Taking Amaia Zubiria as a witness, the trikitilari Joseba Tapia recently received the Adarra Award from the City Hall of San Sebastian, after having contributed all his life to Basque culture. He gave us some songs in return. Having shaken the body with these songs in some places, we didn't get the back to stick to the seats of Victoria Eugenia. Enjoy. On my way home, however, a song stuck in my brain, in the loop; arithmetic problems. In the head, round: “How many problems does Euskal Herria have today? Still a little bit, tell me half!”

In the following days, and without losing sight of the song, I was confused with my daily chores, worries and obsessions “Arithmetic problems”. If we look at a few indicators, we face arithmetic problems of high value. In the energy field, renewables in the mouth, but in Hego Euskal Herria they do not reach 15% (to increase each percentage we should install hundreds of MW) and 85% of the energy comes from the outside. If you look at the food, the sovereignty in the spotlight, but the people who come to our dishes, they make an average of 3,000 km. We are also talking about the circular economy, but our production machinery requires each year 80 million tonnes of new material from the planet, 70% of foreign material. Of these, more than 20 million tonnes are shipped to the atmosphere each year (our main production by weight is CO2) and more than 2 million tonnes are deposited in landfills.

Our ecological footprint summarizes these worrying data, which is, if our welfare model and consumption level were to spread globally, we would need more than two and a half planets. And of course, there's only one. So far we have travelled our way with other resources. From other countries and generations to come.

In short, we are far from the arithmetic of sustainability. When human activity in general clashes with the biological borders of the planet and begins to feel the first thunders of the ecological chaos produced, we must urgently address the gigantic material dimension of our socioeconomic metabolism, which leads us to a world with fewer resources. If we do not want to go into the predatory militarism on the Ortzi border, it is up to us to adapt to ecological constraints (vv). To this end, it is up to us to organise a political offensive for a radical distribution of wealth that guarantees minorities for all and all, always bearing in mind that the time of waste of resources has ended. In short, a new austerity against austerity. If you want, call the ecological arithmetic.