The optimism of the early morning

About ten years ago in Barcelona there was a morning radio presenter called Joan Barril who used a fabulous line at the same time everyday on his breakfast show. Not his own creation, but a paraphrasing from one of the most famous of Catalan poems, Ara Mateix by Miguel Martí i Pol:

"Són les set, i tot està per fer, i tot és possible"

(It's 7 o'clock, and everything is yet to be done, and everything is possible)

Giving the time of day is not part of the poem, but on radio, it makes the line perfect at that crisp clear hour. The optimism of the early morning. The optimism of having a blank page in front of you, and the time and imagination to fill it. As well as the energy - our biorhthymic ability to take a rest and then start afresh.

Yet the poem not only celebrates the fact that everything is possible, but also slightly tempers this with the reality that all the hard work still lies ahead too. That may be a welcome challenge at the beginning of the day. However, the question is, what happens as time goes by, if the things that we are sure need doing do not get done? Everybody's been in this situation at some point, so we know: you figure out what the problem is, you try and solve it, but in the end, solved or not, you adapt one way or another to the new reality - and having made this perceptual shift, you can still wake up the next day and see it optimistically as another blank page to be filled. Right?

Hmmm. There is also the possibility, when problems start occuring, of failing to recognise what is really happening, or of wilfully ignoring it. Maybe, for example, at a personal level, I am just so slow and unproductive as a writer that I should abandon this blog and most of my writing aspirations and look for a more satisfying way to use my time. And yet, it would pain me greatly to recognise that "failure". So I don't, for the moment at least.

But what interests me, and is in the end the motive for this no doubt unproductively-written post, is that the same thing can happen at a societal level. Problems can emerge which we manage to collectively deny. Collective denial can be easier, since the problems can seem to be nobody's in particular - yet they can also be infinitely bigger in scale and more self-reinforcing than our personal burdens. Despite the ability to refresh our perspectives and start again every morning, we can collectively end up like the cast of characters in the fantastical black comedy Ground Hog Day: they are a townspeople trapped in a 24-hour time loop, who wake up every morning and greet one another with an infectious enthusiasm as they start their day, yet they are unaware that it is always the same day - and whatever is achieved that day, good or bad, will be meaningless, because of this time warp which they are all unaware of except for the droll protagonist played by Bill Murray. Who is not nuts, I should point out. Just tired of an apparently unchangeable and therefore pointless existence. Which starts not at 7am, but at 6am:

And I hope I am not nuts either. However, I do wonder if some sort of planetary Ground Hog Day effect has taken hold, and only a relatively small proportion of humanity have managed to notice. Or perhaps the majority of people have our moments of awakening and lucidity, but then we manage to return to the deep, deep sleep of wilful self-deception.

I write this because I've once again been stirred from my slumbers by a book called La Quiebra del Capitalismo Global: 2000-2030 ("The Collapse of Global Capitalism: 2000-2030", with an earlier on-line version available, also in Spanish), published a couple of years ago, the last work by the Spanish ecologist Ramón Fernández Durán, who died in 2011. He straightforwardly asserts that the human race is at the beginnings of a long decline in our industrial-based civilization, which may unfold over a century or more, for the very simple reason that we have exceeded the limits of our planet: a combination of population growth, resource overexploitation and environmental destruction, which will lead via a variety of mechanisms to collapses, big and small: ecological, economic, social, maybe general. This book mostly deals with what he sees as the first phase, and the point here is that we can't avoid it, because we're already in it: our global system, structured on the possibility of continual growth, has begun to come up against our planetary limits - the end of cheaply-extractable oil being the major resource barrier we are already bashing against, with no game-changing alternative even in the pipeline. And the current global economic crisis is also the result of a growth-oriented financial system that is basically running out of ways to grow. Over the next 20 years Fernández Durán forecasts the splintering of our global capitalist system into essentially regional systems, strongly authoritarian and in conflict with one another to a greater or lesser degree for the planet's remaining economic spoils, - making it even more difficult than at present for humanity to move in an just and orderly way towards a more sustainable "Plan B".

Well, leaving aside the details, this forecast is not new, and that's just the point. It is a variation on a scientific warning about our common future that has been made repeatedly over the last 40 years. Only now we're already inside it.

