can Pau Foguera

Josep Travesa, Pepitu, was born in 1930 in Can Pau Foguera, one of the smallest farmhouses in the old municipality of Olzinelles where his ancestors lived for generations. The sea breezes from the Mediterranean blew smoothly in the facade of his house, built on the sunny slope of one of the low hills of the Catalan coastal range of Montnegre. Next to his house, Pepitu took care of a subsistence agroforestry system carefully adapted to the regime of a temporal stream: cereals, vines, olive trees, vegetable gardens, fruit trees, holm oaks… His family’s livelihood combined extensive dry land farming, livestock raising, and paid work as tree feller and cork peeler for the production of charcoal, firewood, timber and cork in the large forest estates. During his life he witnessed how most of the farmhouses of Olzinelles were abandoned and their tenants migrated to nearby towns and cities searching for better life conditions. His only daughter Aurora also decided to leave Can Pau Foguera as she got married. His wife Assumpció plunged into a severe senile dementia that progressively erased her memory. Pepitu remained the last peasant of Olzinelles to live in a 'traditional' way until he died in February 2006. And he did so with an extraordinary fullness and happiness that contrasted with the decadence of the whole universe that was going to disappear with his death.
   
Can Pau Foguera according to illustrator Carme Lorente (included in the book 'La vall d'Olzinelles. Els dominis de l'alzinar i la sureda' by Otero et al., 2007).

According to the well-known artist and neighbor of Pepitu Perejaume, 'the morning when we put his body in the cemetery of Olzinelles, all those landscapes became smaller; lost size, contrast and depth'. But when he was alive and 'you were in Can Pau Foguera, that reality was not at all nostalgic, it was rather the other way around; there was the possibility of perceiving that another concept of reality was possible. It was more like a revolutionary vision, as far as you could realize that there was another possibility in the world: a parallel world'. 

Pepitu's twilight, a myriad of worlds to emerge (summer 2005). 

llegiu la versió en català

Article a Global Environment

Han publicat, fa uns dies, un article nostre sobre Matadepera al número 5 de la revista Global Environment. Parla de la pagesia ofegada durant les inundacions de ciment. Poso l'enllaç:

http://www.globalenvironment.it/Estany_Badia_Otero_Boada.pdf

Hem tingut unes discussions de ca l'ample, amb els editors, ja que a última hora van canviar l'ordre dels autors (els van posar per ordre alfabètic) i el títol (deien que era massa llarg). Després d'un estira-i-arronsa ens van donar la raó, però l'article ha sortit amb un error garrafal al títol (1985 en comptes de 1956). La revista no està malament del tot (ahir vaig estar llegint el número en paper que em va arribar la setmana passada), i és d'accés obert, però jo ja li he posat la creu. 

Una cosa que no m'agrada de l'edició són les normes per a les referències bibliogràfiques: has de posar el nom de tots els autors dels articles que cites. Això fa que si cites treballs que tenen molts autors (a les ciències biofísiques, és comú que un treball el firmi un equip d'uns quants científics, fins a l'extrem que un dels articles que citem té dinou autors) i tens força referències bibliogràfiques, alguna pàgina (com la núm. 9) queda ocupada quasi totalment per les notes al peu. La qualitat dels mapes és molt dolenta, i les fotografies queden tan fosques que no es veu res.

El pes que portem a l'esquena (i VII)

The socioecological transformations experienced in places like Olzinelles and Matadepera may be considered local outcomes of a global change promoted by an unsustainable economic growth rooted in an anti-adaptive culture. According to the philosopher Augusto Ángel Maya 'all cultures in their twilight dream of becoming sustainable'. But there is no exit within our existing worldview. In Olzinelles and Matadepera, although these changes have lead to an increased social well-being overall, inherited social and ecological costs and problems are enormous. In Matadepera, our town, we are engaged in a self-organizing process of adaptive action-research that draws on various knowledge systems and experiences to lead the social-ecological system to a desired and resilient stability domain. This is a process of learning-by-doing in which new socioecological relations and institutional arrangements are to be build across multiple spatial and temporal scales. Knowledge is no more a building that has to be constructed upon the solid basis of normal science, but rather to emerge from a network woven without hierarchies in a radical and happy commitment to create a new existential territory and an alternative, smaller economy, suitable to the physical needs of humans and ecosystems . 'Swarms of worlds are tingling', felt the poet Verdaguer more than a century ago, when he longed for death to arrive and bring him to the absolute glory that was already making his skin tingle.

