Lluís Foix: "Electricity and gas are important, but agri-food energy is essential."

Roquefort de VallbonaVeteran journalist Lluís Foix i Carnicé (Rocafort de Vallbona, 1943) has just turned 82 and has celebrated the last Sant Jordi with a new publication, The strength of the roots (Group62), a collection of short stories that he has been writing in recent years about the rural world.

Is the title of this new book your vindication of the roots above the trunk, branches and leaves of a tree?

If the roots fail, everything fails.

But wouldn't a young person feel more identified with flowers?

Flowers necessarily grow from the roots. A young person must recognize that the most important thing is at the bottom.

The roots, in all their sense?

We all have roots, no matter where we live. It's not physical roots, but intellectual, spiritual, and cultural ones that make you feel at home. This draws many people back to their villages. The land screams, an idea I experienced intensely in the United States, a country of immigrants. There, everyone remembers where they come from.

This is hard to believe in our country, in the midst of rural depopulation…

Precisely, now is a very interesting time for the rural world.

Because?

There have never been so many opportunities. In rural areas, you can do the same things as anywhere else. With one difference: living on the fifth floor of a building on Aribau Street in Barcelona isn't the same as living in a house in Les Garrigues, Urgell, Noguera, or Empordà, where you can open the window and see all of nature.

A migration that will be only for the most privileged?

Not everyone will be able to afford it, that's true. That's why we must put more resources into it. For example, municipal urban development plans should be revised to facilitate, within certain rules, more middle-class housing.

But the nature I was talking about must be preserved, right?

Of course, but it doesn't make sense for a group of people, who have a lot of technical knowledge, to impose what they think should be done.

What does it mean?

The Segarra-Garrigues canal, for example. A spectacular project, yet you see areas like Belianes where irrigation is prohibited to protect birds. Shouldn't this be reviewed? Farmers can't be treated as stingy people who don't love the land.

A farmer who eventually gives up his land for other activities…

I believe that where there is farming, where there is fertile soil, photovoltaic plants should be removed. Let them go somewhere else.

But it is necessary to feed Barcelona's energy demand, right?

Electricity is important, as is gas energy, but there's one energy source that I believe is essential: agri-food. We all have breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day!

Do you think Catalonia is a geographically unbalanced country?

Forms of balance have been emerging. The current electoral law means that a vote in Lleida is worth more than one in the metropolitan area, for example.

What does it mean?

When I was young and you went to the city, everyone knew you were from a small town because of the way you dressed, the way you spoke and acted, and your confusion with traffic, shops, and institutions. Today, a person coming from anywhere in the country to the big city is mistaken for anyone else.

That's good?

Unfortunately, speech patterns are also becoming uniform. The distinctive language of each people is gradually disappearing. The socialization of culture, television, radio, and the Internet have caused this phenomenon.

He's retired, but he's been active on his blog for over twenty years, with a total of 5,736 posts written! Who does he write for?

It's my personal file.

In what sense?

I have everything there: prologues, interviews, conferences, presentations, experiences... If I need to find something, I have it there.

In the book, it says that "memory is a cemetery." How drastic!

The expression is taken from the title of Manuel Ibáñez Escofet's memoirs. When one reaches the end of one's journey, one sees that there are those roads of ancient Rome, whose pieces are mortuary monuments. Memory is full of people with whom we have met, with whom we have lived, whom we have loved... who are no longer with us. It's not a tragedy; this is the fact of life.

Some of his texts, written years ago, are still relevant today.

Man, something is happening... Both the theme of roots, as well as that of customs and the behavior of nature, function in a repetitive and inexorable way.

Good, but sometimes we suffer extreme droughts and other times floods.

Nature is very wise and, at the same time, very strange. It behaves mysteriously. As Josep Pla said, man is a climatic animal.

What did he mean?

The second most consumed news item by Americans and English people has always been the weather forecast. People watch the news to see the weatherman, to find out whether it's raining or not. This doesn't change.

In your book, you say that judging yesterday's world by today's standards distorts the experiences of times past. Does this mean that historical revisions aren't necessary?

There's a general principle discussed among historians that says you can't analyze the past with an eye to the present. You must always consider the circumstances that existed in the past before judging them.

But it's not about turning the page, is it?

I think historical memory, or the law of democratic memory, is good. But I think more like Albert Manent or what they did in South Africa with historical truth.

With all its complexity.

Ernest Lluch said, paraphrasing the Italian historian Augusto De Noce, that history is the past that does not pass.