Forty years ago I was a 12 year old growing up in New Zealand - a place where even city kids were able to get out into the wild very easily, and at a time when Apollo missions and communications satellites and youth culture were giving us a new planetary sense. In the 1972 New Zealand general elections, I remember being struck by this TV advertisement for the Values Party, the world's first environmentally-focused political party at national level. The idea was very clear:

"Economic growth means more money - so we're told. But can money buy us a new planet?"

And I remember thinking, this makes sense, this is the future. And suddenly a year later we were in the midst of the first oil shock, raising petrol prices exponentially and giving a pretty clear message about our global addiction to fossil fuels. The danger of our dependence on oil had become obvious. It seemed the start of something - but it wasn't. The Values Party reached a peak vote of 5% in 1975 and then declined to nothing, and at electoral level, green politics went back to sleep for 15 years in New Zealand, just like almost everywhere else.

The year 1972 had also been seen the publication of the ground-breaking report The Limits to Growth, for the first time employing computer modelling to try and rigorously test assumptions on our future planetary capacity for growth. The report found that if world population growth, consumption of resources and services, technological development, pollution levels, and food production all continued in line with then-foreseeable trends, that there would be some kind of economic and societal collapse during the 21st century.

Three different future scenarios were actually tested - some of the original graphs are shown below, with the world population from 1900 to 2100 highlighted in red in each one. On the left-hand Standard Run, the "business as usual" scenario, the model predicted that world population would rise to a peak in about 2030 and then fall, after societal collapse; the middle Comprehensive Technology option hypothesised that humanity would develop high-tech solutions to enable a larger population to continue living well for longer, but would still fall apart in the later 21st century; and only the right-hand Stabilised World option avoids disaster - but only through assuming that drastic intervention in population growth, resource use and pollution issues would begin in the 1980s.

But instead the 1980s saw the planetary Ground Hog Day syndrome take over definitively, with the 20th Century's Second Coming of free market capitalism. Indeed, big business took the reins to such an extent that even when the end of the Cold War removed the largest political obstacle to a common front against global problems, no agreement was reached on the emerging problem of climate change: the US/USSR rivalry had ended, but the US as the only remaining superpower at that point, was unable to surrender any of its corporate and commercial interests, and hence unable to give the necessary leadership to a global consensus against global warming.

And the wider lost opportunity: the acceptance of climate change as a paramount global issue could have been a unifying wake-up call. For the first time, here was a specific and extremely serious ecological threat to our collective well-being that was easily understandable and scientifically demonstrable, and human activity was almost certainly the cause of it. A clear global policy on it starting in the 1990s could have led on to the even more important realisation that climate change is just one of many related threats we face as long as the unrestrained exploitation of the planet continues: destruction of a multitude of interconnected natural systems, exhaustion of resources, overpopulation. You can't hope to solve one of these problems on its own in any more than a temporary patch-up way; you have to look at them all. Broader systemic reform is necessary, but if a framework of cooperation had been in place with regard to climate change, the process could have been to transpose and extend it to other spheres.

Instead, we in the developed world have allowed ourselves to get drunk on the promise of our technology booms and financial bubbles, while the climate change debate, with massive funding of the skeptical viewpoint from the industries that reap a short term profit from the continuation of "business as usual", has turned into a kind of courtroom filibuster. It is so farcically bogged down in the issue of whether we are 95% sure of the details of what is happening, or perhaps only 85% sure, that those involved may well be still be there, in the metaphorical courtroom, debating over the details in the umpteenth appeal, when they are overtaken by events. And it won't be the actual rising of polar meltwater around the shiny leather of their lawyers' and lobbiests' shoes. Probably more likely some kind of social uprising following, perhaps, a collapse of agricultural production resulting from, say, a mass extinction of bees. Or a disastrous epidemic of a new virus, spread globally in next to no time thanks to world travel and impoverished biodiversity. Or a war resulting from resource scarcity, or from the tensions of large numbers of desperate emigrants, or from one of a hundred other possible breaking points arising from the planetary stresses of unrestrained growth.  

