Yayo Herrero: "People are willing to give up the car if this way they ensure the life of their grandchildren"

BarcelonaIt has just been published Metamorphosis, an anthropological revolution (Arcàdia), the Catalan translation, by Cesca Castellví Llavina, of Yayo Herrero's latest essay (Madrid, 1965). We live trapped in a dystopian moment, of wars and pandemics. It seems like the Middle Ages. The author's response is a revolution. But not a political one, but an anthropological one.

A revolution?

— We effectively live in a time of wars and pandemics that connects us with the medieval era, but also with contemporaneity. In the 20th century there have been two devastating world wars, the Balkan conflict, and many European armies united with others in wars around the world. The anthropological revolution I propose deals with the need to critically examine our culture. The starting point is: we live in a time of war against life, with warlike conflicts, global warming, loss of biodiversity, decline of fossil fuels and many minerals that are at the heart of a good part of the resources we depend on. It is also a crisis of care. How can it be that a society that calls itself a knowledge society, which has built a model based on the notion of progress, has been able to declare war on life itself? This puts us at risk. We are in a culture of disorder.

And then, revolution...

— Revolution, which seems an old-fashioned word etymologically, means to stir, and volutio means to turn. It is a revolution that proposes to move from revolving around money and power, to revolving around what allows us to sustain human life and the rest of lives.

Make people not worry about money?

— In our mindset, in our capitalist society, everything revolves around money. But I wouldn't say that people don't care about money, because it has always existed. There has been currency for millennia. The key is to build a society that is not articulated around the growth of money. We need money: for there to be salaries, to buy food, or to pay for housing. The problem is that we have built a way of understanding the economy, an anthropology, not only oriented towards producing goods and services, but a capitalist anthropology that, in reality, is like a civil religion. Everything can be destroyed if the counterpart is that the economy grows.

Is an economic brake possible? Perhaps some countries can consider it, but tell that to India or China.

— The question is to specify what should grow, what should not grow, and who should do it. The Earth has biophysical limits. In a globalized society based fundamentally on oil, now that oil is declining, on the one hand, we are drilling for other oils that are not optimal from an energy perspective, and on the other, we are exploring any form of energy generation, which inevitably requires other minerals: copper, lithium, platinum, neodymium, dysprosium, tantalum, vanadium... Therefore, we have mineral and energy limits. And the overcoming of biophysical limits. The scientific community says that, of the nine planetary limits that should not be crossed to avoid putting human life at risk, seven have already been crossed. We are now experiencing a material contraction: energy, minerals, water. And this happens whether you want it to or not. In this context, we are not facing an ethical and political ecological proposal, but a question of the exhaustion of things that had limits and that have been used as if the world were about to end. There is a dystopian response: the one we see behind Trump's imperialism, which is a process of appropriation of the world.

Trump wants to keep the energy sources.

— The elites protected by economic, political, and military power want to sustain lifestyles based on hoarding and the use of enormous resources, and while these resources are hoarded, many other people are left out or on the margins.

Is the current one the kerosene war?

— Heavy industry, the bulk of transport, aviation and the rest depend on diesel. Our model has been sustained by a petrodependent framework. War is an opportunity to open our eyes.

Should we change the oil economy to a greener economy?

— Whenever we go to the structural causes. In most media and political analyses, physical limits are not discussed. It is said: we go from dependence on oil to depending on renewable and clean energies. But these energies, as they are designed, also require lithium and oil. Ceasing to depend on oil inevitably requires a process of material contraction: what is in dispute is how this material contraction is carried out.

Is it possible?

— Material contraction already exists. It is not that it is necessary. It is perfectly possible as long as we build economic and political models based on principles of efficiency and assume that people must live with what is necessary. This means more for those who do not have enough and less for those who have much more than they deserve. I am not talking about money, I am talking about materials, energy, and Earth's resources.

Do you sincerely believe people will give up taking cheap flights, eating less meat, and only having one phone or one car?

— Two questions. Practically, 40% of the population in the Spanish state lives in conditions of extreme poverty or structural poverty. We are talking about a society where young people can only have housing if they inherit it. Where there are families that, even working, do not make ends meet. Life in the countries of the global north is becoming precarious at giant steps. Secondly, would people do it? Well, it depends on what you ask. If the question is: What do you prefer, to give up one of your cars or for your grandchildren to have options for a reasonable life? Many people answer that they prefer to give up the car.

Who asked you that?

— At the Transitions Forum, for about four years now, we have been developing grassroots participation projects to build a just ecosocial transition through conversation. If we have the opportunity to pause and see where the problems lie, what the risks are, and what is at stake, a significant portion of people will want to transform things to make space for the lives of those who come after.

Environmentalist discourse is sometimes dismissed as Luddite or anti-progress...

— I am not someone who rejects technology. We need public and collective electric mobility and for things to happen as close as possible. We need a transition to renewable and clean energies, but keeping in mind that they must be sustained by minerals extracted from other places where people also live, who must be taken into account. I aspire not to destroy or ruin anything. I come from an engineering background and for me these issues are important. Scale is crucial and asking oneself: of what I consider desirable, is there enough for everyone? And if there isn't enough for everyone, is it a privilege or a right? Here there is indeed an ethical and political conflict.

