EL PAÍS offers the América Futura section for its daily and global informative contribution on sustainable development. If you want to support our journalism, subscribe here.
The boy was deaf and the bear was polar. Both details are important to understanding what I witnessed fifteen years ago. So is clarifying that deaf people are not mute and polar bears are not white. The deaf talk with gestures, drawing words with the muscles of the face and hands. I studied sign language a long time ago. I almost forgot all the vocabulary, but I still know how to spell, introduce myself (my name is a jota that makes curls on my forehead) and express skeptical suspicion with a sign whose most accurate translation into Mexican Spanish is No mames. How do you say bear? With the right hand a thick muzzle is formed and the mouth and nose are covered with it. How is it specified that the bear is polar? In Mexico, the adjective "white" is added to the "bear", which is formed by sweeping the back of one hand with the other (perhaps the etymology of this sign is a brush that paints a surface). But the fur of Ursus maritimus is not white; It lacks pigment, is transparent and hollow, which allows light to heat the bear's black skin.
The boy lived in Mexico City and the bear in the Arctic Ocean. Despite the remoteness and size difference (one was a tiny biped and the other was the largest carnivore walking this world), they met one morning at the Pedagogical Institute for Language Problems, where I volunteered.
As my sign language was very limited, at school I was commissioned to sort the library collection, where the small projection room was. One morning they took a couple of groups to watch a nature documentary. About twenty children took their seats on the floor, facing the white wall that served as a screen. In silence and with subtitles, the film reviewed the most charismatic fauna on the planet and concluded with a warning about ecological devastation, juxtaposing images of the smoke produced by a thermoelectric plant with those of the starving bear that floated adrift on a small raft of ice.
At the end of the performance, the teacher turned on the light. Immediately, the boy stood up, made his way among his peers, and ran to turn it off. The teacher turned on the switch again with a bang. He didn't give up. Light, gloom, light, gloom: the room became a low-budget nightclub. The teacher and the pupil argued loudly; Body prosody gave me to understand that there were complaints, frustrations and disciplinary warnings. While the students were being evicted, another teacher explained to me that the rebellious boy wanted to turn off the light to save the bear from dying because of our electricity consumption. His rebelliousness seemed tender and funny, although no less reprehensible. For me it was lacerating. As I turned off the light, the child obscured something inside me. I keep looking for the switch with the words.
I have remembered the episode in very different situations. For example: when I saw another documentary: Grizzly Man, by Werner Herzog, made with the videos of Timothy Treadwell, a crackpot who spent thirteen summers living with the brown bears of Alaska (State where the US government has just approved a huge oil exploitation project, which will contribute to the further increase in greenhouse gas emissions). Herzog draws a nihilistic moral from the story: "What weighs me down," he says in his slow, dark English, "is that in all the faces of all the bears Treadwell filmed, I see no familiarity, no understanding, no compassion. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature." I think Herzog projected his own incomprehension and indifference in the mirror. At the other extreme of anthropocentrism, Treadwell treats bears like pets and his story ends badly because of that.
I think of that child and wonder if he saw in the polar bear something that Herzog, Treadwell and everyone else can't recognize. Without the support of melodramatic music and a manipulative voiceover, the boy recognized his personality, understood his situation and felt compassion for him. Perhaps deafness made him more sensitive to the experience of feeling alone in the midst of an ocean of indifference. Perhaps his ability to interpret gestures and glances allowed him to understand the wild language of that castaway.
I think of polar bears as I read Arctic weather forecasts. The picture looks thawed: "The Arctic will be ice-free for the first time in September before 2050. This means it is already too late to continue protecting Arctic summer sea ice as a landscape and as a habitat." Meanwhile, we have become accustomed to breaking the most dismal records. We have just experienced the hottest May on record at the poles. Sea ice in Antarctica is also reaching record lows. Siberia has a fever and in Canada more than five million hectares have burned this spring (the fires were not international news until they covered New York with apocalyptic smoke). The ice-free Arctic is a vulnerable sea (navigable, fishable, militarizable, drillable, polluted); the ice-free Arctic is a hostile sea for ringed and bearded seals and the bears that depend on them.
I think again of that child when he saw that two Swedish activists attacked Claude Monet's painting The Artist's Garden at Giverny with red paint. Adults scold young people for getting up to turn off the light or for attracting attention by harmlessly desecrating works of art. "Don't you see that we already sell carbon credits and electric cars? Don't you see that we are already liquefying migratory birds with gigantic wind turbines? What more do they want?' Although I am not aware that the boy has become an activist, I imagine him with a can of white paint, trying to save polar bears at the Museum of Modern Art. Until governments take care to stop the socio-environmental disasters that indolence and greed are causing, the protest will continue to grow, vehement and angry, incomprehensible to some, hopeful to everyone else.
At this point I imagine a reader wondering with a frown: 'No mames! And then? Wasn't the boy going to save the bear?' He may not have saved the bear from the documentary, but that day, by flipping the library switch, he began a long chain of reactions (this column is one of them) that seek to turn off ecocide and cut off the current from the electric chair in which we have sat the whole world.
Jorge Comensal is the author of Las mutaciones, Yonquis de las letras and Este vacío que hierve. He collaborates with Transformación de Conflictos Socioambientals, A.C. and the condor reintroduction project in Baja California, Mexico.