Gael García Bernal: "The discussion on the climate crisis has to be taken to politics"

A farmer from Coahuila started his own revolution by growing mangrove, a tropical tree with long branches that sink into the ground.

The man dared an act as subversive as working the land in a mining state in northern Mexico.

Stories like this were found by actor and director Gael García Bernal and linguist and writer Yásnaya Aguilar as they toured the country to portray the climate crisis in

El tema

, a documentary series of six short films that premieres this Tuesday.

The most urgent action, they agree, is to speak.

"The discussion about the climate crisis has to be taken to politics," says García Bernal.

The actor highlights solutions such as that of the farmer from Coahuila: "These revolutionary forms of action propose a way out."

García Bernal believes that “starting to talk” is “in itself it is a solution”.

This was his approach to the problem, he tells in a videoconference interview with EL PAÍS before the premiere: from a “personal and amateur concern”.

“Getting organized and being able to talk about this is a very beautiful starting point to find an answer.

The vast majority of the planet is aware that something is happening.

There is a diagnosis that is telling us that we are heading towards a disaster.

We all have something to say about this ”, defends the actor.

The essayist adds, also by Zoom, that it is "an unpleasant surprise" that the climate crisis is not an issue that "frames everything" in the campaign prior to the June 6 elections: "The matter is so urgent that it transcends any interest of a partisan type ”.

The issue

shows that the climate crisis is not an omen.

In two decades, Mexico has deforested an area the size of the state of Yucatán.

79% of the territory suffers some degree of drought.

Seven out of 10 rivers are polluted.

For insisting on the statistics that the first chapter of the series exposes.

"Everything begins with the water, even here, where it seems that the earth has forgotten it", the narrator begins and the images of the desert, the bare hills, the cracked earth follow one another.

The first episode can be seen this Tuesday on the YouTube channel of La Corriente del Golfo, the production company that makes the web series, and the rest of the chapters will be published every Tuesday for the next five weeks.

The first episode, lasting 11 minutes, focuses on the conflict over water in Chihuahua, where last September hundreds of farmers seized the La Boquilla dam and closed its gates to stop the flow of water that Mexico must deliver to the United States for an international treaty signed in 1944. The confrontation with the National Guard left two dead.

The series, an original idea by García Bernal and Pablo Montaño directed by Santiago Maza, narrates six keys to the crisis from different parts of the country: in addition to dealing with the water conflict in Chihuahua, it talks about air quality in Monterrey;

of the extraction of coal, in Coahuila;

the situation of the oceans, from Cozumel (Quintana Roo);

of energy production, in Tabasco, and of food, in Chapala (Jalisco).

Throughout the six chapters, García Bernal and Aguilar interview activists, human rights defenders, members of indigenous communities, academics and organizations to delve into the different axes of the crisis.

A global phenomenon narrated from this piece of territory, the 12th most polluting, according to the Global Carbon Project.

A country that follows an extractivist agenda, depends on fossil fuels while marginalizing renewable energies, and promotes megaprojects, such as the Mayan Train, which crosses vast ecological reserves and areas inhabited by indigenous and peasant communities.

Gael García Bernal and Yásnaya Aguilar, in the first episode of 'El tema'.Montserrat Cattaneo

"We had to upload the questions, but behind us there is a great team of people who have been working on this for a long time," says Aguilar, who is also a columnist for this newspaper.

People, he says, who are exposed "to a very brutal vulnerability."

"Mexico is one of the places in Latin America, in the world, where it is riskier to defend the environment," he laments.

The linguist adds: “In this area of ​​the world, defending nature threatens certain interests.

We cannot speak of infinite growth, we must rethink those ideas of development and progress ”.

“This is

the

topic that covers everything else.

It is transversal and has a connection with other urgent issues, ”explains García Bernal, who starred in films such as

Amores perros

or

Diarios de motos

, and also directed social-themed projects such as the documentary series

Los invisibles

about migrants who cross Mexico to reach the United States. United.

Aguilar agrees that it is an "inescapable" problem and adds a more personal reason, linked to the Mixe community of the Sierra de Oaxaca to which it belongs, to explain the name of the new series: "If we take the first letters of both words they form Et, which is the name of nature in the Mixe language ”.

The trip through different states impacted García Bernal and Aguilar in ways that might seem opposite.

Seeing the coal mines in Coahuila or the construction of the Dos Bocas refinery in Tabasco was "perhaps a glimpse into the worst world that [the author of

The Lord of the Rings

, JRR] Talkien would have imagined about the orcs," explains the actor.

"A place where the human being has completely destroyed and razed what is there," he details.

But at the same time the two acknowledge that they returned more optimistic.

“It seems like a contradiction, but it can be done and this call is urgent.

There are people who are already doing it.

The solutions and the proposals are concrete and achievable ”, emphasizes Aguilar.

As in the case of the farmer from Coahuila, the actor exemplifies: “Simply because of that, being in a mining area and dedicating himself to agriculture is changing a lot.

There are many examples of people doing that.

The most revolutionary and beautiful ”.

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