Walking the Camino

by Tony Kevin

  The alternative, even scarier, scenario than peak oil is global warming caused by carbon dioxide emissions, leading to accelerated and catastrophic climate changes within two generations from now. The peak oil scenario is more bearable to think about, because if oil became a scarce and costly resource first, forcing changes in the way we price and consume it, it might save us before we cook our planetary home. At the moment, it is an open question which will come first: a Noah’s Flood, or oil at $1000 a barrel. But one or the other will come, or both at once, and it will happen in our childrens’ or grandchildrens’ lifetimes. Global warming, unless we cut back sharply and soon on our CO2 emissions, will involve massive and unavoidable losses of human habitat and civilisational decline.

  I thought about how our present, market-driven global society might respond to the stress of adjusting to ever-more-costly oil. Richer countries might try to control what is left, using military power to fend off desperate and starving populations of poor countries. And even within a country, the price mechanism could not be relied on to allocate diminishing energy resources efficiently and equitably. If history is any guide, powerful elites would try to command the lion’s share of energy while the poor went cold and hungry. Marie Antoinette nibbled at her cakes while the poor of Paris starved for lack of bread, and bloody revolution was the inevitable outcome. The black people of New Orleans drowned and starved in Hurricane Katrina because no responsible government authority was prepared to pay a few public dollars to hire buses to take them all to safe, higher ground, and to feed and house them once they were there. Incredibly, an American government sat on its hands while its own citizens drowned and starved in their flooded city. That is one possible future.

  On the other hand, the modern welfare-state democracies that we have created over the past 200 years, hand in hand with the industrial revolution, could, if they kept their heads and a sense of civic responsibility towards all their people, manage the necessary retro-engineering transitions towards a stable, renewable-energy economy, equitably sharing the social burdens of change. It would require a very different kind of politics to what we now assume to be normal: the politics of managing scarcity, of sharing a diminishing cake.

  But I am still an optimist: we could, if we used our brains and consciences, working together as moral communities, finish up with a more balanced, healthy, and sustainable world than the one we have now. Under an unfolding peak-oil scenario, we could still engineer a soft landing, though it would now take a great deal of human wisdom and God’s grace to do so.

  ***

  What, one might ask, has all this to do with pilgrimage? Quite a lot actually, because pilgrimage takes your mind into new territory and encourages bold, lateral thinking. It shakes the kaleidoscope of conventional thinking and can offer a piercing clarity of vision of the world, as well as sharpening appreciation of our common humanity — the perspective that must underpin any real change in the way we address the environmental crisis, the biggest of all our problems.

  The market mechanism unaided by a sense of universal civil society is not going to solve this one. It is easier while on pilgrimage, rather than being caught up in the realities of day-to-day life at home, to see this truth.

  I thought as I walked along on the N630 about how, before the industrial revolution, so many wonderful things had happened in human life without oil. We think that the way we live now is the only possible way to live, but it is not. Most of the world’s great achievements in art, music, literature, and architecture had already come into existence before the onset of the petro-economy.

  Rembrandt was painting; Mozart was composing his music; the beautiful cities of Europe were being designed and built; Shakespeare was writing his plays, and Montaigne his essays; Jane Austen was writing her brilliant but gentle novels about decent, middle-class people trying to find happiness … all before the machine age. People were constructing efficient, sustainable systems of water management, agriculture, and animal husbandry. People mostly ate the food and wore the clothing of their region. They lived in houses made of local materials. Agricultural surpluses fed nearby cities, where complex markets and higher cultures developed. There were roads and canals to move any goods around that had to be moved longer distances: high-value goods that could not be produced locally. Travel was a lifetime adventure. Ordinary people did not travel much. The rich, when they did travel, relied on horsepower and windpower. International trade was based on scarce luxury goods — condiments and spices, fine textiles and chinaware, medicines, precious metals.

