mediteranean Sea, Red Sea, improving his
skill as photographer and his love for wildlife and conservation of
biodiversity, flora and fauna.
Top- Highly unique picture of Sperm Whales sleeping!
When you’re writing your posts about the anomie of modern individualistic atomized existence, and talking about how we need to find some more-communitarian more-interconnected more-tribal-level mode of life…please remember what tribes are actually like.
Tribes are, basically, big families. You know how families work, probably. You were probably raised in one.
And – don’t get me wrong – there are many great things about families. It is cool that, due to the power of collective identity, resources can be distributed in a literally final-stage-communist fashion with very little friction. It is cool that you can get to know everyone super well, and keep an accurate map of all the relationships. It is cool that people care about you, no fooling, they really care about you, they are not going to drop you just because you’ve become inconvenient or whatever.
Nonetheless. Somehow, I’m betting that most of you fled from the bosom of your families in order to go live out in the big cold atomized impersonal individualistic world, and you’re not exactly champing at the bit to go back.
Because there are costs, and they are crushing. Families do not understand, cannot understand, personal boundaries. The counterbalance to “your family will always care about you” is “your family will feel free to use and remake every part of your existence.” Families are places where every point of incompatibility or tension will be rubbed raw until it bleeds and festers, because people can’t just agree to leave each other alone. Families subordinate your dreams to their own collective ambitions and values. Families run Every. Single. Thing. through a system of manipulative personal politics.
Different people have different levels of tolerance for such things, and so the individualism / tribalism tradeoff plays out differently in every case. But if you’re reading this, I am prepared to bet money that you really really really benefit from the advantages of social individualism, no matter how much loneliness and anomie you might be feeling.
Squaring this circle is super hard. It is one of my major long-term intellectual projects. Finding a system that combines “people really care about each other in a reliable fashion” and “resources get shared in a non-stupid way” with “people will respect your individual preferences/ambitions” and “people have the space not to impinge upon each other intolerably” is…well, it may be impossible, and if it’s possible I’m pretty sure no one’s figured it out yet. But I’m betting that, at such time as we do figure it out, it’s not going to look anything like segmentary communitarianism.
OK, I’m rereading this, and I should add an addendum, because this is important and I feel bad about eliding it earlier.
For those of you who are, e.g., raising children or planning to do so: my point is definitely not that all (nuclear) family environments are psychologically horrible. It is not even that it is impossible to have a (nuclear) family that shows respect for its members’ individual autonomy, etc. You can definitely do those things. I have seen people who do. Those people are heroes.
But it is so costly! It is so difficult! God, it is one of the hardest and most expensive projects ever undertaken by man. It basically entails saying “we are going to pour all our resources into one or two or three children, we are going to give them claims on every part of us, and we are going to ask nothing in return. We are going to strip our souls and our bank accounts bare for people whom we fully expect may up and leave us because they will want to live their own lives and pursue their own dreams.”
Most families are not capable of this. Most families aren’t trying for this. Most families expect payment in devotion for their care, according to the ancient tribal logic. And the bigger and more extended your family is, the stronger the pull of that tribal logic will be.
(referring to the original post but keeping the addendum) I know it’s a Tumblr cliche, but: someone finally said it.
Also, local communities will inevitably be crushing to some in the same way as nuclear families are, even though both are net good things. Any system in which you have to rely on the personal favor of the people immediately around you for basic resources is going to be capable of thoroughly screwing anyone who deviates from the local norm. I have a very strong leave-me-alone-and-get-out-of-my-business drive and for most people with that temperament libertarianism has obvious appeal, and I get that, but ultimately this isexactly why I favor centralized distribution of essential survival needs on a universal entitlement basis. Large-scale centralized systems need to be impersonal, they need to apply to everyone, and that means that in the worst-case scenario, where you drew a bad card in the birth lotto and your family or the local elders are terrible and toxic and abusive and hate you for your nature etc, you as a member of the greater society still have recourse. I’m as suspicious of left-anarchist models that rely solely on mutual aid and solidarity as I am of these tribal utopias [sic as hell] you see proposed by ethnotraditionalists.
To be clear, I’m totally on board with having a universal safety net from a financial policy standpoint. And I was raised in an actual fundamentalist cult, so I am well aware of the negative impacts of tribalism. However, there are two points that I haven’t seen addressed by people advocating
individualistic atomization that deeply concern me:
For most people, interpersonal interaction is a very real and fundamental psychological need.
Many disabled, elderly, LGBT+, and otherwise marginalized people aren’t going to get any interpersonal interaction unless people around them have a sense of duty to their community which overrides their individual desire to avoid people who make them uncomfortable because they are different.
We can’t treat loneliness as if it’s some kind of lesser of two evils inconvenience that means people have to spend some of their Saturdays nights at home. Loneliness fucking kills. And has huge, empirically measurable negative effects even when it doesn’t. To the point where many people can and do knowingly stay in or return to abusive situations because the loss of autonomy is more bearable than complete isolation.
And we can’t promote something as a solution while ignoring that it’s the most marginalized people in society who are most vulnerable to its negative effects.
I think the point the earlier people are making isn’t that we shouldn’t have communities, it’s that they will always fail some people, so there needs to be a wider, impersonal social safety net in addition to local families and communities.
To clarify, Rhea has
Psittacine Beak & Feather Disease, and that is why she is featherless. But she’s being well loved despite her illness that prevents her from having any contact with other birds.
Europe is literally the creation of the Third World. The wealth which smothers her is that which was stolen from the underdeveloped peoples. The ports of Holland, the docks of Bordeaux and Liverpool were specialized in the Negro slave trade, and owe their renown to millions of deported slaves. So when we hear the head of a European state declare with his hand on his heart that he must come to the aid of the poor underdeveloped peoples, we do not tremble with gratitude.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (via precarious-life)
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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