Get to know Miguel Delibes.

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Delibes
and nature

And the destruction of Nature is not only physical, but also a destruction in its meaning for humankind, a truly amputation of the spirit of human beigns. Purity of air and water is stolen from human beigns but also it occurs an amputation of their language and the landscape that is full of referencing and characters and that conforms their comunity in which their life takes place, all this is transformed into a depersonalized and meaningless environment.

With that message, Delibes´work was becoming universal because we all already knew that he was not referring anymore to the natural areas of his homeland but to the natural areas of the whole planet. In this way, we can say that the writer from Castilla was somehow advanced to his time in the vision of those issues that today- perhaps too late- all the political parties have in their electoral programmes.

The murder of Carrero Blanco had propelled the events and unchained the language or¡f terror in Spain where ETA and other terrorist groups attacks where inmmediately fought back by the extremist right wing and by the hardest of the police repression.

I don´t really know what was I expecting when Delibes began his speech. I guess I though Delibes would evade all those matters talking about nature in his work awaiting better times. Soon I found out that his discourse was nothing but evasive, he would alert us about a more important kind of crisis than that that the Spanish people were inmerse in. The group of Spanish people that were in the Academy´s hall room at that very moment worried about Spain´s fate. But Delibes was talking about human kind´s fate as if our worries regarding our own country were unimportant compared to the upcoming catastrophe that was upon human kind.

In his speech at the Real Academia, Delibes referred to the reports of the Club de Roma. They were reports made at the very first meetings of scientist from all over the world to face what today we called “climate change”. The chages that the environment is suffering due to the human action on the Earth´s biosphere. Delibes had an excellent councellor, his own son Miguel Delibes de Castro, a well known biologist who would become his professor in this phase that started with this speech and cocluded in the year 2007 with La tierra herida.

Regarding Climate I should say that as a man of Catilla and a man of the countryside I have been always interested in that matter. I have pent great part of my life in the fresh air among farmers that surrender themselves to the weather will; men and women whose survival denpend more on the drought, hail or icing frost than on their own effort and work. What would it happen to us if the climate changed? And how would that change happen? I often vaguely read about the Earth´s global heating , but it was after the summer of 2003 ( a living hell that lasted five months), July of 2004 cought me in Sedano, a small villae in the North of Burgos, with temperatures of 2 and 3 Celsius on the plains and maximum temperatures of 25Celsius during the day. “This is not what we agreed” I said to myself. I had not forgotten the heat of the previous summer with almost 50 Celsius in the South of the country. At that moment I saw it clear that the climate change was not a mere theory but something real. It was not the time to come up with theories since the threat had become true. But the, what did that cold weather mean a year after? Maybe my fears where baseless? If the evidence that justified climate change did not adjust after twelve months, why was that rising and decrease happening in the temperatures?

Under those circumstances I took advantage of one of the visits of my son Miguel, to consult him my questions and doubts. I asked him some questions linked to each other but in a relaxed way, nevertheless I guess faking didn´t worked so well and my questions revealed my deep preoccupation. His answers were so extense and detailed that in some more than twenty minutes we had engaged in an extremely passionate and revealing conversation about the future of the Earth. At the end of that morning I managed to convice Miguel to extend our conversation and even more to try to make it public and give some publicity to it since I considered essential that the inhabitants of the Planet got to know the opinion of the scientists about the situation that the Earth is going through. What can a scientist say to a person like me that I am somehow ignorant but worried? The reasoning of the experts are soothing or on the contrary enough to increase our preoccupation? And there was something else, if the problems were real, Why aren´t they getting propper solutions?

Fiction or reality […] inventing or document, in all the books mentioned [ S.O.S., Vivir al día, Mi vida al aire libre, Pegar la hebra] and in some other that we could add we can witness the author´s enthusiasm for Nature, it is so intense that he proposes an intimate communion of the human kind with Nature to trnasfor it in their existing reason. That loving respect for Nature comes not only from his extensive narrative about it but even more from his direct contact with the land and his intense experience about the lands of Castilla, to sum up, all those aspects come from a keen attitude to live in the fresh air, the sport practice in “Un hombre sedentario” as Delibes called himself. His keen attitude to different sports, represented in Mi vida al aire libre, such as football, ciclying, swimming, marching…and among all of them to two sports in particular: hunting and fishing.