Читать книгу The Notebook - José Saramago - Страница 16

We can sleep easy: global warming doesn’t exist. It is a malicious invention by ecologists, a strategic part of their “ideology of totalitarian inclinations,” as defined by that implacable observer of planetary politics and universal phenomena who is José María Aznar. There is no way we could live without this man. No matter that one day flowers will begin to grow in the Arctic, no matter that the Patagonian glaciers are diminishing each time someone sighs and makes the environmental temperature go up by a tiny fraction of a degree, no matter that Greenland has lost a significant part of its territory, no matter that droughts and devastating floods take so many lives, no matter that there is less and less difference between the seasons of the year—none of this matters if the distinguished sage José María denies the existence of global warming, based on the meandering pages of a book by Czech president Vaclav Klaus that Aznar himself, in a lovely piece of scientific and institutional solidarity, will soon be presenting. We’re already listening. And yet we are tortured by a very serious doubt, which it is now time to offer up for the reader’s consideration. What could be the origin, the spring, the source of this systematic attitude of denial? Might it have resulted from a dialectic egg deposited by Aznar in the uterus of the Partido Popular when he was its lord and master? When Rajoy, with his characteristically calm seriousness, told us that some professor cousin of his—a professor of physics, apparently—told him that this business with global warming was nonsense, this ever so daring statement was merely the fruit of an overheated Celtic imagination that had been unable to understand what was being explained to it. That dialectic egg is now a doctrine, a rule, a principle recorded in small print in the Partido Popular’s primer; and in that case, if Rajoy had just unfortunately repeated the words of the professor cousin, then his former boss turned oracle clearly didn’t want to miss an opportunity to teach the ignorant people one more lesson.

I have little space remaining, but perhaps there is room for a brief appeal to common sense. Since we know that our planet has already been through six or seven ice ages, could we not be on the threshold of another? Could it not be that the coincidence between this possibility and the ongoing activities carried out by human beings against their environment is very like those common examples of one illness hiding another illness? Please think about this. In the next ice age, or in this one that is just beginning, the ice will cover Paris. We can relax; it will not happen tomorrow. But we do at least have a duty for today: Let’s not help the forthcoming ice age along. And don’t forget, Aznar is merely a brief episode. Don’t be afraid.