“You Need a Seed To Build a Table”: Earth and the Rights of Nature at the Heart of the LUMEN Project

The final conference of the LUMEN project, evocatively titled “TO BUILD A TABLE, YOU NEED A SEED. ECOSYSTEMIC APPROACH AND RIGHTS OF NATURE FOR A RESILIENT TERRITORY AND COMMUNITY”, took place on October 10–11, 2025, at the University of Bologna’s Forlì Campus.

The first day was designed to offer the approximately 150 attending students—enrolled in the course on Comparative Constitutional Law within the degree program in International and Diplomatic Sciences—valuable opportunities to engage with experts on the ecosystemic functioning of our “spaceship Earth” (Prof. Margherita Venturi and Prof. Francesco Gonella), as well as with environmental, ecological, and cultural rights activists from Ecuador (Patricia Gualinga, representative of the Sarayaku people and member of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues) and Senegal (Bineta Gueye, director of the NGO FEEDA – Women, Education, Water and Development).

The second day was dedicated to sharing the project’s results through presentations by research units and, most importantly, by representatives of civil society, associations, and groups that collaborated with us throughout the two years of the project. The day was organized in partnership with the local community: the sessions were hosted by the Romiti Neighborhood Assembly, one of the areas most affected by the 2023 floods. The morning began with a Heritage Walking Tour through the sites of the environmental disaster, led by local residents.

The main goal of the conference was twofold: to provide students and citizens with a high-quality learning experience on the ecological challenges facing humanity, and to create and strengthen synergies between civil society and the academic world so that research can increasingly respond to the real needs of communities.

🎥 Watch the playlist featuring short video clips from all speakers
🎞️ Watch the full video of the session “Energy as the Basis of Life”