Collserola and the awkward genealogies

Those of my generation, or even a little younger, may remember the dreadful paintings of deer and horses that were given away in the 1970s when you bought one of those three-piece suites Made of plastic, freezing in winter and scorching hot in summer. In most cases, the animals depicted in the bucolic paintings ran through the forest or drank from a lake or stream. The story I'm about to tell you is loosely related to this type of painting. The world's first nature reserve, legally protected by the state with all its resources, was created in France in 1853, during the prosperous era of the Second Empire. It wasn't very large: about 630 hectares of the extensive Fontainebleau forest. Today, such an initiative would be considered left-leaning on the ideological spectrum; however, in 1853 things were quite different. The Fontainebleau reserve originated thanks to pressure from a group of aristocrats who, to fill their leisure time, dedicated themselves to amateur landscape painting. One of the most common subjects was precisely those paintings of deer and horses that experienced a resurgence in the 1970s, associated with the sofas that were fashionable at the time. The initiative of those amateur painters had immediate effects, but not exactly on the progress of art. In Fontainebleau, there were people, generally very poor, who earned their living making charcoal. Beekeeping was also an important activity, both for honey and for beeswax, which at that time still had various uses. There were also, of course, many hunters who suddenly became poachers, that is, criminals. It is likely that before his death in Cannes on April 16, 1859, Alexis de Tocqueville learned of the creation of that reserve. It would be very interesting to know the opinion of the author of The Old Regime and the Revolution about the event, because Fontainebleau is not exactly a neutral place in relation to the history of French absolutism.

In England and the United States, the first initiatives of this kind also often bore the mark of Victorian aristocracy or, across the Atlantic, of social elitism. American conservationism, like that of the Sierra Club or the Audubon Society, certainly contributed to preserving the environment, but only indirectly: what those pioneers directly sought was not exactly to save nature, but to enjoy the landscape without fumes or noise, as far away as possible from the suburbs of the large industrial cities where workers were exploited with grueling workdays. Nor should we forget that one of the best-preserved natural areas in Germany, the Bavarian forests, owes a significant part of its good condition to the delusions of a rather eccentric king, the famous Ludwig. We could say the same of many royal hunting grounds throughout Europe: perhaps now, having ceased to be hunting grounds, they represent the triumph of certain demands; only 150 years earlier, they constituted the last vestige of feudal privileges.

In Weimar Republic Germany, Lebensreformbewegung The "Life Reform Movement" was one of the first social movements to embrace National Socialism en masse. They promoted vegetarianism, naturopathic medicine, and nudism, among other causes. They shared with German cultural nationalism a romantic exaltation of nature, a rejection of urban modernity, and ideas about "scientific racism." The Nazi regime, in fact, promoted the New German Health (New German Medicine) which combined naturopathy with racial ideology. To properly contextualize the genealogy we are discussing, it is important to keep in mind that at that time all these movements represented a dazzling modernity, the same modernity reflected, for example, in the films of Leni Riefenstahl. By the 1970s, all of this had been somewhat forgotten, and vegetarianism, naturopathy, nudism, etc., were reborn in a context that, fortunately, no longer had anything to do with Nazism. In fact, some of the protagonists of that movement revival Their ideology was of Jewish origin. Suddenly, more or less around that time... three-piece suites plastic and psychedelia new ageThey relocated themselves within the alternative left. The wild boars of Collserola, or the thousands of rabbits that now make it very difficult to make a living from agriculture in my small country, Segrià, can be legitimately discussed from many perspectives. All of these perspectives are welcome. In any case, perhaps we should also consider the endangered species of the Catalan peasantry.