Time has been on our line for a long time, but the climate is relatively recent. There is no need to clarify too much what climate change is. Explaining what the landscape is is a redder necessity. Conferences, round tables or international conferences on climate change are currently under way. I have referred to “climate change and landscape” in a couple of round tables, and the most difficult thing is to explain that it is us the landscapes.
I hope that what Fernando Pessoa said was true: “We don’t see what we see, we see what we are.” If we really see ourselves in the landscape, then we would realize that all we do every day and throughout the day is our landscape. That everything influences our environment, our environment, our quality of life.
Our landscape has been created by ourselves. The whole landscape is cultural, we've adapted it to get everything we've needed to live in our history. And every culture shapes it in its own way: meadows, wooded forests, pools, garomas, apples, fields ... So instead of a natural park, we should call Cultural Park those landscapes that have been created, conserved and conditioned by our ancestors. That's why landscape is the main exponent of climate change. Our heads are gone and, as Daniel Innerarity says: “We are consuming the future and becoming a landfill of what we have today.” And our behavior is being integrated into the landscape, constantly sculpting. We are.
Climate change does not mean that Earth warms up to four degrees by the end of the century, or that extreme weather storms occur, or that wine and chocolate and coffee and fish are almost within anyone's reach, no. Climate change is what you and I are doing. Our daughters and sons, who will live reddened within a few years, and rightly so, because they're creating a landscape to curse us. Fabrizio Caramaña said: “Some places are an enigma, others an explanation.”
But what's in our hands is that. Let this curse of the future not happen. Have your lambs and your butts say whatever they want, and have me take care of our own. Henri-Frédéric Amiel said: “Any landscape is a state of spirit.” For us, climate is change. For them, in Basque, climate change. In our landscape, in Basque Country! Colonized landscape of the Basque Country. Patrick Modiano said: “The person without landscape is left without protection.”