Before the 1930s no one in town could imagine the dramatic change it was about to come in Matadepera. Small actions may have large and unexpected effects on the whole system. Surprises may lead Matadepera to unimaginable states. This may sound funny in a suburb with high standards of living, high consumption of resources, and expensive cars with posh drivers. But the view of rustic shepherd Paco leading his flock to the pastures across the streets of the housing developments, and the sheep excreting naturally in the pavements of the luxurious mansions, fills me with hope.

El pes que portem a l'esquena (VI)

The philosophy behind this management strategy is not to exclude wildfire but rather to build a more resilient social-ecological system, being able to absorb fire events and retain essential structures, processes, and feedbacks. The decrease of fuel load in strategic areas through different techniques is expected to decrease the intensity of fires, which is ultimately responsible for damage to life and property. Our efforts have also been focused in stopping the encroachment of houses into the forests, since besides having direct negative impacts such as landscape fragmentation, destruction of heritage and high water consumption, vulnerability to wildfires is high and very difficult and expensive to manage by the Town Council. The narratives provided by some of our studies have been used as strong evidence that we are now suffering the social and ecological legacies of the wrong choice of development path for Matadepera. In the NE of the town core about 239 ha of low forested hills (almost 10% of the whole municipality) remained free from urbanization but were threatened by real estate interests. The Local Environmental Council started a campaign to involve the citizenship in the protection of the area. Elders joined us. Pintoret told us 'that it is already enough of houses, enough of asphalt, enough streetlights, enough cars and enough curbs and everything. In Matadepera we have gone too far'. With more than 1300 signatures and 18 local and regional bodies supporting the cause we asked the Town Council to protect the area from new developments. The plenary approved our proposal by general consent. The area is now protected and managed to enhance its heritage, and might be included in the Natural Park in the future. Some examples are the restoration of several old lime kilns by a team of archaeologists coordinated by the Local Environmental Council, and the recovery of one well by the Town Council to have an additional supply during the water shortage in spring 2008.

Management practices, direct action and scientific research are combined with environmental education within the Local Environmental Council, including a Botanical Garden created in 2005 and a program of conferences, courses and guided trips done in collaboration with several local organizations and primary schools. The dissemination of the management strategy through conferences, our journal Sotabosc, and regular communications with the local, regional and national media helps to overcome the urban view of landscapes as pristine nature and achieve a harmonious reconciliation of diverse points of view .  In a self-organizing process of action-research stemming from real-life problems, as insider scientists working together with the local community we produce knowledge that facilitates the socioecological transformation in the desired direction. Besides being fed back into the setting from which it emerged, the knowledge is expected to be shared beyond such setting. An effort is made to publish the results of action-research in local-regional journals, in the proceedings of the Natural Park periodical meetings, in national geographical journals, and in international peer-reviewed journals. In this way we contribute to the training of environmental scientists, either at the Bachelor’s Degree, Master, or PhD levels.

El pes que portem a l'esquena (V)

Es sols lo començament

lo que prenías per terme.

L’univers es infinit,

per tot acaba y comença,

y ençà, enllà, amunt y avall,

la immensitat es oberta,

y ahont tu veus lo desert

exams de mons formiguejan.

