by Tony Kevin
I arrived just as the summer-school season was starting, with thousands of foreign students coming to stay for Spanish residential language and acculturation courses. The city streets were full of groups of excited and happy young Americans and Latin Americans, many already talking fluent Spanish as well as English. The city had all the signs of a university town — good bookshops, art and music shops, internet cafés, photo shops where one could burn CDs of one’s photos and send them home … and Salamanca has the largest city plaza in Spain, the size of a city block and an almost perfect square. Banned to traffic, the plaza would have been a great sight had it not been for the huge, ugly, temporary stage erected in the middle for a series of pop concerts.
I met with pilgrimage friends Richard, Aldo, and Nigel in the plaza for a drink, and we went on together for dinner. Nigel, an Englishman, was charming company, thoughtful, and well-informed on many things to do with the pilgrimage and Spain. Like me, he seemed to be looking for some sort of healing through the pilgrimage, and was taking it at a leisurely pace; I did not press him as to why or wherefore.
Salamanca today is a happy and youthful city, but it has a dark past. It was a major site of the Inquisition, and cruelty returned to the city in the Civil War years. Antony Beevor’s Civil War history tells the unforgettable story of a dramatic confrontation in the early stages of the war between Franco’s victorious Nationalists and Salamanca University’s liberal-minded rector, the famous Basque philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, then at the peak of his career. Castile had fallen early in the war to the Nationalists. Unamuno had originally sympathised with their cause, but had then been appalled by their vengeful slaughter of Republican supporters after Salamanca was occupied.
The confrontation took place at a celebratory ‘Festival of the Spanish Race’ at the university, where the audience consisted of prominent local Nationalists, including many local members of the fascist party, the Falange. On the dais sat four people: Franco’s wife; the one-eyed and one-armed General Millán Astray, founder of the Spanish Foreign Legion; the bishop of Salamanca; and Unamuno.
Astray gave a violently provocative speech, attacking Basques and Catalans as ‘criminals guilty of high treason’ and ‘cancers in the body of the nation’. He went on: ‘Fascism, which is Spain’s health-giver, will know how to exterminate both, cutting into the live, healthy flesh like a resolute surgeon free from false sentimentality’. In response, an excited Falangist in the audience yelled out Astray’s Spanish Legion battle cry, ‘Viva la Muerte!’ (‘Long live death’) The audience leapt to their feet, screaming Falangist slogans, their blue-shirted right arms raised in fascist salutes to the portrait of Franco hanging above the dais. The noise died as Unamuno stood up slowly and began to speak quietly:
All of you are hanging on my words. You all know me and are aware that I am unable to remain silent. At times, to be silent is to lie. For silence can be interpreted as acquiescence. I want to comment on the speech, to give it that name, of General Millán Astray, who is here among us. Let us waive the personal affront implied in the sudden outburst of vituperation against the Basques and Catalans. I was myself, of course, born in Bilbao. The bishop, whether he likes it or not, is a Catalan from Barcelona.
The bishop of Salamanca seemed embarrassed at the public reminder of his birthplace, which was almost in itself an implication of disloyalty to the Nationalist crusade. Everyone stood in numbed silence as Unamuno went on:
Just now I heard a necrophiliac and senseless cry: ‘Long live death’. And I, who have spent my life shaping paradoxes, must tell you, as an expert authority, that this outlandish paradox is repellent to me. General Millán Astray is a cripple. Let it be said without any slighting undertone. He is a war invalid. So was Cervantes. Unfortunately, there are all too many cripples in Spain now. And soon there will be even more of them if God does not come to our aid. It pains me to think that General Millán Astray should dictate the pattern of mass psychology. A cripple who lacks the greatness of Cervantes is wont to seek ominous relief in causing mutilation around him. General Millán Astray would like to create Spain anew, a negative creation in his own image and likeness: for that reason he wishes to see Spain crippled, as he unwittingly made clear.
The general was unable to contain his fury any longer. He could only scream, ‘Muera la inteligencia! Viva la muerte!’ (‘Death to intellectuals! Long live death!’). The Falangists took up his cry, and army officers took out their pistols. The general’s bodyguard even levelled his sub-machine gun at Unamuno’s head, but this did not deter Unamuno from continuing:
This is a temple of the intellect, and I am its high priest. It is you who profane its sacred precincts. You will win, because you have more than enough brute force. But you will not convince. For to persuade you would need what you lack: reason and right in your struggle. I consider it futile to exhort you to think of Spain.
Unamuno paused and his arms fell to his sides. He finished in a quiet, resigned tone, ‘I have done’. It would seem that Franco’s wife saved him from being lynched on the spot, though when her husband was informed of what had happened he apparently wanted Unamuno to be shot. This course was not followed because of the philosopher’s international reputation and the shocked reaction abroad to the poet Lorca’s state-supported murder that had taken place a few weeks before. Unamuno died six weeks later, broken-hearted, and cursed as a communist and a traitor by those he had thought were his friends.
