An Environmental Rock And A Hard Place

When it comes to the environment, you just can't win. The current government in the Balearics is probably the most environmentally aware and environmentally determined (in terms of policy) that there has been. This consciousness extends beyond matters of land use. Climate change is of such importance that it has its own government department. The virtues of clean energy are being demonstrated by a conversion to the use of solar for government buildings, by testing electric buses, by subsidising town halls for the installation of electric vehicle charging-points, by investing in more rail electrification, by betting the electricity shop on a scheme for solar to power the Balearics.

The government's environmentalism can at times seem to go too far. It wasn't the government as such which ordered the demolition of the chiringuitos at Es Trenc (it was in fact the national government via the courts). But now they've gone, the local administrations have latched on to regulations like the space that sunloungers have to be from the dunes and those for utility supplies to the demountable chiringuitos (if they actually materialise). When it comes to the next election and to an evaluation of this government's legacy, the Es Trenc Nature Park will be deemed one of the triumphs. This is a government committed to the environment, but it is caught between a rock and a hard place of environmental policies. Whatever it does environmentally, there is traditionalist or environmental opposition.

If the agricultural world ever needs to protest, it typically does so by sending out the tractor boys. Palma has its farming areas but they aren't anywhere near the promenade and the Passeig Sagrera. Tractors will nevertheless appear on Saturday. The farmers are part of a countryside alliance that will be demonstrating outside government HQ.

The farmers and the government (for which read the environment and agriculture ministry) have had an uneasy relationship. The minister Vicenç Vidal has not, to be fair, had the greatest of luck. Mother Nature has done what Mother Nature does, which is to affect the land because of climate and plague. Vidal might argue in a joined-up governmental sense that policies for climate change have in mind drought and floods, but these are not policies for the immediate past. The farmers still feel they weren't compensated sufficiently. The agriculturalists are now seeking tourist tax revenue for replanting trees lost to the xylella plague.

Vidal can't control the weather, he can apply some control over xylella, and he most certainly can potentially control the worst affects of heavy rains and floods. The farmers are not alone in criticising the environment and agriculture ministry for not doing more to keep the torrents clear so that flooding (hopefully) doesn't occur. Town halls have had their say as well.

But what has got the farmers, hunters and owners of rural fincas so agitated that they are protesting is the government's expansion of zones for the special protection of birds (ZEPA). In a nutshell the rural community feels that its rights and interests are being interfered with. The association for the defence of the rural world says that it has done a pretty good job over the years when it comes to bird protection, alluding to hunting for population control purposes, but hunting is far from being the only issue. Larger protection zones could mean, for example, a broadening of restrictions on harvesting, the burning of vegetation and phytosanitary control, i.e. measures to avoid plant disease and pest.

So, there is a traditional agricultural lobby that is opposed to a particular strand of the government's overall environmental policies. While the government insists that there is compatibility, this certainly isn't always clear to those sectors affected, such as the farmers. ZEPA, meanwhile, is lauded by the environmentalist lobby - GOB in particular, as would be expected because of its origins as a bird protection group. And ZEPA features highly in the government's grand energy project for eliminating emissions - the creation of photovoltaic plants.

In Llucmajor there are three separate projects for these plants. Each one raises contentious environmental issues. One, for the finca of Sa Caseta, affects a zone that the town hall considers to be for agricultural, ecological and landscape protection. For a second - S'Águila - there is a ZEPA report pending. The third is the most emotive of all. Sa Marina, says GOB, is a magnificent agroforestry area that has escaped the changes that have occurred in other parts of Mallorca's rural world. The group wants there to be a ZEPA, and if there were to be, it could seriously inhibit any plans for a photovoltaic plant.

GOB is accusing the government of wanting to turn this whole part of Llucmajor into one giant solar farm, but the nub of the issue is that these plants have to go somewhere. And mostly any location that is identified will have some environmental consideration. The government really can't win.

