A More Manageable Project

We drove Holly down to Madrid a couple of weeks ago. It was the first time I had left Galicia/Portugal in two years. We were dropping her off to her new owner.

We were selling her because we found this blue Smurf of a camper van online and were looking to upgrade.

Although a few years older, this one sleeps four comfortably, has a fixed bed, rotating seats, automatic transmission, and a solar panel. But most importantly, we can stand up in this one.

The house project has all but stalled, but this fall we’ve got other priorities: preparing the Molly to head south for the winter, new work responsibilities, and taking a breather from an intense summer at the finca.

The Most Comfortable Conditions

The Uninhabitable Earth author David Wallace-Wells interviewed ecologist and author Dave Goulson last month for his new book Silent Earth in New York Magazine. This part has been rattling around in my head for the last month:

I think it’s entirely plausible that we are now living in the most comfortable conditions that people will see for a very long time.

You know, you could say we’ve kind of lucked out — being born in the Western world in the late 20th century. It may well turn out to be that we had the best lives. Life before us was definitely harder, and life after us might well be a lot harder too. Of course, it doesn’t have to be that way. This is what’s so frustrating — we can fix all of this stuff, more or less, if we really try. And then everyone can have a decent life. But we have to take it seriously and actually be prepared to make some sacrifices and act, which, at the moment, we’re not doing.

Along with the recent release of the IPCC report and Simpsons memes on social media reminding us this summer (the hottest on record) will be the one of the coldest for the rest of our lives, my climate doomerism/optimism has been fluctuating wildly lately.

Lagoa de Bodeiro

I spent the weekend in O Grove and finally walked around the north shore of the peninsula. I thought Foxos and A Lanzada were nice, but passing the uncrowded Pipas, Reboredo, Mexiloeira, Piñeirón, Barreiriño, and Carreiro beaches with calm and turquoise water felt like I was on a different continent.

Here’s the laguna near to praia Mexiloeira.

O BNG, Always with Galicia

Galician Nationalist Bloc leader and national spokesperson Ana Pontón re-affirmed that her party is the only alternative to the People’s Party austerity and the centralism of the Spanish state apparatus in Madrid in La Voz de Galicia today:

The goal of politics is to improve people’s lives and it would be absurd to give up the tools that allow us to move toward that goal. So we advocate the ability to decide on our resources, we advocate putting our wealth at the service of the social majority, or we advocate having the key to our money to manage it based on the country’s priorities. It is called, I insist, real self-government.

Galicia is a nation, and we aspire to be the Galician citizens who have in their hands the decisions about their future before a Spanish state with a low-quality democracy, with a monarchy tinged with corruption, where economic lobbies rule through revolving doors and with a judicial process that is illegally perpetuated. A state in which the defense of the right to self-determination is paid with imprisonment, while corruption remains unpunished and the macho, racist, xenophobic and anti-Galician extreme right advances whitewashed by the right, with which it agrees and governs.

BNG (pronounced be-ne-gá) carries the ideological torch of Castelao and Galicianism into the 21st century.

Hopefully the party’s vanguard and all Galicians (even the conservative older ones) will realize the stakes of allowing Feijóo free reign in parliament to turn the nation into a giant wind farm and once again elect BNG to lead and oppose the centralism of Madrid.