<![CDATA[Ara Balears in English - Environmentalism]]> 10 <![CDATA[The crisis/the crises]]> The internal crises of social movements often generate a strange fascination. From the outside, they tend to be given simplistic and biased readings, and some even interpret them – conveniently – as definitive proof of their incoherence; from the inside, they are often experienced as a dispute between incompatible narratives and forms. But transformative organizations rarely enter into crisis for a single cause. And when we try to explain them based on good and bad guys and opposing factions, we almost always fail to understand what is really happening. Much honesty is needed to want to address the issue in all its diversity, complexity, and depth.In recent weeks, the crisis experienced at GOB Mallorca has caused a flood of comments, speculations, and positions. The resignation of ten women, members of the board of directors who had promoted an ecofeminist candidacy in 2023, has brought to light discrepancies regarding governance, occupational health, ways of understanding leadership, and organizational models. For all this, a broader and deeper reading is appropriate about what this conflict tells us in relation to the challenges that environmental organizations and many other social movements face today.Environmentalism is experiencing a paradoxical moment. Never has the validity, urgency, and necessity of its denunciations been so evident – the monster is growing larger, with more tentacles, refining its narrative and strategies, and accelerating devastation beyond the real capacity for impact of social movements – nor has the necessity of its proposals been so urgent. The climate crisis, the loss of biodiversity, touristification, and the depletion of resources, but also their vital consequences in ecological, environmental, and social justice terms, provide ever more arguments for decades of environmentalist struggles and lead us to the need to join forces from the grassroots and converge with other active struggles and demands (the struggle for housing, the union struggle, the struggle for public services, the feminist struggle, the anti-racist struggle, the anti-fascist struggle, the peace movements...) in order to drive the ecosocial transformations we desire. It is a confluence to which all transformative social movements tend, and proof of this are initiatives such as Revoltes de la Terra, the state Social Forum that works for the 'Beyond Growth' Eco-Social Pact, the meetings of international networks against touristification, the reflections at anti-capitalist summer universities, to which GOB has been invited in recent years as a benchmark, and the debates (and also conflicts) within reference environmental organizations such as Ecologistas en Acción and Greenpeace. We are no longer just in time to resist, but to go on the offensive and advance as a lever for change, and for this we need a broad and cohesive social base that works hand in hand with a common and transversal objective: to guarantee the sustainability of life in a world that ferociously attacks it from all sides. And, however, and perhaps precisely because of this, the movements that drive them, especially those with years of trajectory, as is the case with GOB, experience tensions, wear and tear, and difficulties in sustaining themselves.It is not just a confrontation between conservationists and those who defend social ecology (no one questions the defense of territory and biodiversity, as axes around which the entire environmental movement pivots; because without territory and its resources, no life is possible). It is not, only, a matter of clashing generational visions, of nostalgics versus young and critical visions, of reformists versus revolutionaries. Nor is it simply about clashes regarding governance models between those who try to incorporate the values of the changes and transformations we would like to promote externally, within organizations themselves, and those who would like a directive organizational model measured in terms of performance indicators. It is not just a question derived from the discomfort generated by critical review from feminisms of the structures, values, hierarchies, and objectives of entities that should be a lever and tool for social transformation and the furious reactions it generates. It is not just any of these questions on its own. It is all of them together and at the same time and amplified by the urgency to act in a world where the margins of possibility for the real changes we urgently need seem increasingly narrow.The challenge for social movements in general, and for GOB in particular, lies precisely in their capacity, or lack thereof, to incorporate all this complexity and dimension into their strategic reflections in order to become something useful to the society of these islands in the present and future scenarios that we will have to face, marked by the eco-social crisis and multiple uncertainties. Today we need all organizational structures and, even more so, entities with a track record and solvency like the GOB has been and continues to be –despite certain mantras that are repeated until they function as accepted truths (that the capacity for mobilization has been lost, that street presence has been lost, that what was done before is no longer done) even though major mobilizations have been driven, even though new fronts of struggle have been opened, even though the capacity for social and political impact has been expanded– to be the pillars for driving the changes we need, understanding the defense of the territory and the biodiversity that sustain us as another tool for social justice, democracy, and collective action.I believe this is a truly necessary reflection at a time when it is tempting to read any internal conflict as a demonstration of failure by some and victory by others, and to move forward without incorporating any element of critical review that conflicts oblige us to if the goal is to advance as a collective and as a society. If this is not done, we will not be facing progress, but a major setback that will eventually be regretted.

