It was 1991 and the European Commission warned the Junta de AndalucÃa that it could lose European funds if it did not put a stop to the excessive use of the aquifers that feed the Doñana marshes. Sound familiar, reader? International environmental protection organizations were added to the petition.
Why is Doñana so important? Because, among many other things, it is where the migratory birds that fly between Africa and Europe nest. If the marshes dried up, there would be a catastrophe among these birds, with chain consequences for the European ecosystem.
Given the seriousness of the threat, then-President Manuel Chaves, supported by Felipe González, proposed creating a committee of experts whose opinion would be binding. This is how the committee for the sustainable development of the Doñana environment was created. To ensure its neutrality, the Commission appointed two of its own officials and negotiated that the president of the committee be a person of consensus between the EC and the Board. They chose me because, being a professor of Regional Development at the University of Berkeley, he was free from the pressures of the Board.
I accepted with conditions: total independence and absolute confidentiality for twelve months. So it was. I named ten eminent academics, most of them from Andalusia, geologists, biologists, geographers and economists. We diagnosed where the water subtraction came from. We recommend measures to correct excesses. And we proposed to encourage sustainable economic activities with EC funding.
The problem was not so much the urbanization of Matalascañas, but rather the multiple illegal wells for growing strawberries. Closing all those wells solved the problem. And that we recommend. And we proposed a sustainable development based on ecotourism and derived activities such as the training of ecological guides, the organization of congresses, the Doñana brand beekeeping, the modernization of the infrastructure of the surrounding municipalities, etc.
We quantify job creation at 150,000 in a decade. The plan received wide national and international approval and the Commission granted €600 million for its realization, provided it was implemented. Unesco added protection by declaring Doñana a World Heritage Site in 1994.
But a political and media storm ensued, with surrounding mayors protesting and even some madmen organizing stampedes of their cows to destroy the park. I received multiple pressures, including from a supposed emissary of the Royal House (or so he said), who asked me to accommodate a luxury hotel with an ecological golf course. Some municipalities declared me persona non grata.
Thus began a long tug of war that, when it seemed controlled in 2014, is now getting out of hand because the Andalusian right returns to its rights as farmhouse masters for its friends. And it is that Doñana is a symbol of the demagogic discourse of opposing development and sustainability, mobilizing the poor in defense of the speculation of the rich. That is why we will have to fight again.