In 1952, when Elizabeth II ascended to the throne of the United Kingdom, Isaac Asimov published a story whose plot was based on the struggle for water between Earth and the colonies of Mars. In other words, more than 70 years ago, Asimov already understood that a water crisis could endanger an entire planet. Or two. And that water is not a resource that can be squandered. In fact, from ‘Dune’ (Frank Herbert) to the screenwriters of ‘Mad Max’ (George Miller and Byron Kennedy), many science fiction authors have seen in the possibilities of water scarcity an apocalyptic plot.Well then, the Islands are already living an apocalyptic plot: there is no water, but we continue growing, building, expanding airports and increasing the number of tourists as if we had water. What could go wrong?At the beginning of this year, the United Nations, in a landmark report, declared that the world has entered an era of global water bankruptcy. In other words, many ecosystems have reached the point of no return, because human demand, with its unsustainable progress, has exhausted aquifer savings and dried up the wells of the future. The entire planet's water system is at risk. And, on this desolate map, we can understand islands like the Balearics —located in a Mediterranean that is warming above average and sold to tourism and unbridled concrete— as the paradigm of shipwreck in dry dock, the small-scale experiment of the consequences of the policy of excess. What happens when a society behaves as if a finite resource were infinite?Thus, amid the widespread absurdity, the Archipelago rises, once again, as the champion of nonsense. Attila preventing the grass from growing. In the Islands, we still don't understand what we're playing with regarding water. And this despite all indicators showing we're reaching a very dangerous limit. Water reserves are not reaching 40% on any island. Menorca's reserves have fallen to historic lows. In Ibiza, the largest part of the underground water masses are overexploited and salinized. And the precipitation regime is disrupted due to climate change.It is true that many municipalities have established restrictions — supply cuts or restrictions on irrigation and swimming pools — but if construction continues and human pressure increases, these measures will be like putting band-aids on Smith and Wesson .45 wounds.We are living a water crisis within a climate crisis that threatens our future. And, in reality, it's not that we don't understand it (I think many of us do), it's that whoever sets the agenda for our rulers is a business sector that, in its infinite arrogance, believes that money buys everything and that their navel is above all things in the universe. One fine day I reproached the person in charge of the company that brings us water to our homes —the water oligarchs— that, with the critical situation of the aquifers, they didn't turn off the tap (never better said) to those who ask for five trucks a day for swimming pools and gardens. He answered me that, in reality, he should offer these wasters a better price than me, because they are their best clients. And this is the philosophy. The laws of the market applied to a resource of all that they have privatized without anyone setting limits. Suicidal capitalism, once again.And, ultimately, the limits, of course, are always for those of us who already save water. Individual consciousness as an alibi for not discussing the decisions of those who truly waste. And if not, just ask the pharaoh of Sant Antoni de Portmany (read Mayor Marcos Serra), who, in full drought alert, authorized a party where an Egyptian setting was recreated with a lake that required 170 tons of water to be poured. Water as decoration; the shape of the water we were missing to see.In Asimov's story, titled Martian Way, Earth is about to stop supplying water to Mars —and I don't know if this will be a spoiler, but the book is from 1952—, so the Martians, to avoid depending on Earth's water, decide to go search for an enormous block of ice in Saturn's rings. What some would call technological solutions. And perhaps they themselves will tell me that, after all, an Archipelago is surrounded by water, and that the solution is desalination. But if anyone still thinks that way, I will recommend a short trip to Talamanca, where Ibiza's desalination plant discharges the brine from the desalination process through an outfall under a cliff. There, right there, there should be a splendid seagrass meadow. But the desalination plant has destroyed it. The ecological cost of desalination is too high. And until we can go get ice from Saturn's rings, we either stop building or die of thirst.