The Limits to Growth report received its share of criticism at the time and afterwards. But in the last few years, a number of studies (like this one) have looked at how well the forecasts were standing up to what had actually actually happened since 1972. It turns out that the actual figures are evolving very closely to the "Standard Run" scenario modelled in 1972, as shown in the graph below (adapted from a New Scientist magazine article on the subject, with data updated to the start of the 21st century).

I've added the "You are here" mark, as if it were a tourist map. Perhaps instead of a grey shaded line indicating where we are right now, I could have made it brown in colour and called it "Shit Creek"...

So if this is a shitload of bad news, what's to be done? According to Australian ecologist Paul Gilding in this very good TED talk on the subject, entitled "The Earth is Full", the only good news is precisely the face that this is very bad news, bad enough to make us eventually wake up to it, and that when we humans wake up to a problem and get into crisis mode, we can achieve things surprisingly fast. He quotes the examples of the virtually-overnight reconfiguration of the US economy after Pearl Harbour, of the way companies can suddenly find the ability to make previously-unimaginable changes if they face bankruptcy, of how people completely change their lives and priorities around when told they have a life-threatening illness. So a little bit of fear, a sense of crisis, can be a good thing - Gilding's solution to the Ground Hog Day syndrome, if you like:

"We are smart, in fact, we really are quite amazing, but we do love a good crisis. And the good news, this one's a monster. Sure, if we get it wrong, we could face the end of this civilization, but if we get it right, it could be the beginning of civilization instead. And how cool would it be to tell your grandchildren that you were part of that?"

So I hope I've made this blog post a little bit scary. But somehow I think it needs to be a whole lot scarier, if that's the secret to moving on from our global Ground Hog Day.

And I might just conclude by saying that it might have been scarier if I'd left out some of that whining "if only people had acted earlier" stuff - but this is a blog post built from my personal outlook, written after a period of silence and which I have struggled to write, finally falling on the subject which at a political level is easily the most meaningful for me. In fact, in Paul Gilding's talk he also refers to a "grieving" process, of coming to terms with the reality that our current way of life is coming to an end and has to change - and reflecting on that, I can see the "if only" comments are part of my personal process of figuring out how we got to where we are today. So no apologies.

Necessary to get out of a rut. To move forward. To be able to wake up tomorrow morning and face our world as it really is, in the crispness of the early hours, with so much still to be done, but so much still possible.

stop

"Stop" is one of those English words which have been adopted into usage by speakers of Spanish, Catalan, and probably half the languages on the planet. Traffic sign conventions have no doubt played a role in this, but the word itself has impeccable credentials for the job it has to do. Stop: it's short and to the point, when that's what matters. No need to waste time with soft-sounding, multi-syllabic Romance language imperatives, or indeed with the choice of what language will best get your message across. Just say STOP. Just STOP.

Among the cacophony of complex issues and affairs which are competing for the public's attention here in our crisis-bound country, there are currently a couple which you could call "Stop" issues: specific actions being taking by the authorities that are widely perceived as unjust, causing huge social harm, and needing to be stopped urgently. That is exactly the case in Spain with the issue of home evictions for people unable to keep up their mortgage payments. The obscene number of five hundred families are dumped out of their homes every day in Spain, according to 2012 figures. Horrific. But that is by no means the end of it. Under the draconian Spanish mortgage law, those who have suffered the trauma of being forced out of their homes cannot just hand over the keys and "try" to start again. No, no, no. They have to pay back the full value of the amount of the mortgage, and given that property prices have fallen by 35% since 2007, surrendering ownership of the apartment to the bank is only likely to cover part of what they "owe". So many are left with no home, no other assets, very likely no job, and huge debts still to pay. It is hardly surprising that there has been a steady stream of suicides among those threatened with  eviction.

So people have said, stop. Stop desahucios is the Spanglish slogan - stop evictions. Or Stop desnonaments in Catalanglès. This simple outcry has got louder and louder, due especially to about four years of struggle by a very dynamic pressure group, Plataforma d'Afectats per la Hipoteca, or PAH - the platform for people affected by mortgages (it's a bit of a mouthful - so maybe it's no wonder they just say "stop"). PAH started in Barcelona and has spread all over Spain. They organise physical blockades in front of buildings when evictions are scheduled, to stop the authorities from entering, as well as doing a lot of individual representation and negotiation with banks to enable people to stay in their homes. And working politically to change the law.

