Nature is the last hope for culture

Meetings like the ones that draw us towards RUESGA and the mountains of Palencia are much more than a meeting of naturalists, promoters and practitioners of unconventional tourist travel or, if you like, curious people. Whether they know it or not, whether they are organizers, exhibitors or attendees, the programming of events as generous as they are forceful, which it is obligatory to consider cultural, is due to the fact that every day we are more aware that not one more step can be taken without LIFE AND ITS GIFTS. We certainly breathe, drink and eat what ALIVENESS skills have achieved for their own continuity and ours.

But the majority in this Western culture, which has been able to impose itself as the only civilization on the planet, is the intensified clumsiness of achieving that there are tragically very few of us who realize, recognize and, especially, correspond to Nature. Installed in supremacist arrogance, subscribed to bad taste and greed, devastation already occupies too many territories and governs almost all the actions of this actually uncultivated culture.

 Because when we have managed to breathe what is suffocating, when we drink what is drowning, when we eat what is being poisoned or when the earth is buried by cement and ashes, all of this far beyond what is due, then culture it fails almost all of its purposes and threatens itself. Among other obvious things because it has managed to threaten all landscapes, all other living beings and the processes and systems that allow LIFE to be exceptional. These words do not go unattended from the most forceful confirmations by the scientific community. There are so many reports, diagnoses, forecasts circulating everywhere that I don't think it is necessary to insist on the specific data of the devastation of the planet. But yes in summarizing them, all of them, with a kind of macabre metaphor. The Civilization that calls itself Cultured - and all the endeavors of human culture are linked precisely to the survival, continuity, always through CARE, of human lives - has become an active ally of death. The death, for the moment, of other living beings and of what made them possible.

Thanatos, in effect, knows no borders, it never stops anywhere and the number of humans who suffer the consequences of not being minimally reciprocal with what LIFE gives us is also increasing every day.

There are many of us who have affirmed on countless occasions that Nature does not need us at all and we do need it a lot.

All this, I insist, with exceptions as decent and talented as NATURCYL, which becomes part of the emergency exit that we all need, since our home is already too hot.

As I have been wandering for many years for all sorts of calls for us to know and defend Nature, I consider I have enough references to confirm what you have just read. Because you also have to value the setting.

It is the small places, battered by history, but still not destroyed, that manage to multiply coherence and sensitivity. In fact, the simple insertion, let alone contemplation, are already acts that complete us. While the urban rips you from your own roots, the natural surroundings give them back to you.

The dominant criteria, what we call current affairs or being trendy, are far from considering this topic attractive enough, but I throw it towards the indifference of the majority because I am convinced that we need, every day, many more mergers, not gastronomic, or musical that surely are already so done that there must be a few left over.

I refer to confluences between CULTURE and VIVACITY. Because if we have any hope left, it is precisely in Nature itself, which, as RUESGA has aired on many occasions, is not only what achieves, consents, maintains and prolongs life, but also our main ethical and aesthetic source for us to begin to be grateful for what really matters. That which is learned in moments and places like NATURCYL.