]]> <![CDATA[The parking project on Abel Matutes boulevard threatens one of Ibiza's main urban green spaces]]>

The environmental organization Amics de la Terra Eivissa has expressed this Monday its “firm rejection” of the project to build a large car park on Abel Matutes boulevard, in the city of Ibiza, because it considers that it would mean the destruction of one of the main urban green spaces in the area.

]]> <![CDATA[The pioneering ecological struggle of Menorca]]>

Citizen struggle has more strength than some believe. The Menorcans know this well, who in 1973, at the end of Francoism, were the first in the Balearic Islands to raise their voices against the destruction of the territory – four years later, in July 1977, in Mallorca, there would be the historic occupation of Dragonera; and in October, in Ibiza, 2,000 people demonstrated with the cry 'Save Ses Salines'. In 1969 Menorca was the last island to embrace mass tourism with the inauguration of Maó airport, which replaced the old aerodrome in Sant Lluís. The historian from Maó, Laura Piris Coll, explains the reasons for this late incorporation into the tourist boom: “Here there was an important structure of its own for footwear and jewelry. The livestock sector was also quite profitable. In addition, the owners were very interested in maintaining family estates for reasons of social prestige. On the other hand, the dictatorship had not invested anything in infrastructure on the island”.

]]> <![CDATA[Anand Mangnale: "The energy we consume has a price that other people pay"]]>

The University of the Balearic Islands projected this Thursday the documentary Global Grab: Mozambique's Coal and Jindal's extractive curse, an investigation into the social and environmental impacts of coal extraction in Mozambique by the Indian group Jindal. The screening is part of the Scholars at Risk program and was attended by the journalist and director of the film, Anand Mangnale, persecuted by the Indian government and hosted for the past year by the UIB.

]]> <![CDATA[Against the cancellation of the future, the claim of desire]]> Very often and more recently, within critical thinking circles, ecologisms that aim for the ecosocial transformation of our economic reality, spaces that work on imaginaries – from art, philosophy, literature and activism – a multitude of questions and reflections arise around desire. In a world where the horizon seems to be cancelled, in which it seems that faced with the magnitude and acceleration of the catastrophe there is no other possibility than resignation and resistance, desire seems annulled. Indeed, in a collapsing world, generating desirable alternatives becomes increasingly difficult, even to imagine. Desire and hope are closely linked, and the reality that surrounds us seems more and more determined to snatch both away from us.We think and react out of fear. Fear of the future, fear of inevitable changes, fear generated by the uncertainty of the abyss lived or foreseen, fear of what we don't know… And fear is a bad advisor, especially when it clings to the known out of desperation because it considers it supposedly 'safe'. But the known is not necessarily safe, far from it, nor desirable. In fact, what is known requires critical review always, so as not to reproduce, precisely, the nefarious that has brought us here.Fear induces hatred, the search for culprits, to destroy to have the false sensation of 'control'. Fear denies vulnerability and clings to a fictitious fortress that seeks power, recognition, and allies. It is what Alicia Valdés commented in an interview she had these days on the radio regarding the publication of her book Auge: the extreme right manipulates fear to fuel hate speech against 'the other' and always finds another (individual or collective) weaker, different, or transgressive, which it turns into a threat to point at. And it is a dynamic that not only the extreme right reproduces, but which unfortunately also installs itself in other environments and explains how, even in spaces of movements that should be transformative, we find the reproduction of these dynamics activated by fear (a fear, obviously, never acknowledged). If instead of fear, the permanent threat and the construction and pointing out of culprits were abandoned in favor of appealing to desire, perhaps we could generate livable presents. From which to establish the affective and effective bonds and complicities necessary to draw the desirable horizons of transformation and emancipation of a reality that is imposed on us with blows of violence, which we end up reproducing at all levels and environments. A reality that in the present, and precisely because of this, becomes increasingly unlivable for us, leading us to futures that already seem cancelled from today.Perhaps the most profound catastrophe of our time is none of those that make headlines – neither the climate crisis, nor war, nor democratic collapse, nor even obscene inequality – but rather the one that hides behind them all: the destruction of collective desire and hope for the (desirable) transformation of current reality. The degradation of sensitive bonds with others, with the world, and with ourselves. The progressive inability to feel challenged by the desire for transformation that has historically inspired all revolutions (large and small, historical and everyday, recognized and anonymous) and the dispute over the (desirable) possibilities that today's world insists on closing off.Perhaps one of the most profound victories of all reactionary movements, instilled by fear coupled with uncritical nostalgia, is to make us believe that what causes us to fail are our daring, naivety, or mistakes due to desiring something different. Desiring the (im)possible. And, meanwhile, the framework of the possible continues to shrink.With all this I do not mean, at all, that we should not assume the magnitude of the crisis or collapse of today's global world. Without self-deception. Without easy comfort. Without romanticizing resistances that also accumulate weariness, fractures, limits and, at times, the reproduction of the same dynamics of canceling out fear. What I do want to claim, however, is that the greatest resistance is refusing to completely surrender our capacity to feel, to connect, to imagine, to enjoy and, above all, to desire. Because if reactionary movements apply, above all, a policy of desensitization, any emancipatory policy of the future will have to begin, first and foremost, as a policy of re-sensitization and reconstruction of desire.