Meanwhile, the Spanish Government of the Partido Popular has basically just been sitting on its hands, with only a fairly cosmetic concession in 2012, affecting a small percentage of foreclosure cases. Rajoy and company get nervous about doing anything that might upset investors (in fact, that's actually a good summary of their entire economic policy). And yes, they have probably been counting on the issue remaining lost in the general din.

But PAH has persisted, and last week it won a battle. The Spanish parliament agreed to admit for debate a proposed bill on the matter - drafted by PAH itself, and brought to Parliament via a process of popular petition which exists in Spain, created by the previous Socialist government. The largest ever collection of signatures (around 1.4 million) backed the bill which includes three main proposals: a moratorium on further evictions, a retrospective law change so that evicted mortgage defaulters will no longer be left with extra debts if they have lost their home, and a plan to provide access to state-subsidised rental housing for these evicted homeowners - using the huge stock of flats which banks which have now acquired as a base. Up until the last minute, the governing PP - which has an absolute parliamentary majority - said it would block the passage of the bill. Suddenly on the afternoon of the parliamentary vote, the party leaders changed their minds.

Just how important a victory is this? On the face of it, it's nothing - yet. It's only an agreement to admit the bill to parliament, and the PP will surely propose ways to water it down or veto it. And in any case, even if it goes through, it's still only a band-aid to patch up a social disaster in one area while the system itself - and the PP's management of it - continues hacking apart the social fabric in lots of others. And yet, as a victory for protest, I think it's very important. The PAH people seem really well organised on lots of levels, with excellent leadership and use of all the media, old and new, and polls show they have overwhelming public support for the initiative (something like 90% of Spaniards are in favour of the law change). I think it can be said that democratic pressure, intelligently applied, has forced the PP to back down for once.

So it's a definite morale booster, but now it needs to be built on. By admitting the bill, the PP have bought time. The challenge for the PAH people is to keep the focus up so that the PP will not be able to weasel out of the provisions of the bill later on without a huge backlash. And keeping that focus up is not easy. I mentioned at the start of this post that there was another "Stop" issue around at the moment:

In fact, I lied. Corruption is not in the same category, even if you can easily put the word into a similar slogan, as in the photo. It's a huge and far more complex problem. As Catalan left wing MP  David Fernàndez said recently, corruption is not just systemic, it constitutes the system. He is not far wrong. There has been a storm of corruption cases gathering over most of the major Spanish political institutions (the government, all major political parties, the Spanish royal family) since Christmas, and in the last two weeks it has become a hurricane. But I won't discuss that here, I just mention it because you can see how the dilution of the stop desahucios / stop desnonaments campaign is already happening. It's going to be difficult to keep that little candle burning.



The photos were all taken with my mobile last Saturday in Barcelona, on one of the marches called by the PAH all over España. Plenty of creative protest going on too. You've probably heard of "bad banks" - there's an official bad bank in Spain now, it's called SAREB. It must be pretty bad, because here, to finish, are a couple of photos of the "good" banks:

death from above

Sunday morning in Barcelona, visibility good. 

It was on a day like this one, 75 years ago this week, that death struck from above, right here in our neighbourhood of El Call. Of the many air raids carried out on Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War, the one on the morning of Sunday, January 30th, 1938 was one of the more tragic and infamous. 

Planes from Mussolini's Italian Air Force left their base on Mallorca loaded with bombs and targetted central Barcelona, apparently making two runs over the city a couple of hours apart. In Plaça Sant Felip Neri, fifty metres from where we live, a bomb caused the collapse of a vaulted basement which was being used as a bomb shelter and 42 people died, including 20 children. In our street, Carrer Sant Domènec del Call, another bomb destroyed at least two buildings, at number 13 and number 15, and I don't know how many human lives. Number 15 is our address; and our building (top right in the above photo) was erected on the site of the destruction in the early 1940s. We share our space with many stories that have never been told. 

