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When heavy flooding caught me in my car last December I thought I was going to die. It happened in the battered national road that joins Cáceres and Badajoz; it rained so much that he stopped distinguishing the border between heaven and earth, as the waterfall coming from the clouds merged with the newly formed rivers that hid the tar; For fear of getting trapped, my partner, at the wheel, turned around and, only after crossing a last raft of water that threatened to engulf us, still tachycardic but now safe, did I notify the police: cut off the bloody road! Minutes later, I found out that the strength of the current had dragged a section, causing the great sinkhole that would keep the two provincial capitals cut off for months.
The anecdote could have happened in California, recently flooded; more serious for the tragedy in Pakistan, where some 1,700 people died for the same cause. Before it was Canada’s turn, Germany’s, since, as the philosopher Bruno Latour argued: “The new universality consists in feeling that the ground is disintegrating.” The phenomenon of anguish so ubiquitous that it is no longer typical of the colonized peoples, historically looted and deprived of territory, but also of the “modernizers”, those who uselessly trust in the soteriological properties of that invention called “progress”. The postcolonial, says Latour, thus acquires an unforeseen meaning marked by feet unable to set foot on firm ground at different points on the map and, as in Freud’s worst dream, the surface that supported us vanishes.
It happens that philosophy, science, often from their ivory towers, have been in charge of telling this nightmare during the same decades that government inaction has been nourished by disinformation campaigns, illusionism smeared with sustainable development and other neoliberal pirouettes, while below life was annihilated in the form of roots, microorganisms or homes. It so happens that when a community has consistently refused to negotiate solutions to a serious problem, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote from jail, nonviolent direct action became a moral obligation. Here, between the impossibility of landing because there is no safe ground and the awareness that promotes civil disobedience in the face of laws that are proven to be unjust —those that allow us to continue perpetuating a fossilist society— is where the judicial hearings of academics and climate activists should be located. that are taking place these days. Fifteen of them, linked to the Rebelión Científica collective, face possible prison terms for the protest they carried out on April 6, 2022 on the steps of Congress, where they threw a red, biodegradable liquid that simulated blood to alert on the consequences of continuing the destructive path so many times examined by the IPCC, this is the intergovernmental panel of experts against climate change of the UN.
Last year, only in Spain, 4,700 people died as a result of excessive heat, double that registered by the previous registry, according to the Carlos III Health Institute. Thousands more did so due to contamination and, even though these deaths are political, because they are premature and preventable, the responsibility is diluted in an institutionally elusive amalgamation and no one will go to trial for it. That a peaceful demonstration be considered a reason for possible deprivation of liberty, what is more, that the group to which its protagonists are associated -most of them scientists- is included in the latest report of the Prosecutor’s Office under the category of “international terrorism”, knowing that that his message is backed by years of research, is an injustice that no democratic society can afford. The same science that enjoys unanimous confidence in laboratories, summits and international agreements such as the one in Paris, signed by Spain; That science that was raised to launch campaigns as successful as that of vaccination against covid, is now ignored due to the dissociation between the mandates they prescribe —reduce greenhouse gases by half in a decade— and the prolongation of the harmful status quo. Those who dare to discover incoherence, delirium, in the public space through the few tools that are left after the exhaustion of communication in reports, studies, are pursued to criminalize them in the face of the impunity enjoyed by the most guilty.
In this context, the fact that those who spray Congress with symbolic blood, or who stick to paintings in some museum, would prefer not to do so, is often omitted, but they are impelled by an ethical commitment greater than their individuality, more pressing and powerful than the fear of ending up behind bars, like Martin Luther King. Before the earth crumbles so much that we cannot even find foundations from which to rebuild a livable life for all, justice must reorient the course if it wants to continue honoring his name.
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