Clearly, we can carry out projects of landscape recovery, furthermore, this is something that is not only reasonable but should be a fixed point in our agendas, however, to dedicate our efforts to recover urban structures abandoned over the years (city landscapes) or territories damaged by our activity (old landfills, mining sites, abandoned farming lands or forests harassed by the flames ...) we should not think that everything is recoverable.
We can invest our society's resources to improve their conditions, both urban and natural, but wouldn't it be more reasonable, rather than putting band-aids everywhere, to stop generating wounds in our own land?
The idea that everything is repairable and restorable is so fallacious and naive as unrealistic. Most of the mistakes that this society produces are repairable, but some, because of the scale at which they are performed, the investment and the time, remain like scars and permanent problems. I remember that, years ago, in the same city, after giving a lecture at the University, at a later gathering some spoke of the huge capacity and technological escalation to reshape the landscape with new construction processes. Surely many of those would now blush seeing the consequences of their transformations.
The traces left some by some notorious examples such as the extension of Marina d'Or (Castellón), the "Golf Resorts" La Torre and Mar Menor (Murcia), Marina de Cope (Murcia), the urbanization of Seseña (Toledo) the PAUs (Madrid), City Valdeluz (Guadalajara)... and many others throughout the territory in Aragon, Castilla Leon, Castilla la Mancha and Catalonia, they are just a sample of a large overwhelmed anthropization magma.
Moreover, in many cases, even in the case it could be possible, we won't have resources to assign to this type of actions and, in any case, each of them will take years or decades to recover. In a crisis situation it is quite unreasonable to not give priority to essential basic public services such as education, research, transportation or health care.
Now, as the local elections, where citizens choose their leaders, are approaching, we must all remember our responsibility to know who do we choose, that actions have consequences and that the consequences in most cases do not offer a second chance. A mature and intelligent society should stop thinking that someone will come to repair the mistakes, the damage, we must demand that the approaches of the future local leaders prevent us from spending on repairs, instead of investing to improve.
We need to think that the responsibility for a badly managed territory doesn't only belong to politicians, as if they were foreign beings. In the Aristotelian sense of the word, we are all part of the cities, we are members of the "polis" and therefore we are all politicians because we have the capacity and right to decide, but we must also remember that our choices have consequences, that in most cases those consequences and scales will affect us and that they can condition our future in an irreversible way.