From the poem 'Plus Ultra' by J. Verdaguer (1905, p. 91)

When I came back from the Italian Dolomites, after the summer of 2003, the large fire of Sant Llorenç del Munt mountain had already been put out, but it was in everyone’s lips. I was given the chance to lead the Local Environmental Council of Matadepera. We organized several round tables and conferences with local and external experts to debate how to face the threat of wildfires. The volunteers of the local Group of Forest Defense (ADF) and the firemen stressed the need to manage fuel accumulating forests to reduce fire vulnerability. One of them, forest engineer of the Catalan Ministry of the Environment, was the bridge between the local knowledge of forests and fires and the expertise of the Catalan fire brigade’s special unit on large fires (GRAF). A management scheme was prepared with joint work that combined fire modeling with forest planning. The scheme, including mechanical thinning, slashing and crown pruning in about 100 ha of strategic areas regarding fire spread, was approved by the Town Council of Matadepera and executed by general consent of forest landowners and the Natural Park.

In order to control sprouting and to keep a low fuel load in the thinned stands we promoted the recovery of extensive grazing of sheep and goats, one of the most important economic activities of the region throughout the last millennia. We the ADF reached an agreement with the main forest landowner to use an old farmyard of their own. We restored the farmyard and offered financial, logistic, administrative and personal support to shepherd Paco from the Bages County to graze his flock in Matadepera’s forest. In collaboration with pasture ecologists a modest monitoring plan was implemented, where we measure the grazing pressure on plants and the effects of grazing on vegetation structure and chemical composition.

Some of the remnant fields in the municipality, both from the Town Council and private owners, are now ploughed and sowed to produce fodder and grain for the flock, ADF dealing with the management. Other fields are used by a sharecropper family to grow organic vegetables. Extensive farming and grazing contribute to the conservation of habitats and species that motivated the designation of Sant Llorenç del Munt mountains as Natura 2000 site, such as Bonelli's Eagle, and also other species and taxonomic groups not as media-friendly as the eagle but not less important: small mammals, butterflies, and birds.

El pes que portem a l'esquena (IV)

Unlike Martí, I am not from the countryside, and neither is my family. I felt nostalgia for a world which I had only guessed at when seeing old photographs from the town or walking around the old fields and farmhouses in Sant Llorenç del Munt mountains. I also had the feeling that threatening wildfires occurred precisely because the rural world was not anymore 'The World'. I wanted to understand such a dramatic transformation. I was very much attracted by the experiences and languages of the eldest of the town, but I wondered how to include them in my research without being disrespectful to them or misunderstanding their thoughts, shaped in a completely different social-ecological and mental setting than mine’s. Moreover, given the intangible and vanishing nature of local rural knowledge in an urbanizing metropolis, I wondered not only how to capture it but how to include it in an academic work without reducing it to numbers. What was I expecting to get from this knowledge? Or rather the question should be: What was I expecting to get from the knowledge carriers?

I also found particularly tempting and challenging to build an integrated approach in the study of land change drawing on different disciplines from the social and the natural sciences to achieve a holistic view while at the same time keeping the rigor required in academy. When I attended meetings gathering scientists, land managers and policy makers, I realized that they were talking to each other in different languages, regardless of the scale and the scope of the meeting. In scientific conferences on sustainability or conservation most of the participants complained about the difficulty of producing politically relevant scientific research. For me, this was another cause for concern, especially at the local level. I had the necessity to know if action-oriented research practices stemming from real world conflicts could contribute to solve this gap and to lead the social-ecological system towards a more desired and resilient state in terms of ecosystem services and human well-being.

What follows is just one attempt out of the many other possible paths hidden out there.