  Al-Andalus in Spain was a good example of that kind of economy, functioning prosperously and sustainably at a high level of civilisation. So too, later, in different ways, were Renaissance Italy, Elizabethan England, the prosperous, bourgeois Netherlands, the early American colonies, and Enlightenment France. Of course, such societies had their seriously dark side — slavery, exploitation and oppression of the poor, and gross inequality. But there are many models of successful pre-oil societies where many people realised their potential to live decent and happy lives.

  I also thought about how, if we retain access to enough renewable energy, and the technical knowledge that goes with it, this would enable us to continue to maintain technically advanced civil societies. Our societies as a whole — not just the rich — could continue to enjoy many of the good things we now regard as necessities — modern medicine, telecommunications and multimedia, computer science, and information technology. For none of these sophisticated technologies use much material energy. If we were to steer our renewable energy potential efficiently towards maintaining these sorts of high-technology and low-energy-content sectors, distributing their benefits according to principles of equity and social justice, we could continue to sustain a high civilisational level even as our petro-economy shrinks. This would take intelligent planning, creatively using the taxing and organisational powers of the state to steer these major transitions with an eye to human welfare. It is a big ask, but I believe it would be do-able.

  It seems to me that Spain is a country that could manage such a transition more easily than, for example, overcrowded and over-urbanised England. Because the industrial revolution came late to Spain, its population is still quite evenly distributed across the land, with many people still living in or close to areas where sufficient food and fibre could again be grown locally for local needs. There are still precious pools of local knowledge available for reviving efficient, small-scale, sustainable-agriculture and animal-husbandry systems. I did not think it would be so hard for the people of the villages that I walked though in Spain to manage a transition back to a less petrol-dependent economy. There is still enormous human toughness and resilience in those villages. There is still in Spain a living tradition of human adaptability, of improvising solutions, of making do with less in hard times, of sharing what there is and looking after one’s neighbours. All those qualities, those kinds of ethics, would be essential in managing a decent and orderly retro-engineering transition to a less hydrocarbon-dependent world.

  I thought, for example, of the Andalusian olive industry, those vast, highly productive estates of millions of olive trees, the investment of centuries of work and money, now almost entirely dependent on oil, with every stage of production involving petrol-driven machines and barely a human hand to be seen. I thought about how this industry could manage, with good planning, a progressive, retro-engineered transition back to less use of machines and more use of horsepower and human power. As the price of oil increased, human-powered pruning handsaws could replace chainsaws; solar and windmill electric pumps could maintain trickle irrigation systems; horse-drawn ploughs could again till the land and spread natural fertilisers, instead of tractors spreading bags of artificial oil-based fertiliser. Human hands could again pick and bring in the olive crop, and process and barrel it. And horse-drawn or oxen-drawn caravans could again transport high-quality Spanish olive oil in large wooden
barrels for sale abroad, in the colder regions of Europe where olives cannot grow. As fuel oil prices rise, retro-engineering different stages of the olive-oil production cycle would become more economical. Andalucia could gradually be repopulated, as people came home from lost industrial jobs in Madrid and Barcelona to revived rural jobs.

  Philosophically, many of us find such ideas of retro-engineering hard to imagine, even terrifying. We have become so used to equating civilisation with more and more use of labor-saving, fuel-consuming devices. Then, paradoxically, we spend hours in expensive gyms or on jogging tracks or on crash diets, trying to restore our lost physical fitness. Retro-engineering could walk us back down the path towards a more natural and healthy utilisation of our own bodies, using the energies God gave us to build richer, more balanced lives. This need not be drudgery. To get to this kind of a world would require far more planning and intelligence than did the fossil-fuels energy revolution, which happened instinctively, fed by the profit motive and without much thought for society. But I believe it can be done if we start with the moral strength to face the issues as they really are.

  In thinking about how such a world might look, I went back for possible clues to my experience of an earlier walk I once did — along the beautiful Jomsom Trail in Nepal, which climbs from its lower-valley reaches in the south of Nepal, up along a long, deep, fertile valley, terraced and dammed and irrigated and tilled over many centuries. The trail climbs over 100 kilometres northwards, through the shadow of the Annapurna massif to the east, and the equally enormous Himalayan mountains to the west, up finally onto the high, cold, pre-Tibetan plateau.