This dramatic confrontation illustrates important truths about the Spanish people: their intense pride in their country, their dignity and grace under pressure, their capacity for incredible and glorious bravery, but also the depths of fanaticism and cruelty into which they can sink under the spell of evil leaders. How could Unamuno speak in such wonderfully clear sentences at such a terrifying moment, perhaps the last moment of his life? How did he find the courage to go on speaking to a roomful of hostile armed people thirsting to kill him? And what a magnificent memory his last public words have left to his beloved University of Salamanca and to his nation.
chapter ten
Doing Without
I left Salamanca under a rare rain shower. It wasn’t cold, and my cotton clothes soon dried again. Salamanca to Zamora was only seventy-eight kilometres, an easy three-day walk. Again, as from Cáceres, the walk started with a few unpleasant kilometres along the N630 highway, but eventually the yellow arrows mercifully led me away into quiet countryside. It was sixteen kilometres from Salamanca to Calzada de Valdunciel, a village about which I now remember little, though I spent a night there. I can’t even remember now whether I slept in an inn or a refugio, because I missed getting my credencial stamped that night: I think I was already on pilgrim’s automatic pilot.
I do remember thinking a lot, struggling along the N630 highway, about time and space and energy. I was walking at the interface of two radically different human worlds, separated by technology and hundreds of years: through two overlaid maps of Spain, the medieval and the modern. It was one of those piercing moments of altered perception that pilgrimage brings about.
Walking along the edges of the roaring N630, I experienced intense physical distress. The motor traffic on the highway assailed my ears, lungs, nose, eyes. As huge mechanical monsters screamed along the highway, brushing aside my frail human body, I felt and smelt huge blasts of heat and carbon dioxide gas they were pumping out into the highwayside air. I experienced with almost physical pain the fact of how fast humankind is burning up its precious stored-energy resources. I thought of this scene infinitely multiplied on every highway in every rich industrial country in the world, and an overwhelming sense of profligate waste overwhelmed me. I thought: this cannot go on, it is totally irresponsible.
Where on earth were all these laden trucks coming from? Where were they going? What were they carrying that was so important to have to be moved hundreds of kilometres across Europe? Why did mankind have to cart s
o much stuff all over the planet, to the point where old-fashioned trade concepts like ‘luxury imports’ no longer have meaning? All year round I can buy grapes in Australia flown out in winter from Europe or California, and vice versa. The anticipation, the thrill of waiting to enjoy fresh fruit in its season, is gone. Why can’t we eat what we grow locally in season? We have lost the pleasure of waiting for different fruits and vegetables to come into season at different times of the year, and the thrill of exotic tropical fruits such as bananas or pineapples or mangoes being kept for special occasions. We are burning up the planet, but for what? A dreary sameness and levelling-out of consumption.
My sense of wasted resources for no real gain in human happiness was all the sharper because my pilgrimage was defying the tenet of industrial civilisation that we need our transport machines. It was proving to me that I could move myself efficiently, albeit slowly, over long distances, without needing the petro-economy to get me there. I knew now that if I wanted to and had time, I could walk around the world like this.
It led me to wonder how our world had managed before the petro-economy transformed the way we think about production and exchange and consumption and travel. Had our quality of life really been so much worse before the petro-economy? Or alternatively, has the petro-economy — which really only got underway in the West in the early 1900s, and in the developing world only in the past forty years — now taken our civilisation to a stage that is terrifyingly beyond what our poor little planet can handle for much longer?
Battling up the N630, I knew with absolute certainty, as I had never fully understood and accepted before, that this kind of life could not go on — that we are living through a moment of economic and technological madness, of gross dysfunctionality. There is something insanely out of balance in the way we are burning up our energy capital for no benefits of lasting value. Sadly, our children will pay for our society’s greed and thoughtlessness if we do not get a grip on this problem very soon.
I thought about how Europe’s and North America’s industrial revolutions had been made possible over the past 300 years — a mere moment in human history — by our profligate exploitation of stored deposits of non-renewable, hydrocarbon-based energy: initially clear-felling old-growth forests, then coal, now oil. There is nothing else to come. We have spent these 300 years like Ali Baba’s reckless brother, going more and more often to the fossil-fuels treasure cave as our appetite for easy energy has increased. The world has probably already passed the point of ‘peak oil’: from now on, there will be less new oil discovered in the world each year, and what there is will steadily become more costly to access. Oil scarcity will come on very quickly in our lifetimes, as the exploding mega-economies of China and India compete with Europe and North America for what is left of the world’s readily accessible oil.
We were taught to scoff at the Club of Rome’s warnings thirty years ago, but now we know they were essentially right. Inevitably, as the knowledge of looming scarcity finally hits home in the international marketplace, oil will get exponentially more expensive. We are looking, not too many years ahead, at crude oil prices that are ten, twenty times what they are now. And they will never come down again, because the new oil just won’t be there to find again. We won’t be flying bulk grapes across the world for too much longer.