It's just possible that some of the unknown aspects of the Barcelona bombings may come to light in the near future: although not the stories of those under the bombs, but rather of the bombers themselves. A group of expat Italians who live in Barcelona, AltraItalia, has just succeeded in getting a Barcelona court to investigate the accusation that those air raids constituted war crimes. In the first instance, the case will concentrate on finding out about the Italian pilots who carried out the bombings and the chain of command involved - it sounds a little macabre in itself because if any of those involved are still alive, it may be a case of pursuing and even extraditing old soldiers in their 90s. 

The AltraItalia people say, however, that what they are interested in is getting to the truth and there are certainly many blank spaces in that regard. Like the key question of who gave the orders: although the Italian forces were working to support Franco, it doesn't seem that their attacks on Barcelona and other cities responded to specific requests or indications from the Franquista leadership; rather, they were free agents, not officially part of the war, conducting what have been described as experiments in terror.

On that Sunday in 1938, the residents down on the ground in El Call were among the guinea pigs for those experiments.   

Plaça Manel Ribé, El Call, created on January 30th 1938

by the bomb that destroyed the building at Nº 13, C/St Domènec del Call 

'Forasters' (Part 1)

Forasters is the Catalan word for "strangers" or "outsiders." It's also the title of a Catalan film from 2008 which was rescreened on a local channel one night in January, as a last minute change of schedule. The reason: the sad and quite sudden death from cancer, just the day before, of one of the stars, Anna Lizaran, pictured above. She was one of the reference points of Barcelona theatre, lauded as a gifted and generous actor, and there has been much grieving for her across the Catalan arts scene. I have to say, to my shame, that I am not familiar with much of her work. The main reason is, also to my shame, that I do not go to the theatre very much - and Lizaran's very successful career was very largely in the theatre (see slideshow), Forasters being one of only a handful of major film and TV roles in her CV. I read one piece in the press that said she simply never bothered to get herself a film agent! Whatever truth there might be in that, one thing it does underline is that Barcelona has had a very dynamic theatre scene for the whole of Lizaran's professional life - basically, the post-Franco era from the 1970s on - and particularly in the Catalan language. Lizaran was both prominent in helping to construct this as a founder member of key Catalan companies Els Comediants and Teatre Lliure, and also sufficiently talented to build a monumental artistic career for herself within it, without much need to go outside the theatre or outside Catalunya (bear in mind that all performers who work in català are easily bilingual enough to work in castellano and most do so, to a greater or lesser degree). So there you are: the Barcelona theatre was one of the cultural areas where the Catalan language most demonstrated its renewed vitality when Spain emerged from dictatorship, and Anna Lizaran was one of the artists who personified that in her own career.

So they showed the film Forasters, which was quite close to the bone as far as tributes go, because of Lizaran's role, actually a dual role, playing two women in different eras who are themselves dying of cancer. But it was her performance that was the thing: and it did indeed stand out, and that was ultimately all the justification required.

However I have to say it was another aspect of my response to the film itself which made me sit down at the keyboard and begin writing this. When the movie began I initially pricked up my ears when it appeared one of the major themes was to be the interaction of a rather dysfunctional Catalan family with new neighbours upstairs who are immigrants - the film, adapted from a stage play, shows us two parallel snapshots of the same family, 40 years apart. In the 1960s view, an Andalusian clan moves in above them; in the 2000s, the same thing happens but the new neighbours are Moroccans.

But what then made me groan was that the moment the newly-arrived immigrants opened their mouths, they all spoke perfect Catalan. It was completely unreal, and instantly took a lot away from the film for me. Well, I kind of expected it in fact, because this has tended to be the rule rather than the exception in movies and TV fiction set here: Barcelona is represented monolingually in either Catalan or Spanish - and that is not the reality that I experience every day. The linguistic reality of Catalonia is a rich and dynamic and often mongrel mixture. Some people use mostly català, some people (a slightly larger proportion, according to most studies) use mostly castellano, but the great majority are bilingual and most use both to an extent, and everyone is exposed to both, and there's a myriad of varied dual language situations and lots of mixing, both artful and clumsy. And many people also speak English or a hundred other languages so that is also part of the mix; immigrants arrive and, especially in Barcelona, some never learn to speak or write Catalan well, but their children learn it - in particular, because its the vehicular language in all schools. So it's a complex linguistic picture, and for someone like me, who lived the first 30 years of my life in an overwhelming English-speaking environment (well, it was then anyway) and has spent the last 20 here, it's still a source of both fascination and frustration, every single day. And given that it's such a big part of my reality I crave to see it reflected more in locally-produced film and TV programmes.