  It was January, midwinter, yet in the protected valley I saw ripe mandarin trees bursting with orange fruit against the stunning backdrop of snowy peaks. I saw crops of rich, dark-green winter vegetables, green grass, healthy cows and pigs and goats, all bursting with protein. The people were poor because there were too many to feed on the over-subdivided small farms; but the land itself was rich, a Shangri-la of fertility and bounty. I met Australian and Canadian doctors and dentists and nurses, volunteers who had come in on foot for working holidays, tending the people’s health and teeth free of charge. I walked through a string of villages and small towns along this valley — places that, at least for some of their inhabitants, offered a surprisingly high standard of living, with ample local hydro-electricity, solid, well-built stone or brick houses, shops and cafés, pharmacies, markets, small hotels and guesthouses with hot and cold running water, radio, television, bookshops, music, and dance.

  The truly amazing thing was that there were no trafficable roads into these places in 1997 — no cars, no trucks, no buses. In the Jomsom valley, everything and everyone still moved up and down the narrow trail on foot or by single-file caravans of laden donkeys, all carefully negotiating the steep pathways and stairways from one valley level to the next. The terrain was too steep and unstable to build motor roads: to try to build them risked huge landslides and the loss of precious acreages of agricultural tilled slopes. So, at least when I was there ten years ago, this beautiful valley offered a glimpse of how we might live in a world without oil and using limited renewable energy, if we could only manage equitably the social and economic balances and transitions to it.

  With such thoughts, I comforted myself as I turned off the hideous N630, plunging with relief into the oak woods, golden wheatfields, and canola flowers of high Castile.

  ***

  I left Calzada de Valdunciel early in the morning, because I had thirty-five kilometres to walk this day, to Villanueva de Campeón. This is a day that I remember vividly: it was mostly a walk though lovely countryside, and it got better as the day went on. I was on a high (about 800 metres in altitude), well-watered, deep-soil tableland. This was already a rich agricultural area in Roman times, on the Vía de la Plata trade route, and famous for its wheat, corn, chickpeas, lentils, beef, and lamb. Now it is broad-acre, mechanised, dryland farming, with huge, mobile irrigation rigs rolling slowly across vast, unfenced fields. But where the topography allows, there are little forests and orchards and, as I went further north, increasingly frequent vineyards. I was heading into a quality Spanish wine region, the Douro Valley — after La Ríoja, perhaps Spain’s most famous wine-making area.

  I passed not far from an unwelcome reminder of the twenty-first century: the menacing, high watchtowers of the Topas high-security prison at El Cubo, Spain’s most important prison which, under the US-leaning former Aznar government, had a secret transit role in the rendition of Islamist terror suspects from Europe to Guantanamo Bay and other places unknown. Such rendition flights through Spain, which took place without the knowledge of the Spanish parliament, were being investigated by a Spanish parliamentary committee while I was in Spain. The renditions have now stopped, but I shivered as I saw a helicopter fly at high speed out of the prison.

  I stopped at an inn in the village of El Cubo for lunch, and met there two agreeable bicyclista pilgrims, brothers in their early twenties, who had spent a year’s working holiday in Sydney. They had pleasant memories of Australia, but had never thought of staying there: they had always intended to return to their home and family in Spain.

  After lunch, I gradually climbed up a long, gentle hill towards an escarpment. When I got to the top I was rewarded with a magnificent view down into the broad, rolling plain of the Río Douro valley. The valley was not far below — only fifty metres or so — but that height was enough for me to be able to see for miles, until the horizon faded into a hazy pinkish-blue. It was a patchwork, gently undulating landscape of rich-brown, freshly ploughed fields; grasses of different shades of green-gold; flowering canola croplands, vineyards and orchards; forest copses; little, red ochre-roofed white villages in the distance; twisting laneways; and not a bitumen road or car in sight. Far away, one or two little tractors crawled slowly across fields. Kites and hawks circled lazily in the updrafts of the escarpment. I slowly made my way down into the valley, savouring every last step, with remembered music from Beethoven’s Pastorale symphony ringing in my ears. No photograph could ever capture the serene stillness and peace of that moment: I tried to imprint it firmly on my memory, and it is still there.

