 So, I'm very very happy to be here. And as Italian of course I have to say that my talk pros Probably will be a gain about Grenenis. I don't know why as Italian we love Grenenis, but this is part also of my story of my biography as a scholar, as a Nitro biologist and that's why, actually when Renette invited me here ki sem se stavila, da sem sem jazda, da je to tukaj. Pa sem tudi zapravila, da nekaj nekaj pričil imaš, nekaj nekaj pričil imaš, da jazda, da jazda, da jazda, da mi neko pričil imaš, da mi neko pričil imaš, da na razbanje nekaj biologi, nekaj ne bi almost našem muških tukaj, in zelo smo jaz jaz vzvečati. Zelo smo payske. Moramo počati, da so bojno različili tez v koželj, ta pačnega vzveča. In izveča vzvečanje z zelo, da je vzvečen. Nake kvali vzvečanje, sveče ni s neko vzvečanje. Vzveč sem tudi bom počen, Fadas and Madas of the Ethnobiology, Daryl Posi and Nina Etkin, passed away a few years ago, but these two persons were very important in bringing me to this idea that science has to make a step down. Science has to establish a dialogue with the local communities, because the local communities and their traditional knowledge maybe know much more than we know. And in Daryl idea there was this wonderful expression to say that culture and nature are very linked. There is an extricable link, a mysterious link between culture and nature. And of course Daryl was very important in my life for letting me appreciate the spiritual value of biodiversity. Biodiversity is not about plants and animals only, it's about the ways we look at them. And these ways we look at them, the way we perceive plants and animals and the environment is sometimes very, very important. Much more important than probably our sisters and brothers in the biodiversity world. And of course the need for a transdisciplinary and human science. We will come back to this, and I wanted just to begin to say thank you to these two persons. They are not more among us, but they gave me a lot. And as I told you, as Italian, Granny's again. These are three marvelous old women from a very tiny little village in South and Italy, inhabited by Arbrech. Arbrech are descendants of Albanians. And these three women in different ways have changed the way how I had in my mind the botany. When I began to do this work, I thought there is a plant kingdom, of course, and this plant kingdom, as it is taught in many university classes, is classified, is categorized according to families. These two, three old ladies told me instead for many, many days that their idea of classifying plants is very different. And actually they had a category for a specific group of plants, which included the idea of edibility. Lyakra. Lyakra cannot be translated in the scientific language. They are the plants, they grow in environment, they are pretty disturbed by the human beings, and they can be eaten. And they were eaten, they were gathered, they were blanched, they were generally, and they are still fried with olive oil and chilis. So the category of Lyakra is something we do not know in the science. And that brought me to this strong feeling that the Weltanschauungen we have in the science are not enough to establish this dialogue between science and traditional knowledge is not an easy job. And for all of us ethnobiologists, the first important and difficult story is to try to translate what a specific vernacular term means, a term referred to a plant. And the first important problem we have is that the one-to-one correspondence never exists. Many times people may name different plants with the same vernacular term. Is that wrong? No, it's very right, because according to their idea of plants, they may exist plants, they have similar taste, or they have pungent taste, or they may be used in similar ways. For example, in Southern Italy, in this village, Marshworth, which is a wild plant, which test is very close to the test of celery, and watercress are named with the same term. Is that wrong? No, it makes perfectly sense. And even the mental map of plants that people have in traditional cultures is different from what we have in the books of botany. For example, Amaranth and Fethan, they are generally named in the same kind of label, because they are used in similar ways. And much more interesting is that these mental maps of plants depend very heavily from where the plants are gathered. They are, in other words, mental maps. They consider the ecology of these plants. The botany is not so far yet. And that's why I think we need to learn, we need to listen. To listen. Botanists and probably many scientists around the world, too much time in the past they went in different places in the world and they pretended to know things. But actually what we should do is to listen and then listen again. This is a very interesting feature of the ethnogastronomy in this village. People, according to the bitterness of plants, classify plants as food or medicine. And there is a very interesting stuff, which is in between different species of taseljacent. They are consumed because they are believed to be very healthy. Nowadays we know from the pharmacologists that these plants are the most antioxidative plants we have in Europe. And they are still consumed according to this folk knowledge system. Tradizional knowledge systems then are profoundly embedded in the local landscape, in the language, in the history. We