El pes que portem a l'esquena (III)

There is a very strong emotional link with Olzinelles and Matadepera, the study areas of this thesis; they are our home and body. And there is also a strong concern for being threatened by something. 'It was at the end of the 1950s when we the children and young people from low Montseny grew up playing in Tordera River, while our adults kept their harvests going with the irrigation waters from Tordera, when suddenly the first pollution events appeared. At the beginning we were amazed, because water changed color overnight. But soon jokes made way for fear when we started seeing the death of fishes until they completely disappeared, and how our parents’ harvests were scorched when irrigated with polluted water'. In my case, the large fire of Sant Llorenç del Munt in August 2003, with five people killed and thousands of hectares of forests devastated, made me feel absolutely helpless since I was living in the Italian Dolomites and I could only watch it on the TV. Although the flames did not reach Matadepera, many volunteers and firemen from the town took part in the extinction works. Some friends of mine were almost burned alive when trying to escape from the flames with the fire engine, while others like Pintoret Junior had to run for hours across the mountains with the fire front advancing without respite in their back.

Photograph by N. Valldeperas (2010)

El pes que portem a l'esquena (II)

My supervisor Martí Boada was born in the town of Sant Celoni ten years after the end of the Civil War. He was son and grandson of humble forest workers who provided him with 'very different ways to understand the forest than those given in the academic boxes' before entering the University as late as in the 1990s. As he writes in his PhD dissertation 'when I was a child I travelled across low Montseny’s and Montnegre’s forests with my mother, to do an activity that was a punishment for the women of the humblest families: to gather acorns'. When they arrived to town at twilight, her mother carrying a sack of sixty kilos in her head, they sold the acorns at a derisory price to a pig dealer. Olzinelles valley, located a stone’s throw away from Sant Celoni, was for him a 'school of nature'. At the beginning he went with his father to fell firewood or to capture an appetizing water vole in the stream. Later, he started studying its linked social-ecological system focusing particularly in the interaction between humans and the rest of animal species, from the vantage point of being an insider and living in Ca l’Agustí, one of the farmhouses of the valley bottom.

It is an early summer’s day of 2004. Martí Boada leaves Sant Celoni and enters AP-7 motorway making his way towards Matadepera. At his back, a completely different Olzinelles from the one priest Pascual knew in the 1930s. No peasants are working their lands and forests. Instead of them, government employees manage 'nature' under the protection of a natural park. Some developments sprawl in the hills of the old municipality. After one hour Martí arrives to Matadepera, where I have been living for more than twenty years. Luxurious mansions have grown in former vineyards, and the rural town of the 1930s is now one of the wealthiest municipalities in Catalonia. Watered grass lawns cover about the same area as the remnants of farm land, saved from aggressive urbanization thanks to a natural park that 'protects' about 60% of the municipality. Martí, former professor of mine in the Bachelor’s Degree on Environmental Sciences, is meeting me and the well-known local eldest Pintoret. Pintoret is going to be our guide in a field trip across Matadepera, planned to prepare the course on landscape change that Martí and myself will give in the Summer University of the town. I have just finished my Bachelor’s Degree and I am about to start with my PhD.

 

Photographs by N. Valldeperas (2010)

El pes que portem a l'esquena (I)

Antoni Pascual was born in 1909 in a coastal town from Maresme County, in Catalonia. In 1930 he was ordained priest, and just two years later he became the priest of Olzinelles parish, in the coastal range of Montnegre. Although still a rural parish, by that time peasants from Olzinelles had already started to abandon their farmhouses searching for better life conditions in nearby towns and cities, and the municipality of Olzinelles had already been annexed to that of Sant Celoni. In 1936, the priest Pascual was transferred to the small town of Matadepera, in the hillside of the pre-coastal range of Sant Llorenç del Munt, to replace an agitator right-wing priest whose personal safety could no longer be guaranteed by the left-wing municipal authorities. The victory of the Republican left coalition in the Spanish national elections was very recent, and the military rebellion that was going to change the fate of the country and the town was already being planned by a large part of the Spanish and Catalan elites. When the priest Pascual arrived to Matadepera, he realized that his parishioners were mainly landless peasants devoted to dry land farming and tree felling, living in a small town surrounded by vineyards and gardens. But the outbreak of the Civil War after the military rebellion by General Franco and the resulting revolutionary state in July 1936 obliged the priest to flee in order to save his life.