I realised also that economic rationalism has nothing useful to teach us about how to conserve a finite, exhaustible energy resource on which the world has come to depend. The price mechanism of the world oil market is like a simple oil lamp. The wick will suck up oil, and the flame will burn no less brightly, so long as there is some oil left in the bowl. Even though we will see the level falling rapidly, the wick will not burn more slowly in order to save fuel. As soon as the wick sucks up the last drop of oil, the lamp will go out — phut.
While I was in Spain, one of Australia’s state governments floated the idea of setting aside a proportion of its known large coal reserves as a bank for Australia’s anticipated needs in predicted energy-scarce times ahead. The idea was laughed to scorn by our economic experts and the federal government; they said that, as long as there was cheap coal to sell and world buyers ready to buy it at a price that made profits for the seller, Australia had no ‘rational’ alternative but to go on mining its coal as fast as possible, shovelling the stuff out of the ground and off to China to be turned into more Wal-Mart junk, at the same time continuing to pump more global-warming gases into the air. ‘Have coal, will sell’, is Australia’s operating rule.
The market mechanism has no way of putting a value on the future, on the world our children will have to live in. An ethical society, a society able to think beyond a time horizon of four or five years, would be husbanding what is left of our fossil-fuel resources, setting tax mechanisms in place to slow down their now entirely foreseeable exhaustion, and using them productively as investment capital to convert to a renewable-energy-based economy, to build the expensive new infrastructure that such an economy will need and that we do not yet have in place.
I know, as an engineer, that building a bank of renewable-energy infrastructure will require very large initial capital investments of energy and of materials whose manufacture itself consumes energy. It takes a lot of metals, concrete, fuels, plastics, and silicon wafers to build tidal, geothermal, solar, or wind-energy power plants and the new reticulation networks to distribute power from those new plants. The longer we delay building the renewable energy infrastructures that we already know our children will need, the more painfully expensive they will be to build. We will regret then that we did not build them now, while energy and materials are still cheap, instead of flooding the world with unwanted plastic junk, and cooking our planet with excess carbon dioxide gas. We will regret that we did not use these lotus years, the late-afternoon warm sun before the long, cold night falls, more wisely.
I wondered, what will happen to our world economy when we have no more cheaply accessed hydrocarbons, when oil and coal have become luxury producer goods? We might try to stagger on with a few stop-gap solutions: squeezing more expensive oil out of shale rock, and growing more biomass to make alternative fuels like ethanol. But growing biomass fuels will eat into scarce water and land, and the soil fertility needed to grow humanity’s food and fibre.
We will have to move towards fully exploiting global technical potentials for safe, renewable sources of energy. It is likely that all of those sources, even when fully developed, will together produce only a part of the energy we in the West have got used to consuming. So there will have to be major cutbacks in energy usage in coming decades. It will inevitably be a very different world.
Nuclear energy won’t be any long-term solution, either. Even if we accept the added risks of weapons proliferation, catastrophic power-plant accidents, and disposal of poisonous, long-life radioactive residues, it would only postpone the inevitable energy-crunch for a few years. Like fossil fuels, uranium is itself a limited, non-renewable resource. Even on best-case scenarios, accessible high-grade uranium will run out within a generation or two. Moving to a uranium economy would involve living off our capital, too.
What about fusion — the science-fiction, comic-book dream of a hydrogen-powered economy, turning unlimited seawater into hydrogen and oxygen to run new kinds of machines? I have to say that, as an engineer with some knowledge of physics and chemistry, and as a student of human history who sees how often humanity has misread its optimistic scientific dreams for real goal-setting, such a hydrogen economy is unlikely to help us. It comes down to the second law of thermodynamics, the iron law of entropy: unless you have new energy coming in from somewhere else, everything eventually runs down to the lowest level of energy equilibrium. The reason there is so much water (H2O) in the world is that the H2O molecule exists at a lower energy level than do free atoms of hydrogen and oxygen. While we could no doubt create ingenious new technologies (perhaps we already have done so) to split off
and store huge quantities of oxygen and hydrogen, and then power our cars and heat our houses in little reactors that burn them, such serial conversion processes will be net consumers of energy as a whole. It is why humanity was unable to turn lead into gold, or to fly by muscle power with artificial wings, or to invent a perpetual-motion machine, despite the world’s best scientific and engineering talents obsessively trying to do these things for centuries.
Every engineer knows now that there is no such thing as a 100-per-cent efficient machine or mechanical process. All work, all conversion of materials, involves a net cost, a net loss of energy. That is why there will be no technological quick fix to the coming energy crisis. In the end — and it is not so very far away now — we will have to fall back on the efficient use of scientific and engineering knowledge to tap into the world’s renewable energy sources, the free energy that comes from the sun and from the earth’s rotation, and the weather and currents that those natural energy-drivers create.
What kind of a world will it be then, after the petro-economy sputters to an end? Even if it is possible, theoretically, to convert to a renewable energy-based world economy, can we get from here to there without terrible dislocations on the way? Will there be more wars over shrinking resources, Mad Max scenarios of a world fighting over diminishing stocks of oil?
