For as long as you need to read this article, reader, the global construction industry will see 19,000 concrete bathtubs. In a single day, like the Pantano Wall of the Three Foces of China. For a year, all parts of England, valleys and hills, were covered with beton. This is how Jonathan Watts started the dossier “Concrete: the most destructive material on Earth” in The Guardian.

“If we do calculations,” says Watts, the concrete stack we’ve created is already heavier than all the trees, braces and plants on the planet. In other words, the built artificial environment is greater than the natural one (...) In plastic, 8,000 million tons have accumulated in the 60 years since it was invented: the concrete industry accumulates over two years. However, although it is a bigger problem than plastic, it is not analyzed with the same anguish”.

As we love the beton for its duration, the problems we face also last longer. You see how it got worse over time what I thought I was going to fix. Who doubted the damage of soil waterproofing, in 2005 was able to open his eyes with the terrible flooding of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans: concrete prevented the land from absorbing the rains. However, planners have not studied either in the United States or in the Basque Country.

4-8% of CO2 emissions that lead to a worsening of the climate correspond to the beton production process. But it also has a much greater impact on the climate. 10% of the water consumed by the world is for concrete, a hard competitor to the water that farmers need in the fields and in the homes.

Sand is rarely mentioned, but extraction and removal from the concrete area destroys many ecosystems, leaving many fishermen and many others in misery, leaving large corporations in the hands of the shoremen the task of crushing their inhabitants.

Modern buildings and infrastructures have destroyed their own infrastructures, forests, fields, rivers... Man and the planet itself have suspended the functions it needs: life on the ground, pollination, water saturation, flood control, oxygen generation, water cleaning.

He has also stole oxygen to politics, according to Watts. "Concrete has blended politicians, bureaucrats and construction companies into the same mass. Party leaders need to be awarded grants and push from construction companies, government planners need more projects to maintain growth and construction employers need more contracts to move money, give workers and keep affecting politicians.”

It is only this crazy mechanics, to which you have often referred, that nobody can stop, that can explain the warmth that politicians, like from the environment, are pushing towards gigantic infrastructures, which are manifestly useless or, at least, questionable from the point of view of the benefit of society. Watts is English, it refers to the Olympic Games and the ones built there for the World Cup; if it were Basque, it would have to make a long list of examples of the concrete dependency that politicians have in the South.

Development and Yakuza

Japan is cited as a classic example of concrete addiction. After World War II, the Japanese elite began to populate the country with such enthusiasm that they baptized their style of command as the dogo, the country of construction. Until the late 1980s, it worked perfectly, with high growth rates.

The names of the leaders of the Liberal Democratic Party came to the ears of the then Western readers: Kakuak Tanaka, Yasuhiro Nakasone, Noboru Takeshita.. They did not know, however, that the strength of those leaders was also based on the aid of the major builders: “The country racket was Doka’s coke system, theft.”

With the crisis of the 1990s, the benefits of concrete were greatly reduced, but then the authorities and the businessmen, by common agreement, decided to increase the pressure of the machine: costly bridges to reach almost uninhabited areas, large highways in rural areas, permanent reorientation of all the margins of rivers and streams, construction of large walls that ensure the definitive protection of the Japanese coast.

The definitive deterioration of many Japanese landscapes achieved this. But the seemingly indefinite safety of concrete was unleashed by the 2011 Tohoku earthquake:In a few minutes, the tsunami sunk Ishinomaki, Kamaishi, Kitakami and many other villages, devoured by the waves, forming the insurmountable defenses against the shore of the sea.

16,000 people died, one million buildings destroyed, and one cannot believe: Fukushima nuclear power station broke out! Is the time to change? No, therefore: Liberals Democrats quickly returned to power, promising citizens that in the next decade they will invest 200 billion yen (1.6 trillion euros) in public works. The large construction companies began the construction of larger walls on the shore, surrounding the fishing populations with a wall of 12 meters, although its effectiveness is questioned.

“Concrete in the world – says Watts – means development. In theory, human progress is expressed with a series of demonstrators: life expectancy, educational level, etc. But the biggest exponent for political leaders is Gross Domestic Product (GDP), with which governments place their place in the world. And one of its main components is concrete.”

After warming Japan's developmental dreams, today it is China that wants to become the leading economy of the 21st century. Therefore, he has also become the super-champion of concrete. China, for its part, shows how this new material of cement, sand and water can transform a culture of coexistence with nature into an economy obsessed with GDP.

China has used concrete on its soil from 2003 to the present day as well as that used by the United States throughout the 20th century. Today, half of the world's consumption of beton is that of China. Architect Yu Kongjian has warned of how dangerous development is that it turns its back on nature that cyclically shakes its musky bodies: “This process of urbanization [artificialization of land] is the road to death.” The authorities, however, do not want to hear any of that either here or in China.