It's a mad world

Would God have patented that idea about the round madhouse?

This week I had thought about keeping with the topic I begun last one; if last one I spoke about traditional knowledge, this one was intended to be for the result of humans’ most marvellous capacity for imagination: technology! But while diving through the news, I felt I had to dedicate an entry to this piece of news.

It’s in Spanish, sorry for that to all my kiwi/English-speakers, but I’m sure you will reach the same conclusion as me after reading the heading: “A Cantabrian mayor appoints a confessed pyromaniac as Environment City Councillor”.

The first thing that came to my mind was “It’s a joke, right?” But, unfortunately, it is completely true and made me think about how the environment is systematically humiliated by politicians with acts like this and about the relevancy of this in the general topic of this blog. This is completely relevant for two reasons:
1: Credibility of the process and stakeholders selection, and
2: Trust building.

Making decisions like that can spoil a process of environmental management by eroding the very basic foundations. When discussing about the basics of the theory, one fundamental pillar was trust, based on professionalism and honest work. With decisions like these, the entire process is rotten from the very beginning, a complete lack of credibility will surround any decision made from the Councillor, or the person who appointed him. This is a failure sentence, and an enormous lack of respect for the rest of actors and interlocutors which shows the role the environment and its defence have in many cases yet. A lot of questions arise from this election, the why, the how and the hidden who, but I won’t go deeply into them. The most important one that appears to me is how the involved stakeholders will react to something like that: how would any process of dialogue or negotiation be approached with these precedents?, how could anybody pretend to gain some agreement or advance if the head actor shows such a complete disdain of the matter?, would anybody agree even to try to gain some goal?
The answer to all this is not easy and, surely, in some cases will be no option but to work with these kind of institutions and actors; but when a chance, even if radical, the election should be a complete withdrawal of the process. IEM takes time and resources, and both are valuable enough to be spoiled in a doom-to-failure process; a sign of professionalism should be to demand the same in our interlocutors and they should take the task as seriously as we do. Without this basis, the trust and credibility construction is impossible and, consequently, all the IEM process, a chimera.

I don’t want to seem pessimistic or disenchanted, nor naive or falsely optimistic. Even if this is an example, an unfortunate election from a Major, environmental insults like this happen far away, and close to home, as well as remarkable intents to amend things and act correctly. Which side does the scale tip in? I won’t answer that; instead, I will ask you as a reader to wonder that yourself and act, so you can, as a citizen, tip it through the right side.

Making possible the impossible

Mom: What are you doing with this in here?
Mafalda: I thought you may like crying for something better than an onion.

The recent news about climate and weather give uneasy feelings to many people. If you have a quick search in the news and people’s comments about, you will see never-before experienced phenomena, gales in Central Europe, 24 consecutive days of rain on the Iberian Peninsula just in the middle of the summer or persistent drought in vast areas of East Asia. I’m not discussing here if those are evidence of the so claimed climate change, Mother Nature taking revenge as some predict or, as some sceptical are ready to say, simply statistical anomalies.
The fact is that these events may have a strong link with IEM as human action has indisputable repercussion over the natural world and it will turn back to us. Searching for some image to illustrate it, found this astonishing aerial picture in Indochina Peninsula.



This photo gave me a bit to think about. The terraces, as common in those parts of the world, use the land and rain in the most efficient way the people who thought about them had, millennia ago, and it is still a marvellous way to multiply the available surface. It shows the hand of humans shaping their environment, but also how they keep some vital aspects of natural ecosystems in place, wisely using what the nature has to offer in each place as a matter of survival. In all those pictures of farmland, crops, cities, villages and fisheries, a single fact becomes obvious. Human and Nature are together. The four spheres (some authors refer to them as three by merging the social and cultural) are heavily intertwined.

The way that nowadays progress is mainly understood means altering the environment to grow, no matter what the consequences are and, simply, there are things that are not possible. Human kind can try to alter the natural environment at will and, certainly, sometimes the achievements are remarkable but, what is the price? The costs (and not only monetary) are incredible. The fight that positions people and environment on different sides of the line creates depletion of resources, loss of time and energy, suffering in communities and sometimes even irreparable damage in entire societies. "Fighting because of fighting" in the understanding that the natural environment is an enemy to surrender means, eventually, being in war on ourselves.
See this example; the people there made terraces because the terrain was rough. They could have thought about flattening the hills to try to make an immense monoculture with hectares in extension and, certainly, they could have tried to combat the environment with all their means only because of stubbornness. And they would have failed. Instead, it was much wiser to adapt their actions to the specific area which surrounded them, bargaining areas with nature so they intertwined, knowing that this way they would survive for generations.

There is no way to live or evolve without leaving a print, something like that is a complete chimera, every single human action implies an effect. The challenge is choosing what kind of footprint is to be left, how deep and how painful.

Don’t misunderstand me, dreaming and advancing is inherent to being human and this search and interest has created marvellous weapons at the disposal of people's objectives. After all, what’s IEM about if not about evolving and moving forward? Without this permanent aim we wouldn’t be people anymore, but realism and consciousness must impose. Not everything is achievable, not every ecosystem and resource is there to be exploited and ruined and not every warning and limit means a challenge to be broken and trespass.

Traditional knowledge all around the world has been aware of a lot of those things for a long time, from the Mediterranean horticulture systems that rotate and mix species not to exhaust the soil, to those terraces that keep soil in place and take advantage of the monsoon. In the light of that, couldn’t it be wondered whether IEM is a return to the origins?
Well, I believe that it is an important step forward, acknowledging the history to learn from past mistakes and create a bright future.