On May 17, 2003, Environmental agents removed the first snake in Ibiza, a horseshoe snake specimen that a gardener found while watering olive trees that had arrived from Andalusia. Two weeks later, a second specimen appeared, this time a white snake, and three more were removed that same year. That is to say, it all started 23 years ago and, since the first case, the arrival of snakes could be linked to the entry of olive trees through luxury villas. But two decades have passed and the olive trees still come in, because nurseries want to keep making money and because our politicians are afraid of setting limits to the lack of control, lest the neo-capitalist mafia system that dominates the island kicks them out of their seats. The snake invasion is much more than a biological invasion; it is a symptom. The symptom of an island that has lost its way. It is difficult to find a more precise metaphor for what is happening, because, in the end, what is behind it is an economic model that exploits Ibiza without control, which corners and expels the people of Ibiza, whether they are lizards or human beings.

In the Islands, we have achieved a new administrative feat, a new magic trick: to be able to expand a marine reserve, we have agreed to reduce the protection of all of them. And I explain it. We are located in Freus, between Ibiza and Formentera, the first marine reserve declared in the Balearic Islands, in May 1999. Last year, the Government, after presenting its ambitious Marine Conservation Plan, announced the expansion of the protected area. And, to no one's surprise, recreational fishermen took up arms with their well-known tactics to pressure politicians: references to tradition, to "reserves are closed areas for professionals" and that very Sicilian-sounding threat to withdraw votes from the PP. By the way, tradition as an argument to curb environmental protection would deserve a whole article, but that will be another day.And what has been the Government's response? Now comes the sleight of hand, because the solution proposes to expand the reserve but to reduce, in return, the level of protection for both this area and Punta de la Creu, Tagomago and the western islets. If it is finally approved (the objection phase has just closed), recreational fishermen will be able to increase fishing quotas and, in addition, use techniques that until now are not permitted in most of the reserves. The director of the Marilles Foundation, biologist Aniol Esteban, summarized it as follows on IB3 radio's Nautilus: “We are talking about a decree that will increase fishing pressure in the marine reserves of Ibiza and Formentera”. Disrupted reserves.Global warming

Fishermen believe that the sea belongs to them and that, therefore, they have the right to exploit it infinitely, without taking into account that entire populations have already been exterminated. Without taking into account the added pressure of global warming (even sardine populations are dwindling, but you can be sure they will be fished until there are none left, because freedom is more important than biodiversity). Any progress in the defense of the marine environment continues to be subject to the veto right of the sectors that exploit its resources. A minority veto over a common good. We have assumed that fishermen – professional or recreational – have a kind of special authority over the sea, an automatic legitimacy to determine what can and cannot be done there. Why? I insist: WHY? Why should those who exploit the sea decide on its protection if we all depend on it?The problem is, in large part, a matter of language and structure, because the Balearic reserves are technically marine reserves of fishing interest and, of course, even if this allows for the improvement of populations, the objective is that, in the future, fishermen will have more marine life to exploit. They don't even call it life, they call it 'fishing resources', and until we stop thinking about the oceans and their inhabitants from the perspective of predation, we will not be able to save them. It's the same linguistic trap with which whales were protected just forty years ago. They weren't stopped from being killed just like that in view of the catastrophe their disappearance represented, but rather a moratorium was established, which means they are allowed to grow and multiply, and we'll see if they are ever hunted again. Resources, stock, and exploitation are loaded words with which humans sustain their self-proclaimed status as gods of the world – unsatisfied and irresponsible gods, as Yuval Noah Harari would say – to continue considering that animals and their habitats are there for their sole profit. A language in the service of an idea that leads us to disaster, that hides that our entire life depends on a healthy ocean, that without it there is nothing. It's time we understood that its health is ours. So I will go even further, and you can call me radical; if we are clear that the sea is overexploited, that there is neither the diversity nor the populations of twenty or thirty years ago – and I won't go any further – why is it assumed as normal to continue eating the ocean? Why do those who sustain overexploitation have more right than I do to decide on the future?The sea does not belong to those who exploit it. The sea is a common good on which we all depend, including those who do not fish and those who have even reached the –uncomfortable for many, but difficult to ignore– conclusion that in an overexploited ecosystem, the most coherent response is to stop eating it. Conservation should not start with the question of how we can continue fishing without reaching the point of no return, but rather what we are willing to give up – here and now – so that ecosystems continue to exist. And perhaps the marine protected areas we should have in the Islands should not be reserves of fishing interest, but let's see who dares to open this debate.

