These days I have been able to follow the conferences of Jorge Riechmann in Vitoria-Gasteiz, Errenteria and Bilbao. His contribution is profound, rich and courageous. I would like to highlight three issues and one attitude here.
1.- We must have the courage to recognize that we are entering the road to genocide and ecocide. But we've already entered. Necropolitics is already under way. Examples: George Floide said “I can’t breathe” with the police boot, but that boot was supported by the supremacist movement around Trump; Bolsonaro is making the Amazon breathless, with deforestation, leaving the forest without oxygen and water, and condemning indigenous nations to death; Rwanda, Afghanistan, Syria, Palestinian wars are being waged with oil, Killed or killed? And who is the killer? Is it legitimate to die in order to protect the life and position of Europeans? Even closer: More than a million people killed by COVID-19 What are the dead or killed? These are examples of the near or recent past, but the future we have nearby is even darker. Ignoring doesn't work.
2.-Since there is life on planet Earth (3.8 billion years) today, the sixth great destruction of biodiversity is occurring, greater than that which has occurred so far. Apart from possible pandemics, this destruction has accelerated climate change and will accelerate the destruction of biodiversity. And with this, human life and many other forms of life we are on the same path…. And I add: the sixth destruction of biodiversity is accompanied by the first gigantic destruction of human languages. That is what Unesco says: thousands of languages, including the Basque language, are about to disappear and the great languages are being degraded by chaos and manipulation of information. Due to COVID-19, liberation theology thinker Leonard Boff stated that some languages of Abya Yala are running out of speakers.
3- When the necessary seems impossible and we get caught up again and again in this vicious circle, it is time to take the leap to another dimension. This is the time for that jump. In globalised capitalism, these crises cannot be solved, but we find it impossible to overcome globalised capitalism. Then we have to put ourselves in another dimension and place ourselves and our societies. What is a new dimension? What is that new dimension that we need?
"These days I have been able to follow the conferences of Jorge Riechmann in Vitoria, Errenteria and Bilbao. Deep, rich and courageous your contribution"
I will explain with some examples what a new dimension – fundamentally a new look – is. Inaki Antiquity and Ane Zabaleta, in the presentation of Petxarromán's book by Martín Ugalde, told us that instead of looking at the river we must look at the basin. Without a basin, the river is nothing. I've read to Carlos de Castro that it's not the same to look at the trees separately than to look at the forest as a whole. Looking from tree to tree, we don't see the coordination, the symbiosis, the relationship with the earth, the measurement of evapotranspirations. Moreover, the whole history of life is full of such moments. From very complex molecules life, i.e. bacteria that have autopoiesis; from bacteria without a nucleus to nuclear bacteria; from life without oxygen (anaerobes) to aerobes that live with oxygen; from single-celled bacteria to multi-cellular bacteria; from uncomplex organisms (with few different cell types) to multiple cell types (blood, kidneys, neurons, lung, etc. ). But in all of these cases, the new dimension does not destroy the pre-life steps. We ourselves, human beings, the different viruses, the single-celled and multi-cellular microbes essential to our lives, in organs with different special functions, and in the whole we are (our ability to do, to multiply, to have a metabolism of energy matter with nature), all those dimensions are present in us. History also gives examples of this kind. For not prolonging it, I will highlight one case: Karlos Marx, in a new dimension, put at a new glance the democratic horizons drawn until then by the Enlightenment: the enslaved person of work is expelled from democracy. Feminism has also brought us a tremendous change of view, offered us a new dimension of emancipation. The same can be said of the contribution of Lynn Margulis to the role of symbiosis, coordination and collaboration in the creation of the basic conditions of life and in the construction of the bases for the elaboration of the Theme. New looks when we are in a borderline situation.
And what is the dimension that we need today, the new look? A view that is complemented by practical experiences and intellectual reflections, and that is a key work to achieve a dignified future. Basically, as I've started to see, it's that the view of society lies within the dimension of Gaia. It's not just that the capitalist system is decomposing nature as a miserable student of magic. Not only must Eurocentrism be overcome. You don't just have to overcome androcentrism. Now, as a matter of urgency, what we have to overcome is the same anthropocentrism. We join all our lives, from bacteria, fungi and algae, plants and trees, to reaching newly arrived animal mammals and ending the Homo species, newcomer and mad. The new dimension is a balanced life chain. From there it becomes essential to decarbonisation, denuclearization, desgrowth, the end of urban metropolis, the flooding of care, the putting of life in the center, socioeconomic equality, the stimulating creative development of each of them, the deploration of the luxury of pride, intellectual humility, the reflections shared among all the cultures of the world, the feelings of liberation from love ...
"The loss of biodiversity and the loss of languages go hand in hand. The first is the collapse of biological life, the second is the collapse of the human spirit. And if biodiversity is essential for the survival of life, linguistic diversity is essential for the preservation of the ability to speak of human beings"
Based on domination, cruel struggle, humiliating grass, suffocating insolidarity… we have to remove the venomous desire systems that have introduced us. In order to dominate human beings and nature, we must banish the systems of thought and the naive, corrupt beliefs and fantasies that we have about them. Everything, our thoughts and feelings, the organization and the social structures, the walls of relationship, everything, they question it, and they look to see if they increase the weight of inequality and domination or increase the force of equality and mutual care and free life. One has to choose between the forced silence of death, more specifically murder, or the free language of life. For example? Advertising is the lascivious manifestation of necrotic desires. Repugnant Desire Production Factories. When I saw an innocent Pendant ad, I was amazed at myself. It was like this. “Do you have your mouth full of courage? Ez gives concern. Colgate will remove all the qualities of his mouth.” I heard this and I got angry, I was at home, yelling passionately. “Colgate killer!” Because without bacteria we cannot live… It is desirable… let’s go through all our desires, our system of desires! If a war is justified in Iraq, Afghanistan or Rwanda to own oil and coltan, if the destruction of the Amazon is a symbol of progress, how is it not going to end all the hanging bacteria!
The loss of biodiversity and the loss of languages go hand in hand. The first is the collapse of biological life, the second is the collapse of the human spirit. And if biodiversity is essential for the survival of life, linguistic diversity is essential for the survival of the ability to speak of human beings. Thus, the diversity and vitality of the languages of the human world is equally essential to ensure the survival of the same life in which the biological biodiversity of planet Earth is essential to ensure the survival of the ability to speak. Combining the defence of biological biodiversity and cultural linguistic diversity is essential: A healthy nature and a healthy Human Spirit are the two sides of the same effort.
…and an attitude. Jorge Riechmann, among many other works, wrote the book “Ekosozialism oinuts”, which is part of the Ecologists in Action and Extinction Rebelion movement in Madrid, and which was arrested a few months ago in an action of this movement. More than dreams, their effort is to make dreams. We are in the Tower of Babel, the Tower of Confusion. The language of the life and life of linguistic diversity are one of the main instruments to bring down this Tower of Horrors.