Lanzarote: el papel de la crisis - Fundación César Manrique

TO LIVE HERE
Joan Buades
THE WORLD IS AN ISLAND. We live in a world which is gradually slipping out of our grip. We
are approaching the culmination of the philosophical project of modernity: that of man as
master and minister of nature, he who knows it, unravels its secrets and is, accordingly,
capable of “perfecting” its fruits. Technology, with its unceasing inventions and contrivances
of all shapes and sizes, has become the religion of our time, an era which is marked by what
somebody has termed as “technological sleepwalking”. Bribed by the television, the Internet,
the microwave and the car, we have lost the instinct of fear and misgiving about the turn
that events are taking.
At an increasingly hair-raising rate, we are breaking through sacred borders: the planet, the
immediate universe, the body, the human genome. However, and this is the tragedy of the
present moment, we are slowly but surely beginning to feel strange in our artificial paradise.
It is an open secret that we are brushing against the limits: the climatic balance that enables
us to breathe, the hydric balance allowing nature to flow and feed us, the survival of the
beauty of the landscape as the face of the planet which gives tranquillity and pleasure. We
are many, and our number is increasing all the time. We are living in the century of uprooting
and migration; of a false crossbreeding and of the destruction of the last nations to have
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