cannot really divide. This is culture, this is nature. It is just the result of the co-evolution, the fact that in these gastronomies we use certain things for reaching certain aims. The fourth person I would like to talk about is another very important teacher for me. He is one of the last worn virgins living in a very isolated area in Albania, Justina Duni. In one of the most untouched probably plays in Europe. And they are the people that have been always pastoralist. They use their plants according to very unique features. For example, Justina taught me that salep, the tubers from wild orchids, may be a wonderful and delicious food in the winter when the people and especially the kids feel weak. Justina has taught me that even a nettle or beach soup has a dignity and has to be respected not only when other members of the family eat it, but when animals eat it. This is in fact a soup which is prepared only for the cows. And then only in this way the cows according to the knowledge of Justina may produce a delicious milk, which will then fit in all magnificent dairy products for which these mountains are very famous. But Justina told me also another important story that the traditional knowledge changes, evolves, is not just static, is not just traditions. Traditions are made by continuous evolutions, innovations. And actually after the communism in North and Albania people went back to gather salep and other plants much more than they were used to do during the communism. So in a kind of magic way traditional knowledge was revitalized. Why? Because of course during the post communism in the mountains many problems arises, public health problems arrived and delivery of care was very, very difficult. So that told me that traditional knowledge is the result of a continuous co-evolution between human beings and what we call nature. The last two friends in this session I would like to talk about are two friends they come from very different world. Olga is a Russian-German who migrated back to Germany a few years ago after the family lived in Russia for more than 250 years, back migration. And Rosa Lisika is one of the last Venetians living in Eastern Romania in a wonderful, lively landscape close to the Danube. These two wonderful women told me that even the representation of traditional knowledge may change over time. Of course they could remember and they still do, of course, the marmalade, the jam with the flowers of the indelion, wonderful sweets from sorrow leaves and not to forget of course the lactofermented vegetables. They could be actually probably very useful this evening after the European Championship match because the water is considered very, very healthy against drunkness. But the lessons I learned from these two ladies was that even traditional knowledge is effect, is experiential, is very much represented. That means we talk probably about things we are attached to in different ways depending on the person we have in front of us. So in one word the traditional knowledge and you of course as chefs know this better than me is a narrative, is a way of representing an experience and then is a way through which we negotiate our identity. So where do you go from here? I think, and that is actually funny because I wrote this before coming here and yesterday evening I was thinking that what we have experienced so far, yesterday we had a wonderful day with René and the other friends is part of what I drafted as a dream. What is important is to feed our appetite for bio-culture diversities and to celebrate these diversities we need platforms like the ones we are now, thank you very much René for building such an essential platform. Too often scientists live in a tower and of course many of other stakeholders live in another world. We need a platform where we can talk together and I think it is so important that we can share our experiences, we can share our knowledge. Other important point in my opinion, education. We need desperately need of platforms through which we can educate young people and we can re-educate each other. We live in a time of crisis, of problems and we think to build these networks will also facilitate the building the so-called resilience which is very much needed in this time. Resilience is a very nice word but actually in practice is what local communities in many parts of the world have really generated every day. Then let me go back to the idea of the repository about the spiritual value of biodiversity. When we talk about food, when we talk about knowing how to manage a natural environment at the end of the day we talk about care. Food providers, shepherds, farmers are care providers and we need to care I think very much each other in order to appreciate this value which is probably the most interesting essence of biodiversity. What this may mean in our society at large for scientists, for chefs, for foodies, I don't know. But I think we need to find space and time for these platforms because these are very, very important. And then we come to my last friend, my last and probably most important and mysterious friend, Levi, one of the wise elder of one of the first nations on the Vancouver Island in Canada. I spent many, many days with him alone in the middle of the forest and talking about biocultural diversity many, many times he told me, at the end of the day, Andrea, this is your