Fernando Valladares, director of the Ecology and Global Change group at the National Museum of Natural Sciences (CSIC), has written Recivilization (Destino), an entire encyclopedia of reflections where he reprograms the imaginaries to establish a new relationship between man and Nature. Valladares has written the book in the middle of a pandemic and while he was fighting a severe illness. His resilience is as great as the influence he continues to gain in the networks where his critical thinking leaves its mark.
How has this experience been?
This book has been like a boomerang in which I threw and received at the same time. He sent out the message that humanity was sick and then humanity was really sick; I myself had a health problem and we all went through a big health problem, as happened with Covid. The book was created a little before we all became ill, but this global and personal illness should undoubtedly make us reflect. It made me think and that was the genesis of the book. The awareness that getting sick is what forces you to get well. ‘Recivilization’ refers to the fact that “we are going to heal ourselves, we are going to change what makes us sick.”
The book swings between the idea of ??collapse and the idea of ??recivilization, between two extremes. Are we closer to collapse or re-civilization?
I am a bit of an enemy of black and white situations, and I prefer there to be at least one gray and if there can be several grays the better. I believe that collapse is inevitable and inescapable; collapse is going to happen, but collapse is not a single type of collapse; My hope is that we make the collapse an opportunity and that we go to the best possible collapse. We are already suffering collapses. In the book I describe the various phases of the collapse. We don’t have to be so afraid of collapse because we are collapsing, and in some way we learn from collapse. Collapse in a way is a form of illness. The UK has had supply chain collapses, we are having energy and healthcare collapses. All of these to me are actually opportunities to say that if we don’t want a deeper, sharper, more global collapse, we must act; They are opportunities. Many times crisis situations are what make us strong. This is a crisis that is adding up; The economic, health and geopolitical crises are bringing us a little closer to a major collapse, but I insist we can avoid the head-on collision with a very global and very deep collapse.
What is your assessment of the alarms that he raises to the Secretary General of the UN with a tone of increasing drama?
These alerts are essential. António Guterres is one of the most reasonable speakers for these alerts. Let’s think that they are alerts that are based on science, but the language is not strictly scientific; Science only reaches a very small percentage of society. Therefore, building other narratives on science, whether with artistic overtones, with plays, films, photographs or videos, or other expressions that Guterres uses, that appeal to the heart or emotions, that scare but also speak very clearly. looking for very strong metaphors, they seem simply essential to me. Whether they are useful or not we will see; but they are certainly reaching sectors of the population that other narratives do not reach.
In his book he talks about ecosocial crisis. And how do we get out of this?
Several ingredients are needed. In your backpack you must, of course, carry a dose of scientific knowledge and understand the crisis well, understanding it better than we are doing; If not, we won’t get out of this. And image washing, greenwashing, is precisely not understanding it. When a company does greenwashing, I don’t understand why it is going to be noticed, that it is going to be noticed that it is false. It’s just an example.
The first…
The first ingredient to get out of the crisis is to understand the crisis, its depth, its depth. It is not about understanding only the climate part, the biodiversity crisis, feminism, inequalities or the trampling of human rights because they are only parts. You have to understand all these connections and secondly, to get out of the crisis, you have to have motivation. And why want to get out of it? Why, if many of us can pretend that it does not affect us, can we spend comfortable moments on our sofa or adjust a little to a reduction in salary or to conditions that are not so comfortable?
That. And what is your answer? Why?
I try to be as much as possible; look for the reasons for everything we can gain by taking advantage of this opportunity. This being so, we are not only going to solve a problem but we are going to enter a much more comfortable, much healthier, much happier, much more prosperous situation for everyone, for 99% of humanity and almost even for the 1%. responsible for the majority of emissions. Even that 1% is already realizing that their own business model does not work and that is why they are signing the manifestos to have their taxes raised.
His book expresses the perplexity that comes with having scientific knowledge of solutions and the lack of answers… Isn’t it naive, or overconfident, to think that science can do everything, that it can govern us? It is not like this.
I share that criticism because science is undoubtedly not the solution, it is part of a very complex solution that has a fundamental social and political derivative. We are not going to change everything with science alone. I sometimes use perplexity as a rhetorical argument, as a cynical attitude if you like, to show that it is not necessary to have gone to university or to have studied a lot about climate change, but rather the most basic common sense of a 10-year-old child. would be enough to act accordingly. And we don’t act accordingly.
Talk about the obstacles we can take to overcome this ecosocial crisis.
These trips are explicitly obstacles in the wheels to prevent progress. We are not talking about laziness or inertia. These are actions determined to hinder our progress in resolving the crisis.
Which ones would you highlight?
Denialism is very well known. It is denying reality: the climate reality, the pandemic reality, the reality of inequality or the reality of the human rights that we trample. They are harsh realities that are very difficult to accept and therefore there is a certain pathology in the inability to accept them. But other times, we deny reality because it simply does not suit us to accept it. And that is related to the pressure of selfishness. And I am talking about individual as well as social and collective selfishness, of oil companies or large political groups, which “are not doing well with climate change” and which exert strong pressure, as we see in the UN climate conferences. They are pressure exercises: ‘what about mine?’, ‘I want water to irrigate and if there is, we will take it away from biodiversity.’ Or you resort to fleeing forward. It is not stopping to analyze and, on the contrary, saying ‘I keep going, I keep going’, like a car that bursts the tire and instead of stopping to change the wheel and then continue, we say: ‘keep going, keep going, keep going, it still holds up’ the wheel’, but the wheel can’t hold. We can’t go back to normal. Normality was what Covid brought us and therefore if we do not want to fall back into Covid we cannot continue fighting and looking for that normality because that normality is toxic.
