It's sad to see how one's land withers slowly away. The forests that I used to enjoy as a child now get burnt to ashes every summer. The trees are no longer autochthonous species, but pyrophilic eucalypta. We've experienced droughts in a region that is known for its abundant rain and water resources. The few natural spaces that still belonged to the people are now dedicated either to tourism or to massive windfarms.

And the most astonishing thing is that no one seems to notice it, or no one seems to care enough. But it makes sense. Formerly, the population in the countryside got advantages from looking after the environment (food for their animals, fertilizer and manure for farming, wood for the winter...) and now the entities profiting from the natural resources belong to the national and international capital (wood and cellulose firms such as ENCE, the energy industry through Iberdrola, Naturgy, Gamesa...) with the compliance (and often with the colaboration) of regional, national, and even international institutions, such as the European Union. The people who cared in the past for the land are now displaced by the capital, as their domestic economies are now dependent from capitalist relations towards their own labour.

In other words: the original symbiosis between the environment and the non-monetary communal economy of the people in Galiza got destroyed. Although, even when it's true that this de-coupling is now reaching higher levels than ever, the phenomenon is not new, nor the result of any new fundamentally new process. It's the result of a centuries-long dynamic of centralization and the integration of the region into the global chains of value and the structures of capital. The nature, which was a treasure in the past, is now confronted by the inhabitants as an obnoxious burden.

And it is sad to see that everything on the periphery is a burden, that anything outside the cities is not attention-worthy, that the only functional relation is the very same capital that deepens our alienation from the environment.

#Ecoansiedade #EcologicalCrisis #galiza #Galicia #deforestation #fire #windfarms #macroeolicos #centralization #Anticapitalism #AntiCiv #anarchism