Can the extremism to which Trump, Netanyahu, and Putin have taken their ideology open a window of opportunity?

— It is a disgrace. It is a great pity that as early as 1957 there were a lot of North American congressmen – white middle-class men – honestly and with concern debating climate change. Or that in 1972 we had the Meadows report on the limits to growth, much criticized, but which today, when you look at the graphs, you see how accurate it was. Having had all this, it is a pity that there is the dystopian response of a president of a country that hunts immigrants, locks them in a cage and exhibits them. Things that have happened before are happening, but with enormous speed and with an exhibitionism of brutal cruelty.

The great danger of the West is empathy, said Elon Musk.

— It's a brutal thing. The truth is that we must recognize that Musk, if he didn't have the power he has, is a fascinating character: the master of escapism. He says: let's consider Earth lost. He is not a denier of the ecological crisis. He says: don't worry, in sixty years I will be able to put a million people on Mars. But be careful: we are 8.2 billion people. It is an extreme supremacist proposal. And he says that on Mars we will have to do the water cycle, the recycling, and everything by hand, because here evolution has manufactured it over 3.8 billion years of the web of life. And, still, he says we will live cultivating our food and recycling our excrement like permaculturists, which, by the way, we could already do here. But basically Elon Musk's idea is the same as Milei's when he says that social justice is an aberration or that empathy is a disease. The war they declare against the Earth and against the material conditions of people's lives is also a war against bonds and relationships, when the reality is that human beings are radically interdependent, incapable of living alone.

Harari also says it: human progress has been possible thanks to interaction, to commitment, thanks to creating religions, democracies, and ideologies that allow us to live together.

— In fact, the word symbiosis means living together. It is true that in nature and in the web of life there is competition and struggle for resources, but much more frequently, intensely, and on a larger scale there is cooperation, symbiosis, interdependence, and interaction. Destroying this, pointing it out, stigmatizing it, and attacking these bonds is a great mistake. And, moreover, an incredible form of parasitism. There is no person who can aspire to live without others taking care of them: not in childhood, not in old age, not in illness, not people with functional diversity, not at any moment of life.

In the end, what his vision promises is blood, sweat, and tears.

— I wouldn't say it like that. I would say it can be a process, in fact, quite joyful and enjoyable. At least that's how I've always experienced it. There is, of course, a basic job that cannot be eliminated. Against Le Pen, France Insoumise has ended up working in factories, works councils, schools, parishes, mosques, neighborhoods, and working with people, their needs, their discomforts and pains. And from there it has sought to force changes. I would love to think that we will resolve things by voting for a political option that will reach public institutions and suddenly generate sustainability and redistribution of wealth. That would be magnificent. But in the context of material contraction, everything you said appears: privileges that are not wanted to be lost, people who don't mind stepping over others to continue accumulating. People who reach institutions will have enormous difficulties: they will be expelled or judicially processed, or they will directly give up parts of what they wanted. It is what has been seen historically with social democracy.

Are there reasons for hope? Mamdani in New York, for example. Angela Davis says that hope is a discipline.

— Mamdani's strategy seems wonderful to me. The day after winning, there were people who immediately said: "What a command of social networks!" And it's true, he used them very well. But what he had were 90,000 people going door to door. People capable of spending fifteen minutes talking to a neighbor, with knowledge and arguments, not repeating a sheet of instructions learned by heart.

How do you see the situation in the State?

— It is a profoundly complicated moment. From the base I am operating from, I see a deep unease. The most repeated words are exhaustion, tiredness, fear, uncertainty, and distrust. An overwhelming present. For many people, life weighs them down, it is difficult for them, it hurts them. Another thing that comes up in all the processes we undertake, and which I find very dangerous, is the growth of a deep distrust towards public institutions.

And this is exploited by the far right.

— Totally. There is also great anger with progressive options, considered unreliable. Above all, people say: always fighting. Now, when you start working with people to think about how we could fix it, most people have alternatives assumed. What is missing is, first, to build a certain movement – I don't say a single movement that encompasses everything – and for people to have opportunities to do things together. This is key. And, second, to work intensely on cultural transformation. The problem is how to make it desirable on a larger scale. Here we find that capitalism and everything it offers is hard drug.

The difficulty of accepting resignations.

— How do you make it understood that something that initially seems pleasant, which you aspire to, must be done differently? Here I think a good part of the institutional left has made a mistake. Many institutional leaders tell you: "No, it's better not to talk about this, people will get scared; it's best to tell them they will pay less on their electricity bill." That seems like brutal elitism to me.

Maintain the people.

— Especially because the far-right is demonstrating that many impoverished people care not only about paying less for electricity, but also about how they will live and with what values they will live. Between the lived discontent and the possible options, there is a field for mediation. This field is currently abandoned by progressive sectors, who do not dare to mention the discontent or its causes. The far-right is occupying their space, and it does talk about discontent and tells you: the solution is to return to a glorious past that never existed, or to get rid of those who take your home or your food, who are immigrants. It is a simplification. This space must be occupied with radicality and urgency.