Aerial view of the Paraná River in Rosario, Argentina, on July 4 Sebastian Lopez Brach / Getty Images
“Suddenly I felt the river in me, / it ran in me / with its tremulous banks of signs, / with its deep reflections barely starry. / The river ran in me with its branches. / I was a river in the evening, / and the trees sighed in me, / and the path and the herbs died in me. / A river crossed me, a river crossed me! ”: This is the end of a poem that talks about ecstasy. It is called
I went to the river
and it was written by one of the greatest Argentine poets, Juan L. Ortiz, who lived in the twentieth century in Entre Ríos, where the islands of the Paraná Delta begin, one of those places where it is not difficult to understand that we are part, powerful but part in the end, of a whole, of a network of myriads of millions of beings that make life.
Now, those who went to the river are the boys and girls from the Multisectorial de Humedales.
They came rowing in kayaks through the Paraná from Rosario, a beautiful coastal city 300 kilometers from Buenos Aires: they arrived this Wednesday, August 18, and called for a march between the Plaza de Mayo, in front of the national government headquarters, to that of Congress .
They asked our representatives to stop postponing the treatment of the Wetlands Law, which is vitally important, because wetlands store and purify water.
However, they are destroyed with impunity.
They are set on fire.
The river is overdrawn.
Its fauna is hunted without controls or limits.
More information
The wetlands of the Paraná River Delta are in danger
“They are the mining companies or us.
We have no other way out ”.
The history of Andalgalá and its fight for water
The Paraná River has been going through a historic downspout for 20 months.
On the website of the national government, a senior official from the Ministry of the Environment, Sergio Federovisky, affirms that the Paraná drought “is an extreme event that has its origin in climate change and is accentuated by deforestation in the basin and the reduction of the wetlands ”.
And what do they do?
Any.
The same happens with the deforestation of the Gran Chaco forest, the second lung of Latin America after the Amazon: it lost five million hectares in the last 20 years.
Many of them during this pandemic.
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We could also talk about mega-mining.
Or industrial agriculture with its toxic pesticides and fertilizers.
Or Vaca Muerta: using the method of
fracking
(hydroinjection), they generate earthquakes and contaminate water tables, that scarce good that began to be listed on the stock market.
The lapidary report of the IPCC did not twist the poor imaginary of the national elites: you have to pollute, they say, if you want to grow.
Extractivism has been the heart of the economy throughout the country's history.
And here we are, with more than 40% of the population in poverty.
In addition, the maps of poverty and pollution coincide every day.
The IPCC was clear: the worst of climate change can still be stopped.
It is inevitable to think about and execute a socio-environmental transition.
A new model where the right to housing, health and education for all is the center.
And not the irresponsible consumption of fewer and fewer people.
A petition is circulating from intellectuals, journalists, artists, writers and people of the most diverse trades, for a socio-environmental quota so that the socio-environmental agenda enters the political debates with a view to the next elections.
The least we owe to our children, and their children, is a livable world.
And the ecstasy of feeling that a living river is running through us.
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