To change our relationship with nature, you carry out in your book what Serge Latouche calls reprogramming the imaginary, a change of values, above political change: frugal living, cooperation, participation, empathy, kindness…
I am talking about a change of civilization and not simply ending the capitalist model or fighting climate change. There are many issues that we must change to be better and to live better. I resort as little as possible to ethics, a resource that has been the great failure of traditional ecology and is being reinvented. Appealing to the debt we owe to future generations and other appeals to ethical codes only works for 20 or 30% of the population. 70 or 80% of the population doesn’t care about ethics. Not only those 1% of billionaires but large sectors of the population are very lacking in ethical values. I appeal to other values, to emotions, kindness and empathy; I appeal to things that can be enjoyed, to things that can help us get out of the depressions, anxieties and stress in the global north, which is precisely what is causing a good part of the problems. The global South is entangled and indebted in the traps that the global North has set for it; The global South is developing as best it can, full of contradictions and killing the goose that lays the golden eggs that are its own nature and natural resources.
There are those who see climate action as an attack on their freedom, a synonym for restrictions, the hand of the spoilsport, those biophysical limits are not accepted…
For those people who have become accustomed to always more, more and more, growing and growing and who aspire to have whatever they want, the idea of ??limits does not suit them very well. But I would tell them to stop and think for a moment why a kite flies. A kite flies because it has a string that ties it to the ground, that holds it in the hand of the one who makes it fly. And precisely these biophysical limits of the Earth are what can make us reflect on how to move towards a better model of civilization. If we had no limits, we would continue fleeing forward, we would continue without reflecting, we would continue to mature. We will mature socially and individually as a civilization precisely because there are limits. Thanks to the fact that there are limits, we have a historic opportunity to do things differently. The normal thing will be to do them as we have always done them; That is, adapt to great cataclysms and great problems. And those who can adapt will do well; those who cannot adapt will die; and those who adapt, regulate, will suffer. And we will lick our wounds. This is what we have been doing until now. But, if you have not planned it, if economically, for example, you have not made a degrowth, which is a planned recession, economic limits are imposed and in the end you suffer unnecessarily. Its translation is quantified in terms of preventable deaths, which is what medicine does in epidemiology.
Advocates ecocentrism. How do you define it?
It would be putting nature at the center, and not the human being, which is only a part of nature. Paradoxically, when an ecocentric vision is adopted, the human being becomes humanized. The example of a city serves us well. Cities are theoretically designed for people, but where people suffer the most is a city because cities are not human. On the other hand, by putting more green areas and more nature in a city, you humanize it. That is ecocentrism. It is understanding that human beings are part of nature and that they need it.
The opposite of anthropocentrism.
There cannot be a paternalistic attitude, like the idea of ??conserving the lynx or leaving room for orchids that are in danger of extinction. That attitude is like saying ‘I, a human being, am the chosen species and, thanks to my magnanimity as a superior species, from time to time I leave a little corner for these other species, of orchids, storks or lynxes’. No, not the other way around: orchids, storks and beeches and oaks must be put at the center of civilization’s worldview. By doing so we humanize ourselves in every way. Not only do we become better and enter into a new relationship with third species, but with ourselves.
Inequality costs the planet, he says in his book.
Yes, and that is why the billionaires have already made up to three manifestos in which they ask for their taxes to be raised. These last 300 who have signed the manifesto do not do so for ethical reasons, even though they dress it that way. In reality, what moves them is an objective, functional knowledge that inequality is unsustainable. Moderate inequality, like the one we tolerate in Spain, costs us twice as much energy as an egalitarian society. Faced with the energy problem, a solution to the problem is to confront inequality. The enormous inequalities are costly in terms of energy, economics or the environment, pillars on which a new civilization would be based.
What opportunities could we take advantage of in that re-civilization?
First, feel better individually because when we realize that we are doing what we have to do we feel better; and when we do things that are good for others, as a social species, we feel better. And the door opens to break the cliché of competition. Periodically I come into contact with many economic sectors (banks, textile sector, pharmaceuticals, breweries…). It is difficult for them to change the competitiveness chip. But if you analyze it, competitiveness compromises the business model itself. But when they want to break the competitiveness and want to establish collaboration, they find that the first one who wants to establish collaboration, given the competitive environment that exists, may be at a competitive disadvantage if they limit themselves and build bridges to other companies or sectors. And the same thing happens with countries. Countries that begin to apply a degrowth economy will gradually put themselves at a disadvantage compared to countries that continue with a competitive economy, growing, growing, growing; But when we more comprehensively understand and accept the limits, the benefits of cooperating and sharing will be understood and extended; That’s my wish. And analogies with nature serve us well. In ecosystems that experience difficult situations, such as when there is drought or a disturbance such as a fire, symbioses and cooperative forms arise. Only in ecosystems where there is superabundance does competition predominate.
