Some writers define politics as the art of governing.
Others: like the art of commanding. There were those who, in order to come to power, proclaimed that politics was the art of serving, but they left the definition as a mere campaign phrase. However, Colombia needs leaders who govern guided by the art of planning.
You will say that when I put the title today I was wrong about the topic.
When you finish reading my column, you will pair the two topics: global warming and politics. Animal rebellion of the farm or rebellion of gaia.
Then, you will understand that biopolitics and necropolitics differ.
Some will take my column as a requiem for the land.
Others, who do not believe in the clean energy transition, will take it as an apology for economic disaster.
Well, what we came to: I refer you to memory.
We ever came to think that those high school teachers who, half a century ago, spoke to us about the depletion of the ozone layer and future climate changes that would cause natural catastrophes, were exaggerating in their classes.
As an example, they only referred to the capital of Mexico, indicating it as a dark city due to the pollution caused by carbon emissions from the circulation of too many gasoline-powered vehicles.
We understood what the oil wars were. Oil was the cursed fuel with which people could be invaded. We did not understand that extracted from its bowels in the long term it would be the poison of the earth.
We did not believe them, furthermore, because if there were floods in Cali, they were caused by a lack of rainwater channels in a city that was beginning to grow without planning or territorial ordering.
Although our city has had good luck in the face of the rebellion of nature, the latest news about catastrophes in other cities and regions of the country proves that our teachers were right: extenuating temperatures; floods in Bogotá, Medellín and Barranquilla; entire populations of the Atlantic coast submerged and with the loss of livestock and crops; landslides on the country’s highways; forest fires in our massifs; hurricanes and lack of control between cold seasons and droughts.
Soon the landslides on the roads were evacuated and they were solved with barriers or the construction of retaining walls.
But what happened to the south of the country had never had an precedent in the history of geological disasters: that the green landscape of the calm relief collapsed and the hills turned into slopes of land similar to raging deserts.
It is a novel natural phenomenon, which fractured the Pan-American Highway, isolating the south of the country.
It is a national emergency that will only be solved with a seventy-kilometre alternative road and its costs are enormous, not only because of its layout and construction, but also because it will be necessary to buy land and move populations.
In the United States, the frost freezes several people inside their vehicles, while the fires advance towards the counties.
All this happens and yet, when a ruler dares to propose the transition to a clean energy economy, they consider him dreamy, utopian and even anarchist. There remains the dilemma of continuing the oil that will bring the apocalypse closer or planning an economy towards the transition to clean energy.
Between looking at politics as the art of getting rich or looking at it as the art of planning so that life on the planet continues.
If oil wars kill people, dark economies kill the planet. The dilemma remains: necropolitics or biopolitics.
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