concept, is the concept of the people they come from the western culture, they think biology, nature and culture were divided and that's why they need to build new words. But actually he was keeping me saying what you express, we would express in another way. I shukish savalik, everything is one, everything is connected and since everything is one I think we can also say we are all one. Thank you very much. Okay, stand here, Andre, stand here. Some lights and some, any questions for Andre? We've got a question here. Not about the football, hopefully. Okay. Do you believe this is not kind of risky to try to melt science with this knowledge? I don't know if... No. As a scientist. As a scientist I think we need to be open-minded and to recognize that in specific domain I don't want to say in many things but in many domain science has not given the most final word. We need to learn from the people they have lived together with the nature for centuries and millennia because without this kind of experiential knowledge also our creativity and innovation is very mutilate. So in my opinion that does not far mean the science should do another job. Everybody has to continue to do his job but we need a dialogue. We need finally a dialogue because let's be honest all these delicious products you probably use in your cuisine comes from farmers, comes from fishermen as we have seen this morning they have the knowledge and they have a knowledge which is probably not embedded in the agronomy and botany books we have in our universities. And that's why you have I think you folks have an amazing role in trying to build this platform and to reconciliate this different kind of knowledge. At the end of the day probably let me say traditional knowledge and science that they are fruits from the same tree. This is beautiful but they are different fruits and we appreciate one fruit and the other together. Sorry, I believe that this kind of thought creates some kind of aberration when you think about to melt two different concepts then you got something like this biodynamic I got once again to this concept but I think you cannot in no time you cannot think that you can do science and grow vegetables and think that the stars can influence this process. I think it's very risky to give this message to the people. Well, to begin a work that has been never done is challenging. There are of course bottlenecks we cannot go now in details there are many bottlenecks but it's a work in my opinion that is urgently needed. Ok, any more questions? I talked about the importance of having a platform to share ideas and talk so that's what we should be doing. Andrea, ethnographers are often in a race to capture and record a culture and preserve it before it disappears. Can you give us your view on the cultures that you're looking at their strength, their ability to survive in an evolving world and also how we pass on that knowledge so that it doesn't get lost? Well, this is also our responsibility because we have built the wrong idea that we have all answers. We have built a fake idea in front of local communities they had historical much less power in the world that we can solve everything. So I think we have also the responsibility to work together with the local knowledge in addressing the problem of the transmission. We need to reinstill this knowledge we need of course to marry this knowledge with the modern science, with innovation. I think we cannot escape from this responsibility. And many communities all over the world I think are more and more aware now of this kind of subtle, interstitial but delicious, rich value they have. Let's think about the languages. Languages are music and we are losing languages every day more than we lose plans. But of course, since we are what we are, who we are especially in the past decades we tend to look at more at things but not at music. So I think we have a responsibility. We cannot leave all in the hands of local communities they are very often marginalized. Ok, one last question, quick question and a short answer. Where is our question? Ok, right at the top. And a short answer please. Andrei, thank you. I'm not sure if it's a short answer. Not long ago I sat in a meeting of chefs who were told that science needed to come into the kitchen much more that the kitchen was a place of wives' tales and false knowledge. And so I'm wondering if it is really communication and not knowledge, the language that these two different groups speak that is the issue. And if so, how, if you could quickly suggest a way to communicate better amongst ourselves. Does that make any sense? Yeah, I think that actually we need to go out from our towers. This is the main point. Because it is true that of course science should enter into the kitchen. I would like to say and believe me this is not just to make you happy that I would like to see more farmers and chefs within the universities. I think that we need to go out from our towers. Very strong. Because at the end of the day knowledge is not just a body of something that is just theory. Knowledge has to be embedded with practice and you are the real, let's say, expert of practice. You are the heroes of practice. So I think you can understand probably much more than me and then scholars how this dialogue has to happen. But of course it is a very open task. And I don't have any exact recipe in my pocket.