In Portugal, only wine is reserved. Everything else is relative.
In Portugal, there is never time to think, to analyze, to reserve. It's all immediate consumption. And the result is visible: the catastrophic state the state has reached.
The ready-to-consume concept now extends to the National Ecological Reserve (REN).
In the preamble of the legal diploma that created REN in 1983 (a pioneer in Europe), it was read that it was the second step in the implementation of a national planning policy. The first had been given the previous year, with the creation of the National Agricultural Reserve, whose objective was to safeguard the agricultural soil, enshrining it as an essential patrimonial value for the permanence of the Nation.
The figure of REN, in turn, safeguards the biophysical structure necessary for the exploitation of resources and the use of the landscape without the degradation of the conditions on which the stability and fertility of the regions depend, as well as the permanence of many of its economic, social and cultural values.
Simply put, REN ensures the elementary functioning of the landscape, the continuity of its fundamental cycles. Its interruption, in addition to constituting a factor of instability and environmental degradation, represents a real threat to the integrity of goods and, fundamentally, people. Hence its understanding as a public, immediate, concrete and national interest.
This made it, from the outset, the target of defamation by the civil construction sector, which, as is well known, has always been an obscure crutch of the “professional policy”, whatever this aberration is. This is because the discomfort generated by the impediment to savagely concrete and asphalt those who bank on this ruinous structure is unavoidable. Wild ducks, the banking system that makes a living from these, the political system that is fed by hand by the two previous ones, all look sideways at REN.
Many even think that reservation is a misnomer. Unless the "hortographic bread” in force can help them, instant or equivalency courses, as well as school benches and dictionary allergy take their toll…
In wild duck language, REN has always been synonymous with hindrance, embarrassment, delay, obstacle, impediment and other related nonsense.
Concepts such as the prevention of coastal erosion, the risks to people and property associated with flooding or the safeguarding of the capacity and quality of recharge of underground aquifers never entered the ears that were massacred by the concrete mixer.
However, and just as an example, when distracted, ignorant hands, or with eyes conveniently closed, they let slip licenses of "maisons” in overflowing beds of watercourses, which effectively filled, no one ever bothered to listen to that intellectual foam of the nation…
It is true and assumed that the delimitation of the areas integrated in REN contains several errors, but it is no less certain that the errors are corrected, as long as there is willingness, and that the technical services are equipped with material and human resources for this purpose. With the capacity and flexibility to recognize and rectify inconsistencies in its delimitation, most of the decision errors associated with REN, and the ill will that this generates among the public, would be overcome.
Successive revisions, such as the one recently announced by the Secretary of State for the Environment and Spatial Planning, as someone who does not want the thing, in the sole sense of facilitating and accelerating, does not serve the national interest. What is strategic must be thought of.
Note that it is never streamlined. This would imply that REN, and the entities responsible for its tutelage, would function quickly, articulated and securely, but still function.
What is constantly promoted is the overtaking of the competent entities and the application of the legal framework, either through the human and material strangulation of the technical bodies of these entities, or through the dismemberment of the legislation (fragmenting and perhaps delivering to local authorities), reducing it to an anecdotal footnote, or pro forma for projecting a not so third-world image to civilized countries.
But there are still those who don't know why we are at the tail of Europe...
It is like a school system where, given the degradation of the quality of students, there is no attempt to improve training: it is simply easier to move on, lowering the level of demand.
Oh yeah… I almost forgot that we also have one of those…
Crises are usually seen as opportunities for reinvention and innovation, in the search for alternative paths that allow us to leave this state.
In Portugal we are witnessing an intolerable surrender to the greed that has brought us here, in the name of the interests of a few, to the detriment of many.
If only this atavistic smallness paid tax, the deficit had long been filled.
Author Gonçalo Gomes is a landscape architect
(and writes according to the old Spelling Agreement)
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