Ecology and the law of the jungle

Sometimes I wonder if the councilors love the object of their department. Does the councilor of Education love education? Does the councilor of Linguistic Policy love language? Does the councilor of Culture love culture?Fifteen days ago, in an article in favor of teachers and professors, I spoke of the poison of superior causes. We must help these students!, said the pedagogues. But the function of teaching was not to help students, but to transmit knowledge. Twenty-five years of turning priorities upside down have destroyed teaching and have harmed students in a terrible way. We must go against the extreme right, we are told today, to justify any blunder. With criticism thus deactivated as in the case of teaching, both things will be achieved, the blunder and the extreme right, which already seem like two stages of the same evolution.

These days it has become known that fifty-eight Catalan publishing houses will not receive the subsidies they expected for books already published, after it was retroactively required of them to print an eco-sustainability logo. These are books already printed on ecological paper, but they are missing the logo. Ester Andorrà, editor of LaBreu, recalled on X that "certificates are a way to invoice and logos are to provide work, and salaries, to all the certifying companies that have been invented under the umbrella of laws."

Incompetence can never be ruled out, always available for someone to eventually take advantage of it. Administration is increasingly introduced everywhere and today to renounce subsidies is to fight with one arm tied behind your back. There are publishing houses that depend on them, independent publishing houses that are mainly the ones that keep our written culture alive. Then others will take advantage of its prestige –“It is important to read!”– to make it a pure business. These affected publishing houses would deserve a monument on every street, not for the selflessness, which is there, but because they are the pillars and foundations of our written culture. Instead of thanking them, however, you see. As Ignasi Moreta, editor of Fragmenta, also said to X, “if we want eco-sustainable publishing, we must reward good practices. For example, keeping the catalogue alive, without cheerfully chopping it up, without delisting, reprinting the stock when it runs out.” These publishing houses publish “thinking of several generations. The opposite of what large groups do, who chop up books, subsidized, five years after publishing them.”But everything leans in favor of the big groups, as usual.