For some time now I have had a book in my head: “The Triumph of Pigs” by George Orwell: “Those who were outside looked from pig to man, from man to pig and again from pig to man, but it was already impossible to distinguish them from each other." Thus ends the little book which, more than a satire on the Soviet Union, is, unfortunately, a general and timeless portrait of the evolution of the human species as a social being.Gonçalo Ribeiro Telles, in an interview to the last green edition of Visão, states that “politics has been deviating (...). It has developed in people not the sense of serving the public, but their individual situation. There is a rupture and having came to dominate being”. And here, I say, we begin to lose identity.
Ribeiro Telles also assesses the situation of spatial planning as “a total disaster”, where the councils are more interested in making money with the territories than in managing them, “than creating a landscape that offers a favorable environment for people”.
And behold, man and beast get mixed up and Minister Assunção Cristas announces that “the National Ecological Reserve is going to disappear”. In 2010, in one of the “public discussions” on the proposed Land Use Plan for the Natural Park of Southwest Alentejo and Costa Vicentina, the manipulation of the people by the Algarve's mayors marked me. Mayors shouting with their arms in the air: “Down with the Natura Network”! There, too, I failed to notice whether the faces were men's or swine's! And today, these same mayors must already be celebrating the sweet victory that seems to be approaching.
With the new reform of the environmental legislation, what has been achieved so far in terms of Spatial Planning and which still allows us to speak of “Nature Tourism” and “Sustainability” falls apart.
With this imminent danger that the municipalities and authorities autonomously resolve the changes to be made to the former National Ecological Reserve (REN), the doors are opened to men, pigs I mean, who, thirsting to have, will have territories in their hands that should be seen as much more than just a bargaining chip, in exchange for nothing. A law change like this cannot be offered to non-thinking men, who do not know the word reason and have, for the most part, represented the pettiness and smallness that is in all of us…if we let reason get lost in the illusion of having .
A few years ago, I was assigned a class I had with Sousa Lara, who would play a predominant role in the elimination of Saramago's “Gospel According to Jesus Christ” from a list of books proposed for the European Literary Prize. Teaching us about politics, he told us about "Shooting Star Politicians." They were those who barely entered and left, seeing that they could not abdicate their own values in the name of parties or laws (not him, as he proved in the Saramago case). At the time, at the age of 20, what made me most happy was the idea that, in politics, there were still those who tried their luck for nobler values, even if they only illuminated us as “shooting stars”. There was a spark of hope!
Today, I hope that our country will be illuminated with a huge rain of political falling stars, that will bury once and for all the obscurantism towards which we are heading in the name of a having that is mere illusion! And that those who fall to the ground are these pigs that mask themselves as people!
And may the constant transformation that Ribeiro Telles sees in his gardens, and is present in all of nature, have a happy ending.
Author: Ana Carla Cabrita has a degree in Business Communication, with a specialization in Internal Communication from the Escola Superior de Comunicação Social. He is doing a postgraduate course in “Active Tourism in the Natural Environment” at the University Pablo de Olavide, in Seville. Owner and guide in the company Walkin'Sagres.
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