It all starts with a simple question, a serious and not rethorical at all, question: If you really care about trees and forests and the Amazonas and the environment… how could you not vote GroenLinks?
The answer is never simple. It is the elan of the leader, the left politics, the guvernamental inexperience, the strategy of not loosing a vote… and many more things. Many of us have expend a lifetime arguing (and working on) each of them. And yet, now and then it does not feel enough, it does feel like our friends, seriously and honestly concerned about the environment, still doubt about their local green party, being my friends spanish or dutch, french or venezuelan.
So this time I rather tell a tale, a real tale.
It happened to me in the early nineties, in Venezuela. I was already a lefty, and I had helped prepare a local left wing party delegation to go to a thing called United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, to happen in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. I was done studying Physics, and I was well into my second year of Biology. The change of studies was motivated by my climbing, by walking in the Andes and in the Amazonas. So I was aware of conservation, of global warming, of massive deforestation, of extinction. I knew, and I cared. And yet it all was… distant? intellectual? I knew that those were serious problems… but I knew it with my head, not with my skin.
So it happened then that two girlfriends of me were studying urban architecture, and decided to study, for their master thesis, the settlement of Las Claritas. Las Claritas, a town then well inside the Venezuelan Amazonas, is a gold mining town. My friends went to do their research and invited me along, with the honorific title of photographer. It was the first time they went there, and actually very little was achieved. They rented a car that could not get through the mud, there wasn’t enough time, I believe I did not take a single photo, and if I did, none is left. My memory is hazed in the details, so I think that it might have been a pilot trip. They did go back, other friends took good photos and eventually they got their degree. Few years later I run the statistics of several environmental impact assessments, some in the Amazonas. I even got my degree as a biologist, eventually. So it is a kind of happy ending tale. Kind of. Not really, though.
I remember the first night, or perhaps the second. We had not reached Las Claritas yet, and there were no hotels to be found on the road. So eventually we landed in a town, and asked for hospitality to the Captain of it. The town itself was a bunch of houses build by the government few decades back, not far away from the asfalt road, inhabited by an indigenous group. That’s why the Captain title, since Cacique was not used anymore. A sympathetic and empathic man, he immediately mobilized some people and in half an hour we had a house at our disposition, with some food. We talked and he was friendly, well informed and supportive of our universitary, and probably remote to him, aim. But in Las Claritas? Research Las Claritas? I remember he raised a eyebrow and said nothing. We did our best not to notice, and kept talking about everything and nothing. Eventually he excused himself, since he had to join the rest of the town for a memorial. About what, we asked. So without much ado, and certainly without drama, he told us that his youngest daughter had died few days back. She caught a fever, and we run out of aspirins, he said. We could not get her temperature down, and she died. He said. And he smiled to us, and explained that aspirines were not always enough, that the road was not always reachable, that now and then a kid died. Like his daughter. So he excused, stood up, and left.
The next day, we reached Las Claritas. It was late already and we had to go back to somewhere else, to the asfalt road, to a city, so we had few hours left. My girlfriends went to talk with somebody that was expecting them and I was left to my own devices, to make some photos, if possible. I remember that I had manage to convince my father to borrow me the Canon A1 that, more or less miraculously, he owned. It had a very nice lens, a 50mm with 1,2 aperture. It was a pleasure of a camera to use. So I started walking in the streets of Las Claritas. I did not walk too long, I think. I knew that I could not possibly catch in film the inmense trunks randomly trashed here and there, or the ongoing destruction of the forest, so I might have shoot at the yellow, mercury tinted waste waters running in the streets, I guess I should have. Or at the dilapidated, also yellowed walls of the mudhuts were the miners sleep. I guess. What I do remember is that at some moment this little boy was looking at me. As any Venezuelan boy, his skin had a beautiful copper color, which here was streaked by yellow, the yellow of the mercury, of the mercury that yield the gold that his parents or himself mined, the mercury that was destroying his genes, and that would kill him, probably before I would get my degree of biologist. I don’t know If I manage to raise my camera, but I know that I took no shoot. I guess that we looked at each other, at least for a moment. I think I walked back to the car, and that I did not raise my camera again. If I would have been hard and good I would have made good photos, and I would have helped document the tragedy, the deep scars in the people, and in the forest. But I know that I could not. I was ashamed, mostly. I knew that I was going to go back to Caracas, to my urban life.
The years have passed, almost thirty of them. I would like to believe that even if I stopped working in the statistics of environmental damage, I have done a bit to help. A bit, probably a tiny bit. Now and then discussing and talking with my friends, with my friends that tell me about their fury and their frustration about the deforestation of, among many others, the Amazonian forest. My friends that learn about the biodiversity crisis. My friends that have actually changed, or are trying to change, their professions in order to make something about the environment. I hear them, and many others like them, and I believe them when they tell me that they are genuinely concerned, that they want to help out. And I think in that UN conference, also called “The Earth Summit”, that conference that coined the term sustainable development, that articulated by first time that without development, there is no environment possible. And that without a viable environment, there is no economic growth possible. Back in 1992 the United Nations assembled these ideas, which were embraced by green parties. And by no other political force, or movement, ever. Today everybody talk about environment. But about justice and economics intrinsically linked to environmental policy? No other party whatsoever. Because it is us who understand that without conservation there is no future, at the same time that we understand that without economic welfare and without justice there is no environment.
My friends, who probably think that me and my party are hopeless lefties out of touch with reality, keep on talking to me about biodiversity, and trees that disappear. And I remember the Amazonas that I walked through, the Amazonas that nobody will see again because it has gone under the chain saws of the miners and the developers. But I also remember that girl that died without aspirine. And that boy living in raw mercury. They are still alive, in my memory. They deserved better. They deserved a chance, and they never had one.
And I wonder how would you not vote GroenLinks. I really wonder.