(Note: this was called Part 1 because I was aware that this was only part of the story. Unfortunately I haven't yet got round to writing Part 2. Huge subject. One day...)

they are leaving us again

They landed in our city six weeks ago, and in a matter of hours they will be taking off again, these three alien capsules in Plaça Sant Jaume, which look suspiciously like giant Christmas tree baubles. I am worried. Will we be able to cope without their presence? So much has changed politically while they have been here, camped in our political epicentre between the Generalitat and the Ajuntament, that you have to ask what part they played in it.

We did not at first give them a second glance. We were too busy thinking about our Catalan election, which was at that point just a few days away. It was late November and there was euphoria in the air. The election seemed certain to open the way to Catalan independence. We did not think twice about the fencing off of part of Plaça Sant Jaume, which happens every year while they prepare the Christmas pessebre - the nativity scene. Indeed, I took the photo below while the fence was up, but the fenced-off area is not even centred properly in the shot, because it is not what I was interested in.

What I was more interested in was the banner on the top left balcony, which I wanted to show in its context next to the Generalitat building on the right. Here's the banner, slightly more legible.

"Mas, tens un poble darrere teu" says the Catalan: "Mas, you have a people behind you". Words of support for the Catalan president Artur Mas who had called the election on the independence issue, promising a referendum if he won, which he would surely do. 

The thing was, it never occurred to me or anyone else to say: "Mas, you have a giant alien bauble behind you. Watch out!"

Some sort of warning might have helped the poor man, because three days after the above photo was taken, we had our election, and it turned out Mas certainly did not have all the people behind him - his party CiU lost support. Even if there was still a clear majority, in fact clearer than before, in favour of the referendum when all parties supporting it were counted, and even though CiU itself was still far and away the largest party in parliament, suddenly it felt like a rude awakening: the required coalition government would be difficult to form, and the Catalan political panorama had become much more complicated, in a way which with hindsight should have been completely predictable. 

But - as the presence of those giant baubles in the square indicated - nobody had been thinking about the obvious. 

Until it became obvious. Which it did in those final days of November just after the election, as the winter cold finally started to bite, when there was this palpable feeling of emptiness for a short period  - you could feel it on the streets, in the Catalan media, amongst friends and workmates -  as though Catalunya had simply been drunk on the euphoria of its big chance, and was now left with nothing but the headache of negotiating a new crisis government - and a wind-swept Plaça Sant Jaume occupied by three tacky alien Christmas baubles. 

And naturally, the banner on that top left balcony was taken down.

Well, the mood did change again after that - several times in fact over the next few weeks of our alien bauble visit, as has been more or less recounted in earlier posts of this blog: a new Catalan government was slowly but surely hobbled together amidst the tinsel and Christmas lights; the political noises from Madrid oscillated between on the one hand gentle calls for dialogue and unity and on the other, blunt attacks on some of the foundations of Catalan identity; and our great economic crisis lurched onwards even as we moved through the season of goodwill and rampant consumerism - with all the weirdness and inherent contradiction and tension which all of that entails. We even jokingly celebrated that the world didn't end, even though hundreds of thousands of people in the world  - basically, the poor - have died unnecessarily over the last few weeks simply because our unjust planet did not give them access to the basic means of survival.   

So now, as kids are about to go back to school and those of us who have work (25% unemployment in Spain, remember) are about to return to it, I can only say that the needle on my personal stress metre has fallen a little. Our friend who has the top-left balcony on Plaça Sant Jaume is obviously in better spirits too: while not treating us to another slogan, he has hung out an estelada.

As for the possible role played in any and all of this by the giant baubles, that is all very speculative and unclear. But maybe we are about it find out: they are due to disappear again on Monday. We will wave goodbye as the three shiny spheres depart from Plaça Sant Jaume for terra incognita, and then we will start to sense whether their absence has made any difference, as we continue our various and collective journeys to our own terrae incognitae.