Joan Carulla: the true pioneer of green roofs

• CARLOS FRESNEDA

  Barcelona

Updated on Friday, 15october2021-01: 33

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• Domingo Jiménez Beltrán The "beacon" of sustainability in the Mediterranean

Joan Carulla was an ecologist long before the word was coined.

He was born back in 1923 in Juneda (Lleida) and at the age of ten he already had his first "intuition", thanks to Professor Capo's books on naturism.

The Civil War made him "a vegetarian out of necessity and conviction."

And also a pacifist, crying "for our million dead."

From his village in the countryside he emigrated to Barcelona, ​​where he grew as a small businessman with his grocery store.

He was president of the Food Guild, and in his magazine he published his thoughts on "the rational nutrition of the future" and "the universal sense of good."

In its terraces of more than 250 square meters, it was planting a paradise of fruit trees, olive trees, grapevines, tomato plants and all kinds of vegetables.

At 98 years old, the

continues to dedicate time to his plants and envisioning solutions for the planet with all his accumulated wisdom as an urban farmer.

"The most important harvest for the farmer is that exchange of vibrations with the plants ... They are so noble that they only give us positive vibrations, and on top of that they eliminate our poisons and our emissions ... Plants must be treated humbly, with Total gratitude. I am not saying on my knees, but with open arms. After all, it is they who transform the energy of the sun, thanks to the miracle of photosynthesis. They are our food and our medicine. Hippocrates was right. ".

"What they call weeds are plants whose qualities we have not yet discovered. We have to pull them out of the ground asking for forgiveness, until we know what they are for ... I don't think there is bad soil either. In any case, there is good soil and better soil. That's what my father used to say, who was also a peasant, like my grandparents and great-great-grandparents. They were poor farmers. "

"I came to the city because I had hardly any land. I opened a grocery store and was president of the food union. Let's say it was not bad for me, and I ended up having my little piece of land in my own house and on the roof ... We had We have to reinforce it with double asphalt fabric and tiles, as well as drains, so that there are no leaks. We brought the earth from a nearby mountain. I irrigate everything with rainwater, with a catchment system ... There is nothing like savoring it. that you collect yourself, ecological and healthy. I would like to pass the witness to someone or an institution, so that this does not get lost. It would also make me very happy to see people cultivating and creating microclimates inside the blocks of Barcelona: it is a very feasible idea. "

"We are playing Russian roulette with the planet. We cannot continue burning fuels because burning is polluting ... We live in an orange peel in which juice is heavy incandescent material. Planetary changes and catastrophes have been cruel and natural, But now we can provoke them by irreversible chemical, physical and biological means. If the poles melt and the Earth's axis of rotation changes, we can now say goodbye to all humans. We have a battered and wonderful planet. We better take care of it. "

"All my life I have been crying with pity for the million dead in our war, and for the half a million who died later in the aftermath ... The atrocities were committed for lack of brain in some, and for lack of heart in others. We lived 14 kilometers from the front of the Segre, in my town more than a hundred died and we went through all kinds of hardships. My mother died of grief and suffering. We had misery by the neck for years. "

"The war made me a vegetarian by force, out of necessity and out of conviction. In the postwar period we only ate what the countryside gave us: spinach sometimes, cabbages if there were any and especially potatoes, full-fledged potatoes ... For breakfast , for lunch and for dinner ".

"I was ten years old when I opened my eyes and inspiration came to me. Then I understood, as a child, that the natural, curative and preventive diet of diseases basically consisted of plants, vegetables and very varied fruits, like the ones we have in this country. .. I already had these and ideas and after I grew up I have been consolidating in them ".

"An aunt of mine, Teresa Rius, was sent to be cured by Professor Capo, an Italian naturist doctor who had settled on the slopes of Tibidabo and who was a precursor of vegetarianism ... He treated everything with onions, garlic, lemons and watermelon. And even then I said that tobacco and alcohol were two poisons. I became a naturist of ideas thanks to the professor (Nicolás) Capo, he was an eminence in his time ".

"What (Alberto) Garzón said I said a long time ago. I wish I had a telephone to talk to him, man ... You have to eat very little meat. Do you know why people eat so much meat? Because it is artificially cheap. Because they feed the cattle with feed that comes from the wheat that the farmers grow and that is paid as it was paid forty years ago. We are sinking agriculture and excess meat translates into excess disease ... Garzón spoke very well, but he got involved with the interests of capitalism. That is why Sánchez had to come with the steak. "

"I can affirm in a quick and synthetic way: the food of the future will have to be necessarily vegetarian ... It is our vegetable brothers who give sustenance to the animal kingdom, and there we have the bull, the elephant or the giraffe. The strongest animals and larger ones obtain the proteins of the vegetal kingdom directly. Why not us? ".

"Humans are irrational seris, who go against reason and are capable of killing unnecessarily, even torturing ... Animals kill because they have to eat, a cruel law of nature. But humans do not need to kill. We can live. even without killing animals "

"Nobody talks about the Fraternity nowadays. Everyone has remained in Liberty and Equality since the French Revolution. For me the most important thing is the Fraternity, even if it sounds like an antique. I was once invited to give a talk about Galicia, and there I said that Spain was dragging a cross, with the crown of thorns from the Basque Country, thrown in the center and two nails in our hands, Galicia and Catalonia. It is time to pull out those nails, I told them, and unite as brothers "

"Love people who are worthy of being loved. To the toxic people who poison the environment, it is better to forget them, not think about them ... As a child I had another idea: to become a" generator of love ". A" generator of love "is someone who loves others unconditionally, without expecting anything, but generating a reaction. The best good is to avoid evil. And when you practice good, you generate love and you get a feeling of happiness, inner peace. Loving, to be thankful, not to be proud. Maybe that's the secret of my longevity. "

"I say that intuition is the poor relative of clairvoyance. And I must admit that I have always been a bit intuitive, and that is why I have sometimes gone ahead. Intuition, more than the accumulation of information, is sometimes the key And I have also had a certain sense of what I call "social anticipation", getting ahead of the times. "

"To talk about economics is to get into what one would like to avoid, for not understanding it or wanting to decipher it ... Searching for the Good of humanity already sounds very tricky, because we have to talk about social justice, the increase in the standard of living. I have always spoken of the Universal Sense of the Economy and the Good, and of taking examples from nature, of that plant-man symbiosis is that the key to the future of humanity ... I have been a businessman for a large part of my life, but what I cannot do is this capitalism without guts that is sometimes practiced. "

"If I am a master of anything, it is in this of recycling and composting. I take advantage of everything, except glass and earthenware. I use plastic bottles to protect the grapes from the birds ... And under our feet, decomposing, we have organic garbage, fruit boxes, cardboard from the supermarket, bills and even blinds that I did not want to throw away. Almost everything is thrown to the ground, which I appreciate very much. "

"A great friend that I talk to whenever I can is Antonio Gallego i Calaf, a benefactor of humanity. I shared many concerns with him, from ecology to economics, from nature to science. We were already giving talks in 1969 at the Club Friends of Unesco. We were among the first to warn about the risks of contamination. With his naturopathic advice, many people recovered their health. He left us his Autobiography. Who sets a good example and writes sensibly, never dies ".

"The pandemic has been like hail, it is going to change everything but for the worse. We have a very difficult task because medicines, in the face of a serious illness, are always bitter and cumbersome ... It could be that all this has been caused by Faults that we commit against nature and the planet, that perhaps these viruses that are more mineral than animal or vegetable have been in incubation for a long time and it is now that they wake up to invade the world at tremendous speed. It may be this, but I do not know".

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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