Everything burns
These days, while the smoke from the massive wildfires ravaging different parts of Spain worries us, we've also seen the fires affecting the Albufera region once again. This, after a few weeks in which a permanent heat wave seemed to suffocate us and in which the island teems with people and unrest. The fires become a metaphor for the present we are living in. Everything is burning; it's not in vain that we've been playing with gasoline for so long, ignoring the increasingly explicit, violent, evident, and immediate consequences of the disaster we have caused, with irreversible ecological imbalances and growing social inequalities at all levels, both locally and globally.
And, unfortunately, the situation is likely to only worsen. Because despite the abundant evidence of the single root of all these problems, superficial, ad hoc solutions continue to be addressed, looking for culprits (always others), throwing stones in the face, without addressing the ultimate reason for it all, and taking advantage of the opportunity to expand the frontiers of commodification at the expense of human and material misfortunes, which in human and material misfortunes, are used to justify the worst policies of territorial, social, and natural resource plunder.
Everything is burning: the territory, the climate, the sea, the borders, hatred, and despair. Many of us believe that putting out these fires is and will only be possible if we radically change our outlook and practices. There will always be arsonists, arsonists, suicides, and psychopaths, but I am convinced that more and more people are realizing the ultimate need to radically change course. To revalue what essentially sustains life—understanding life as the expanded concept that encompasses us as human beings and, at the same time, non-human life, that of the ecosystems that sustain us, and non-material life, the bonds, mutual support, and complicities.
More and more spaces are being generated for the convergence of struggles and collective perspectives with a strong eco-social approach. Both in small groups, spaces, and communities, as well as in broader calls that expand and overflow borders and frameworks of both political and territorial action, to center the commonality of defending a dignified life in contexts of urgent need to regenerate, restore damaged balances, or learn to collectively dance out the imbalances that are already collapsing.
Assuming the horizons of scarcity from a shared responsibility, focusing on degrowth and redistribution from a collective perspective. Spaces like the Garma experiential workshops (in Cantabria), the Sobremesa event, the Earth Revolts initiative, the summer training schools for anti-capitalist collectives and grassroots unions, the collectives working on transformative social action, or those forging complicities within the Bala coordination. Critical cultural initiatives that help us question, take root, and expand our creative boundaries with other languages, from other perspectives, fresh and inspiring.
And also, of course, the popular gatherings in the street, the solidarity marches for Gaza that filled Mallorca, the open-air conversations, the Wednesdays at the Slice that have occupied squares in the summer at the suggestion of Zumbido, the thousand and one neighborhood initiatives and those that emerge in assemblies, in assemblies, in summer. Spaces that demonstrate that, beyond the narrative of powerlessness, there is a collective impulse that resists and seeks to build.
Fresh air, all of it, in a world that tends to surround us, separate us, and suffocate us. Political spaces, all of them, from which to subvert and recover connections as a collective tool for justice. Refuges from which to emerge to confront the hatred, plunder, injustice, and ecological suicide that some want us to take for normality. A normality that burns us from within and against which we rebel together. Always together. Alone, never.
Thus, resistance must also be a fire, but of a different kind: the fire of solidarity, of critical consciousness, of the radical defense of life. A fire that ignites hope, that warms communities, and that drives away the coldness of individualism. A fire that doesn't destroy but lights paths, that doesn't consume but summons. A fire that reminds us that life can only be dignified when it's shared, and that the only way to live in times of collapse is to do so collectively, with courage, with joy, and with the tenacity of those of us who know that, despite everything, we still have time. When we say that everything is burning, we don't do so to sow fear, but to point out that fire can also be an opportunity: to set fire to the old normal and make way for a new, more just and free life.