Dragonera: Forty Years Later

July 1977. It is a date when something highly significant occurred. An incipient environmental consciousness in Mallorca found both voice and direct action. It was extraordinary, an act played out against the background of equally incipient democracy. It was a time when public administrations - local authorities, police - were only starting to come to terms with what democracy entailed, a feature of which was the right to protest.

The date has in fact a far greater symmetry than mere month and year. It has entered Mallorcan folklore as 7-7-77. The day, seventh of July 1977 when fifty people occupied the island of Dragonera off the Andratx coast. It was a landmark protest, one that confirmed a movement of environmental conservation, something that had been all too conveniently ignored during the Franco era.

To understand the full background, one has to go back three years earlier. The island's owner sold Dragonera to a company called Pamesa for some one hundred million pesetas (around 600,000 euros at the rate that was used at the time when the euro was introduced). The understanding was that half of the island would remain in its natural condition; the other half would be developed and would include a marina. (The island's area is slightly under three square kilometres.) In fact, the plan was to involve the construction of four developments with capacity for some 4,000 people. Essentially, the whole of the island was to be built on. The alarm bells were set off.

It's important to appreciate that there were pockets of environmental resistance prior to the establishment of democracy. One organisation was GOB, which was founded in 1973. Although ostensibly an ornithological group, GOB's activism was to become far more broad-based. It was one of several organisations which voiced its opposition to the Dragonera plan in 1974, the year before Franco's death.

A joint statement from GOB and the other organisations was sent to the mayor of Andratx. It referred to the irreversible alteration that the project would entail and to the importance of Dragonera in the context of Mediterranean flora and fauna. It called on the town hall to defend scientific and social rights. Around the same time, the issue reached an outside audience. The Paris-Baleares magazine alerted France to the plan, while the Council of Europe was petitioned and requested to recommend that the Spanish government made Dragonera a nature park, which would mean that it couldn't be developed.

Two years later, in 1976, there were more moves to prevent development. This time, the opposition could also count on the Fomento del Turismo, the Mallorca Tourist Board. But all the petitions, the requests, the publicity were to prove to be to no avail. In what now seems one of the most astonishingly ridiculous acts of premeditated environmental vandalism (even by Mallorcan standards of the 1960s and 1970s), Andratx town hall approved the plan.

When the definitive project was published in the Official Bulletin on 5 July 1977 - it was given the green light by the provincial committee for urban development (there was at that point no Council of Mallorca or regional government) - the decision to occupy the island was taken. Two days later, with by now the whole of the Spanish media aware of what was going on, two boats with fifty people crossed the short stretch from the Andratx coast.

They were to be described as variously anarchists, leftists, artists and ecologists. They may well have been, but there were many people in Mallorca who certainly didn't fall into the first two categories, if any of them, who were outraged and supported the occupation. The occupation was to last two weeks. There were meant to have been many more occupiers, but boat owners were "persuaded" not to take them. The Guardia Civil kept watch, whereas in previous times it might have opted for its own direct action; the force's neutrality was to later be acknowledged after officers initially landed on the island to check on things. However, the occupiers were, up to a point, starved into giving up their protest.

The movement behind the occupation was known as Terra i Llibertat - land and freedom. It inspired enormous support from across Mallorca, and the occupation genuinely marked a major turning-point in conservation. The official reaction was to be uncommonly swift. The president of the Provincial Deputation, Gabriel Sampol, stamped his signature in opposing the development. The matter was to end up in the courts, and in 1984, following repeated demonstrations, the Balearic High Court dismissed an order that had permitted construction. Eventually, on 14 July 1988, the Council of Mallorca approved the purchase of Dragonera for 280 million pesetas. In 1995, it was given nature park status.

Last week, the events of 1977 were remembered. Sandra Espeja, the environment councillor at the Council of Mallorca, referred to how direct action awakened the people and transformed policies. Dragonera was a landmark.