Revenge of nature | Society

We are so accustomed to tame nature that we have lost our fear. Today we walk much more relaxed in the open air because it is highly unlikely that we run into a hungry beast in freedom. A recent study, published in the journal Science, It analyzes how the human expansion in the planet has been settled with the gradual disappearance of the large terrestrial mammals and concludes that in a few decades maybe the largest one ends up being the cow. For our grandchildren, who will only know the giraffes and rhinoceroses through photographs, it will be too late.

For the victims of the flood of Sant Llorenç (Mallorca) on October 9 and in which 13 people died, it is also too late. Many of the houses affected by the runaway water are built in river sections. The whole area is a kind of pot to which torrential torrents go when it rains. In fact, as this newspaper published, the Ramblas de Sant Llorenç were cataloged at maximum risk of flooding and the torrent Ses Planes has already registered six major floods since 1850.

But the engineers channeled the water and the neighbors increased the construction of houses closer and closer to the river banks. The overflow was deadly this time. As it has been on other occasions in constructions erected even in the mouths of dry rivers that one day come back to life. Something similar happened years ago in the camping of Biescas (Huesca), installed in a natural funnel and flooded by water one August afternoon. Result: 87 dead. "The problem is that they lost their fear and forgot what the elders of the place said," explained the geologist Miquel Grimalt. The world about the recent Balearic tragedy.

The UN has published a new and alarming report on climate change. It is urgent to put an end to fossil fuels and, even if it is achieved, global warming has reached a point of no return. But the threat is so long term for our short views that we continue to trust our superior power and, of course, we have already forgotten the report - another one.

We hope that electric and efficient vehicles solve the problem and we can not change our comfortable way of life so that future generations do not have to act desperately; when it's already late. So, for example, any citizen pedestrianization project - one of the measures recommended by experts - is systematically rejected by an important social sector.

But nature will end up taking revenge and not because it is revengeful, but because it is inexorable.