The images of the disaster left by the DANA depression in the province of Valencia (Spain) are horrifying. Despite being horrifying, in Colombia and around the world there will be hundreds of millions of human beings who still doubt that climate change and its multiple crises are a socio-environmental and ecological reality that can no longer be denied.
Germán Ayala Osorio*
Cars huddled together like toys in disrepair could well serve to expose individualism as a contributing negative factor, resulting from the ways in which humanity has taken on the ideas of development, progress and individual well-being. This has been against collective rights and behaviours that should never have yielded so much to individual desires for independence, recognition, prestige and autonomy in capitalist society. The car of the year, the Ferrari or the Lamborghini, or the Silverado to penetrate jungles or swamps represent the logic of the civilised human being as a being capable of subduing and transforming ecosystems judged as inhospitable.
All of the above is associated with urban life, a civilisational milestone where climatic phenomena such as DANA or hurricanes in the United States are expressed with greater force.
Those cars that have been thrown away, crashed and many of them unusable represent the sum of the objectives set by all the industries that converge in their manufacture and mobilisation around the world.
The economic and political power brokers who bet on giving millions of citizens the bonus of having a vehicle powered by fossil fuels that generate CO2 emissions belatedly understood the damage that is systematically being done to the planet’s climate.
The truth is that it is going to be very difficult for humanity as a whole to abandon the conditions and circumstances created by the individualistic economic development model. A model based on the one hand, on the instrumentalisation of nature and, on the other, on its subjugation and transformation to put millions of egos on the road at the same time, on ever faster and more congested highways in the United States, China and in Spain. While the world sees the apocalyptic images left by DANA, at the COP16 taking place in Cali-Colombia, discussions are progressing amidst political and economic tensions that have to do with the relations of domination between an opulent and developed North and a complex South, but equally interested in reaching the same levels of development, under the same formula: to continue to subjugate Nature to satisfy our individual desires.
Perhaps human beings early on took on the natural conditions of planet Earth as a form of “violence”.
Hence, capitalist economic development has been founded on a form of “revenge” driven by the need to adapt ecosystems to our desires and aspirations.
“What we need above all is to regain the love and empathy for nature that we lost when we fell in love with urban life” (Lovelock, James).
Perhaps what we need most of all is to fall out of love with urban life and individualistic desires whose self-centred source seems inexhaustible.
Addendum: I imagine that insurance companies are already designing (if they have not already done so), policies to back up the economic investment in luxury vehicles that are affected by the coming events.
*German Ayala Osorio: Colombian writer, journalist, with a Ph D in Sustainable Regions, political scientist and professor, author of the blog La Otra Tribuna.
(Translated by Rene Phelvin: Email: renephelvin @gmail.com) – Photos: Pixabay
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