Ecocides La Española (Unlimited Society)

Man and nature have always cohabited in conflict. There are those who say that we are not capable of leaving other living beings alone. But so aggressive with the alien and the unknown, we should not be surprised by our mercantilism towards the biosphere. Environmentalism collides with anthropological realities: it is impractical to ask someone to do something that they believe is contrary to their interests. What is cartoonish and calamitous is that it is the conservative apostolate that has made us believe that biological conservation goes against progress. "We should not talk about progress in terms of longevity, safety or comfort before comparing the animals in a zoo with those living in the wild," according to Nassim Taleb.

These days, on the initiative of PP and Vox, the Andalusian Parliament is processing the Proposal of Law on irrigation north of Doñana. Parliament that will not be able to be duly informed by scientists, since these, against all foresight and common sense, have been vetoed in the hearing. The honorable exception, almost nocturnal and reluctantly due to media pressure, comes from Miguel Delibes, who seems condemned to preach in the desert. Passing through the strawberry arch all the warnings of the European Commission, this law runs fatally like a Leviathan in the style of the film by Russian filmmaker Andrey Zvyagintsev, in which the Hobbesian curse is imposed: everything for the wicked and nothing for the just. For any well-informed citizen, the subterfuges of water, progress and employment are liquid demagoguery, propaganda dressed in altruism, a picaresque of Galdosian legitimization for profit and flight. But a deadly noose around the neck of the Doñana World Heritage Site.

My defense derives from having dedicated 30 years of my professional life to the study of the ecosystems of the past, including the habitat of our ancestors. I will share three relevant studies. In the first I have coordinated 130 authors of 14 nationalities, studying almost 500 fossil records to document the changes in the Iberian floras during the last 66 million years. We observe that the south of the peninsula has served as a refuge for biodiversity in adverse climatic phases during which many species became extinct from the rest of the continent. There are examples of extraordinary survival in coastal ecosystems such as Doñana: Noah's Arks for species that would cyclically recolonize Europe under more favorable conditions. Moral: the disappearance of populations in refuges means irreversible extinction throughout the distribution area of the species.

Other studies include human action over the past millennia. More than 4,000 years ago, the thriving Argar culture, one of the first European urban societies, developed in the southeast. We observe its abrupt end ("argaric collapse"), after the disappearance of the lush forests with high biodiversity that dominated the coastal areas. Fossil records show how deforestation activity (wood ovens, fires), overgrazing and agricultural exploitation for surplus trade, caused the ecological catastrophe, the first great European ecocide. Moral: an ecocide precedes a genocide. The Argaric elites deforested the mountains and brought hunger, disease and death to their inhabitants.

The current species have crossed all the tunnels of the past time in a chained process of contingencies. They are here after all majorities of all past populations have been left behind. We ourselves are an evolutionary event of very low probability, heirs of millions of lucky chances. And it turns out that our evolutionary past is linked to territories with high geographical complexity, biodiversity and presence of lakes and freshwater courses. Doñana replicates today the common home of all species of Homo. Therefore, the biggest pandemic today is what Richard Louv called "nature deficit disorder". Warning, diagnosis and prognosis: the fall of Doñana supposes a traumatic amputation of European biodiversity, but it also symbolizes the evolution of a collective suicide, symptom of an identity disorder due to propaganda intoxication. There will be no curative remedies: in reality, they are in the common house whose demolition is "democratically" authorized. "The Revolution does not need wise men," Lavoisier was told in front of the guillotine. More than 200 years later, barbarism stutters.

It is also difficult to explain how biodiversity is a network that protects us from the uncertainty inherent in existence. It is also difficult to apprehend our animal nature and its irremediable link with the natural environment. Sometimes I think that we have already become manufacturing by commercial imperative. Edward Wilson says that we have never conquered the world because we have never understood it.

Defending Doñana is not a romantic or crazy affair. The romantic and paranoid thing is to believe that we can remain carefree while they plunder the future of our children and grandchildren to sell strawberries on the edge of a desert. As paranoid as the sinister oligarchs thinking they will save themselves from collapse by traveling to Mars or frozen in the transhumanist chest. I am afraid that, as the Rolling Stones (Sympathy for the Devil) sang, they have not understood the true nature of diabolical games.

José Carrión, Professor of Evolutionary Botany at the University of Murcia.

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