  Calzada de Valdunciel was an ancient Roman town with a Roman fountain. Villanueva was a ‘new’ town, established in the sixteenth century. To my untaught eye, they looked equally old. In Villanueva, I stayed in a pilgrim albergue. I was now meeting up each evening with two friendly fellow walkers: Richard, a retired businessman, originally from Bavaria, but who had for many years made his home in the Galician seaport city of La Coruña, where he has a large and loving Spanish family; and Aldo, a young Italian from Siena. My walking had been keeping pace with Richard and Aldo for about a week now, since we had met at Calzada de Béjar a few days earlier. Richard had then been walking with a younger German couple from Cologne, but they had left in Salamanca to go home. He was now walking with Aldo. It was still my preference to walk alone, enjoying the solitude and time for reflection on the camino, and keeping to my own speed and walking rhythm, but I had come to look forward to meeting my two new friends in the village inns and refugios in the evenings. We had become quite companionable since Salamanca. We ate and drank together and stayed in the same refugios. Their common language was Spanish, which Richard spoke fluently and Aldo adequately. I struggled along to speak with them in Spanish, or with Richard in his good English.

  We were now watching World Cup football games together every evening, Richard being a great expert on the rules. Finally, that night in Villanueva, he broke the ice, saying bluntly in his honest Bavarian way: ‘Tony, don’t walk alone any more — why don’t you walk with us into Zamora tomorrow?’ I agreed, not wanting to be rude, and also thinking it might be time now to try walking again in the company of other pilgrims. Richard and Aldo both looked like quiet, easy-going companions, so I thought, why not give it a go?

  It turned out to be a good day
into Zamora, which was an easy twenty-four kilometres ahead. Aldo soon lost us — he loped ahead, having a longer stride than Richard or me. He went out of sight behind a low rise. When we topped it, we found a T-junction ahead, with Aldo nowhere to be seen, and no yellow arrow (a rare failure of waymarking). Should we turn left or right? We chose right — incorrectly, as it turned out. We soon came to a village and there, quite foolishly, became lost. We were given contradictory directions by various people in the local bar — it was remarkable how in this village, just a few kilometres off the camino, no one seemed to have much idea of where it was or even what it was. All they knew was the map of the motor roads. Finally, an old farmer gave us more reliable advice, and we carefully navigated our way through lanes and pathways westerly across fields, back until we regained the camino. It was with relief and affection that we saw a familiar yellow arrow again.

  We turned northwards, down a deeply gullied ancient track though shoulder-high fields. The Zamora city skyline became visible on the horizon as we drew closer. The path entered the city through an old medieval pilgrim and trade district, San Frontis, south of the River Douro. We reached the river, flowing gently across a low weir, and walked upstream along it to the fourteenth-century stone bridge, where we found Aldo, waiting patiently for us in the late-afternoon sun — he had been sitting there for two hours. On our left loomed the high, reddish-golden ramparts of Zamora castle, the domed cathedral, and the walls of the old city. We walked across the bridge, my spine tingling at the sight of Zamora’s medieval walls looming over me, and up a twisting lane into the modestly sized city plaza.

  If Salamanca is a Renaissance city, a symbol of proud, imperial, Christian Spain on its victorious march southwards, Zamora feels much older, a city of the medieval age when the destiny of the small Christian kingdoms, León and Castile, on the periphery of powerful al-Andalus, was still being fought out. Zamora took me back to the heroic age of the Santiago pilgrimage, when the fear of being robbed or captured by Moorish raiding parties was still very real.