The Barbarian Years

We review the beginning of the environmental-conservation movement in Spain in the year 70 of the founding of SEO-BirdLife.

It has been said on many occasions that Francisco Bernis, founder of SEO (1954), used artillery periscopes in the trench to which the Spanish civil war led to, to observe the flight of birds. What a touching and beautiful allegory; instruments for killing men that, however, he used to appreciate the beauty of free fauna. Some years later, a very young man José Antonio Valverde, sick with tuberculosis, frequented the wetlands of Pisuerga and the Duero River in search of fresh air for his battered lungs. He would fall in love with the marshes forever and go all the way to the Guadalquivir to save Doñana from destruction (1968). Around that same time, in 1965, a boy with long hair and an aged voice appeared for the first time in TVE with a sacral falcon on his forearm. He spoke to viewers about caring for nature, eradicating the practice of poison and protecting predators of Iberian fauna because they were essential for the balance of ecosystems.

The years in which Bernis, Valverde and Félix (who we are talking about in this Post) broke into Spanish society, public administrations such as the Institute for Agricultural Reform and Development (IRYDA), desiccated the marshes and cleared hundreds of thousands of hectares of native Mediterranean forest to plant pine and eucalyptus trees as raw material for the paper industry. El National River Game and Fishing Service I controlled the Harmful Animal Extinction Boards, a kind of organized commandos that filled the mountains with traps, traps and strychnine to wipe out wolves, lynx, bears and large raptors, paying rewards to people who showed up in their offices with claws, fangs or heads of these animals.

El Ministry of Public Works (MOPU) built hotels and second homes like donuts right on the coastline, to provide the coast with the essential services that the country needed on its takeoff as a tourist power, in an attempt to turn Spain into The Caribbean from Europe.

At the beginning of the 1950s, unlike Western democracies that had large conservation organizations since the end of the 19th century, there was no association in our country for the defense of nature. And then everything came to a head. The mind that opens up to a new idea never returns to its original size, and in the middle of that coastal concrete wasteland, forests full of eucalyptus trees and mountains full of traps and poison, Bernis founded SEO, Valverde led the creation of ADENA And of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and Félix undertook a pedagogical and environmental awareness offensive that has not yet been paralleled today.

Today, our country has 16 national parks and hundreds of protected areas. Environmental regulations are regulated by more than 20 specific laws and dozens of other decrees. There are lists for the protection of flora and fauna, the use of poison has been banned and prosecuted, and thousands of tourists pay money to photograph a wolf, a bear or a lynx. The State invests in public volunteer programs and environmental education, and the associative fabric is very rich in conservation and naturalist groups. The challenges will undoubtedly always be more than the achievements, but the balance of improvements, commitment and awareness is undeniable.

And we owe it all to these three men and to those years that, as in the movie of Fernando Colomo, we will call 'barbarians' because without a doubt they marked their lives and those of many generations, because of the frenetic activity and the awakening to a world with greater sensitivity, because everything developed in the midst of a very tense and difficult political situation, because of the much they taught and learned, and above all, because in the end, Bernis, Valverde and Félix invested the best of their lives in those years to make ours better today.

If twenty years is nothing, as Gardel sang in his famous tango, perhaps 70 years are nothing either, but it is more than enough time to offer us with a serene perspective the advances achieved and the change in mentality so desired.

Congratulations to the Spanish Ornithological Society on the 70th Anniversary of its founding (1954 — 2024).

Chema Fernández, Biodiversity