Joaquín Araújo, naturalist: "Water wars will be almost inevitable"

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To talk about water, the element that has given us life, we should dress for Sunday, as in the past, with our best clothes.

Or use capital letters and more than one vowel, "Aagua", as the writer and naturalist Joaquín Araújo (Madrid, 1947) does in

, his latest book recently published with Editorial Crítica.

This is an ode to the nature of water and our relationship with it.

Araújo quotes it, describes it, recounts it, makes it omnipresent in every corner and in every living being on this planet;

with prose, with poems, quotes, experiences and emotions.

Also with fears, for that world that fades and does not value her, mistreats her.

"We are upright Awater and that she thinks. However: how little we emulate the fact that She is the most useful, beautiful and supportive substance in the Universe!"

In

uses the term

for this element.

What is

?

is that column that supports the totality of what we call reality on planet Earth.

It is a liquid column, almost invisible, especially misunderstood by the product of itself, which is our mind.

Water and life is not that they are synonymous, but that they are confluent.

is your look.

is your food.

is your security.

it is the beauty that is on the skin of the world. When he mentions "the faces of the water", we see its different facets.

What is the main face of water? Now that we have just celebrated World Water Day and that we are in the midst of the worst drought in the Mediterranean area of ​​the Iberian Peninsula, the main face of water is rain when you get out of that drought.

It would be equivalent to the wonderful sip of water you take when you're overheated and thirsty to death.

Let's think that we have an entire thirsty territory and today it is raining.

For a long time I considered that what rained was God.

But the minimum is to think that what rains is life, it is survival, it is fertility, because water is the main fertilized element of the soil.

It is the one that allows us not only to drink, but to eat. It also cites the "

to the boards of directors of the 100 most important companies.

A lot of pedagogy, a lot of education, but everything that has to do with life, with survival, with the generalized collapse of all natural systems, needs to be addressed generously in the media, in the educational system. , in all creative activities, in the world of art and thought, what the environment is, the liveliness, the forests, the rivers and lagoons. Is water a resource or a right? If you consider it a resource, you are insulting life, despising it.

But you are also insulting yourself.

Water has to come out of any convention that brings it closer to the condition of merchandise.

Water is the soul of landscapes.

It has to be managed democratically so that there is no trading or stock market speculation.

Water has to be something venerable, from the point of view of lay respect.

But whoever wants to consider it as something sublime, I also sign up for that consideration.

It is the most important thing we have inside the body and also outside of it. Even during a drought there is waste of water.

How should we tackle it? We should save water, avoid, in all the activities of our species, of society, spending the amount of water we do.

Virtually everything we humans do in industrialized societies can be done with half the water.

One of the most important and controversial arguments in the book, for consumerists, developmentalists and mercantilists, is that the more water there is in freedom,

that is, water not used directly for our lucrative wasteful needs, is infinitely more valuable water than what is in the pipes.

Because it is the water of life, of the continuity of life, of beauty and of all futures. We see that when ditches are piped and nature is deprived of that water that runs freely.

Is this "thirst for riverbeds without walls" that he mentions in his poem

?Yes.

Is that the hydraulic work, on countless occasions, has been a real attack on water.

Water is thirsty for freedom, it is thirsty for cleanliness, it is thirsty for us not to imprison it, it is thirsty for us to use it well. The countryside is manifested by the difficulties that the sector is going through.

Also due to lack of water.

We are talking about a technified field, precision agriculture.

But, sometimes, water is saved to exploit it to the fullest, as is the case in Doñana, Malaga or Murcia.

What do you think about this situation?

As I have the great privilege of also being a farmer and of using only the water that is strictly necessary, curiously when I do not pay for it, because the one I use is born in my own territory, I extrapolate it.

Water has been carte blanche, wasted because it cost nothing.

The agrarian world, which has plenty of justified reasons to protest,

it has also committed authentic attacks against the essentials of this world.

In the face of what is upon us, it will rain much less, we should save water, with the modernization of irrigation, which is a very technical solution, or with the more than obligatory contribution of organic farming.

A lively agriculture, which uses a lot of organic matter, respectful of water, air and earth, needs less water.

If you fertilize organically, you use half the water than if your land is pure mineral, to which you add more mineral so that it produces food. Fertilizers lead to the contamination of aquifers.

Are we talking about mismanagement? Well, it doesn't just happen because of that.

There is another thing that goes unnoticed.

By overexploiting the aquifer and leaving the walls of the underground cavities bare for very long periods,

Heavy metals are released from them that can contaminate the water.

This is related to the nonsense of having promoted and generalized the irrigation of our most traditional drylands.

To say that a very important part of the olive grove, the vineyard in Castilla La Mancha, in Andalusia or the strawberry in Doñana, is irrigated by depleting the aquifers, not only reduces the possibilities of life-creating water, but also makes arsenic appear with some ease. in overexploited aquifers.

In the Region of Murcia, there is a record for overexploitation of aquifers, totally illegal irrigation surface.

Part of the Mar Menor catastrophe is due to previous water thefts.

It is well known that there were several thousand illegal hectares. From there they ask for more water, while the drought adds to the rise in fuel prices.

Will we have water wars as with gas or oil? In all climate change simulation models and in the trend of all the statistics of the world meteorological centers it is very clear.

It is raining significantly less.

And if you add the rise in temperatures to that, you have invited all the tables to the desert.

This autumn, with an absolute record of drought and heat, we are even more on the verge of a local collapse.

We are candidates for a catastrophic zone due to climate change.

Water wars will be almost inevitable.

There have already been.

There have been several attempts, but it is possible that it will get worse because water will become something much more precious and precious than oil.

And we have already had a good handful of oil.

You have to avoid it and work on it.

The commitment of the prologuist of the book,

Pedro Arrojo [UN rapporteur for the human rights to drinking water], is the creation of a universal right to water.

That is to say, that it has the same legal status as the right to life. Although experts warn about climate change, there are those who deny it.

Do we need a change of model or a change of mentality?

There is no change of model without a change of mentality.

There is no change in the creation of public opinion profound enough for there to be, in turn, a change in generalist policies, if the basic ideas do not change.

And these only change through the media, the educational system and a fight against ignorance.

Now there is denial of the Holocaust, climate change, that the earth is round.

It doesn't fare so well with wisdom.

Ignorance is winning points.

And this is serious.

That the political representatives deny climate change or what is happening with the Huelva strawberry, affects the most important life zone in Europe.

But come!

Carte blanche to continue destroying!

We are facing a very serious problem. Is water the beginning and the end of everything? The book is a call to recognize that water provides us with everything from what is absolutely preferred, which is our own life, to what is absolutely deserving of the utmost respect, such as it is beauty.

Water is the pencil that time uses to draw reality and it is the element that life has used in order to become life.

Defending water is defending each and every one of us. If "the greatest drought is that of ideas", how can we preserve the Water Planet? Drought is thinking without taking water into account.

That is a drought more dangerous than the one in heaven.

Let our brains drink.

And what you have to drink is that better culture, that more complete, truthful and verified information.

Everything that means creation of wisdom in the world has to be added.

And you have to get the water out of the conventional market circuit.

If water is a commodity, we have no hope.

We look with two large drops of water and the water has the colors of all the eyes that have looked at it.

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