]]> <![CDATA[Margalida Ramis leaves the GOB]]>

After 17 years, Margalida Ramis will cease to be the spokesperson for Mallorca's main environmental group, the GOB. Ramis has confirmed to the newspaper ARA Balears that the change not only means stepping down as head of territorial campaigns and spokesperson, but also marks the end of her working relationship with the GOB.

]]> <![CDATA[A stuck sailboat reopens the debate on the consequences of illegal anchoring]]>

The stranding of a sailboat on the bay's promenade after recent winds has once again brought attention to illegal anchoring and the abandonment of vessels along the Balearic coast. This is the complaint of the environmental organization Arrels Marines, which warns that the incident "is not only a consequence of the storm but also of a structural problem" of lack of control and neglect along the coastline.

]]> <![CDATA[Terraferida returns: "A greener and more fertile Mallorca is still possible"]]>

The environmental group Terraferida announced on Monday the resumption of its public activity almost three years after suspending it. This coincides with the tenth anniversary of its founding and the imminent publication of a study that, they say, reveals an "unprecedented destruction" of the Mallorcan landscape over the last decade.

]]> <![CDATA[Leaders, take advantage of what we have learned]]> I was reminded of an environmentalist the other day, while preparing the dossier on the first quarter of the 21st century, that when they mobilized against highways (the Ibiza case is still shameful today), in the early 2000s, there were still many people who were completely convinced that more asphalt, despite it being a small territory, was the best solution.

]]> <![CDATA[General incontinence]]>

The media is reporting on a major controversy. A great injustice perpetrated by the Palma City Council: the Christmas lights don't reach all corners of the city with equal abundance and intensity. Intolerable.

]]> <![CDATA[Xisco Avellà, the person who forged the environmentalism of the Balearic Islands]]>

I still can't come to terms with the news: Xisco Avellà He was leaving us forever. It was Pep Lluís Pol who told me on Tuesday morning, "Yesterday Xisco set sail on his final voyage." It was hard to believe, especially since just a few days before he himself had told me he was feeling better. Suddenly, stories, anecdotes, campaigns, situations, events… all starring him began flooding my mind.

]]> <![CDATA[Neoliberal plunder]]> To welcome tourists to the point of exhaustion and to do business, speculate, and sell off natural, cultural, tangible, intangible, real estate, material, common heritage… whatever it may be, and at whatever social and ecological cost.

]]> <![CDATA[Thousands of boats committed to illegal deaths are damaging the seabed.]]>

Between 8,000 and 12,000 deaths or illegal permanent anchoring due to mooring boats have plagued the Balearic Islands' coastline for decades, a consequence of historical inaction by the government. These facilities cause a significant environmental impact, to which must be added the abandonment of hundreds of moored vessels, which are entering a phase of degradation "discharging fuel, oil, plastic waste, and various chemical materials into the sea," explains the biologist responsible for the report. Balearic SeaRaquel Vaquer. Furthermore, "these anchorages are often in areas that don't have the same level of protection as a port, because they have been occupied irregularly, which means bad weather affects the vessels much more severely and, therefore, the degradation process accelerates," she concludes.

]]> <![CDATA[Organizing conflict in times of ecosocial crisis]]> The last weekend of August I shared a table, conversation and reflection with my colleagues from Anticapitalistas, at their Summer University. Ecosocial strategies for the end of the old order. The fifteenth edition of a week dedicated to generating a joint space for political reflection and analysis, training, conversation, critical thinking, and enriching, stimulating, and hopeful experiences.

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