]]> If we want everything to stay the same, everything must change. Only a Sicilian could express cynicism so well. Well, or maybe an Ibizan too. The mythical maxim with which Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa composed the best dialogue of The Leopard is reinvented in the Balearic Islands with the form of tourism policies that promise to transform the model while avoiding altering the essential. "Gatopardismo" reloaded (a sequel in a Balearic version).If until just a year ago the general tactic of politicians and hoteliers was still to make us believe that overpopulation was just our feeling because we are grumblers, reality has proven stubborn and the upward trend in the number of passengers at airports, undeniable. And airports are not the only point of entry. Although the business sector emphasizes that last year's increases are "slight," the signs contradict the discourse of tourist containment: the tourist apartments and hotels we see being built and growing throughout the territory every day are not a mirage either, nor are the collapsed roads or the new seasonal businesses that are opening everywhere. In any case, it seems that, at least, those statements by the president of the Consell d’Eivissa, Vicent Marí, telling us that it was all our “anxiety sensation” derived from illegal tourist offerings are behind us (apparently, legal tourism doesn't take up space, unlike ghosts). And although blaming illegal offerings continues to be a much-invoked mantra and there are obsolete businessmen who still talk to us about our sensations, as if we were children to whom the world must be explained, today the official discourse has evolved. We no longer openly talk about growth as equivalent to progress, but rather the preferred slogans now use formulas like ‘manage’, ‘balance’, ‘sustainability’, ‘sustainable tourism’, and ‘tourism intelligence’. Words and expressions that, by dint of being used in a spurious way, as a lawyer would say, are becoming empty of content. We change the words but not the course. Change everything so that nothing changes.In this chameleon-like framework we can inscribe the sustainable tourism strategies of the Balearic Government, its Containment Plan, and the Tourism Intelligence System promoted by the Consell d’Eivissa, all presented as innovative tools for monitoring flows, anticipating behaviors, and optimizing decision-making. Now everything leads us to think about a paradigm shift, true, but for now we only have declarations of intent, data collection, and more data and studies. How many studies do we need to know what we are all seeing and suffering every summer day? How many more studies do we need to understand that mass tourism is destroying our natural spaces?A thousand more studies to better understand reality does not necessarily imply transforming it. And this is where the suspicion of "giacobinism" emerges –like a red flag–. If the problem is saturation –crowded beaches, overflowing roads, and housing strained by the workers that the entire tourism machinery needs–, the institutional response does not seem aimed at reducing it, but at managing it with greater precision. Whatever that may mean. In the name of sustainability, massification is being digitized. We create digital twins so that artificial intelligence gives us the figure of the people on the beaches and can tell us that there is no room for anyone else. And then what? Well, according to the councils and the Government, this will help manage visitor flows. Manage. That is to say, at some point an application will tell us that ses Salines is bursting and, to "manage its flow", they will ask us to go to the rocks of El Codolar, where there is no one. And since it will be us, the residents of the Islands, who will use the application, in practice, saturation will continue to push us out of our spaces, but everything will be managed. And we will have many figures. The distance between diagnosis and effective intervention –between declarations and reality– reveals a clear commitment to managing the symptom without altering the model. And this, of course, has an obvious political explanation, because introducing real limits implies incurring costs, generating conflict with an oversized tourism sector, and challenging its economic interests. On the other hand, betting on technology allows projecting an image of action without having to touch the foundations. Data panels are deployed, but the debate we urgently need is avoided. Furthermore, all this deployment of activity to make us believe that something is being done is costing us a lot of money. But everything remains the same. If the prince of Lampedusa were to raise his head, he would kiss the hands of our rulers and tell them that they are the masters. 

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