We recently had a Canadian visitor here in Spain, but this one wasn't welcome. Smoke from the huge wildfires there had drifted across the Atlantic and changed the color of our sky. This week's Camino a Ítaca looks at recent developments in Extremadura where the far right will enter into a coalition with the PP and the implications of this for the future of the climate.
The apocalyptic ashen sun
hung over the Torre de la Yerba like the cold, dead eye of a fish on ice. Its
orangish red contour bled its inky light across the tapia Almohad tower,
transforming the XII century military defensive structure into a warm crumbly ochre
ice cream cone.
I had been showing my
friend from Brooklyn, New York around the old city of Caceres during the sweltering
heat of the summer’s first heatwave when she commented, “This sky is familiar.
It looks just like it did in New York a few weeks ago with the smoke from the immense
fires up in your homeland.”
I looked up into the haze
and hazarded, “That’s sand from the Sahara. Here they call it ‘calima’. It
blows up from the desert when there are big storms down there. It’s becoming
more frequent and a few years ago it was so bad that the sky was literally
orange for days and when it finally rained, it came down like muddy blood.” I
was so sure that I was right that the conversation ended there and we continued
our tour of the forest of renaissance palaces.
It wasn’t until the
following morning that I found out she was right. This climate emergency wasn’t
from across the Mediterranean. I read in this very newspaper that the pale
discolored skies across the region weren’t due to Saharan sand at all, but from
smoke that had drifted all the way across the Atlantic from the massive
wildfires burning across the country of my birth, Canada.
The effects from a climate
disaster half a world away were as tangible and easy to see as the sky above
us. For some of us that is.
Now we have outspoken
climate change deniers presiding over ministries in government here in
Extremadura.
Maria Guardiola’s word
lasted about as long as a snowfall in Badajoz. The soon-to-be President of the
region who swore she wouldn’t give away ministries to the ultraright and who
said her promise and her land were not bargaining chips for anything now finds
that her word, her principles and supposed convictions are more ephemeral than
snowflakes.
The woman who now says
that her word is not as important as the future of the people of Extremadura
has given over control of things like forest fires to a party that denies
climate change and who attributes catastrophes like these wildfires to ‘climate
fanaticism’.
With just 8% of the votes,
many of which were given over in protest rather than rancid ideology, those who
see bicycle lanes as a primordial threat to the essence of society are now in
control of policies that protect and regulate the countryside. An area they
claim has been abandoned by what they dismissively deride as frivolous green
policies that come from the European Union and Agenda 2030.
The incoming President has
clearly demonstrated that her word is as trustworthy as a drunken meteorologist
performing a rain dance in July, but she is right about one thing, the future.
While these religious zealots may embrace the vision of their benevolent
Christian deity saving them from the flames of the coming climate collapse,
what about the rest of us?
