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The world is a combination of many viewpoints. Each person focuses on the part that seems most suggestive to them.

Some read the islets surrounding the main island as laboratories of evolution, where the original lizard has taken on its own colours and learned surprising survival strategies, but for others they are potential hunting grounds.

In the past, those who managed to kill one of the last specimens of the monk seal took photographs, proud of an achievement that today we interpret as testimony to the extinction of a spectacular species from our seas.

Cultures and geographies shape the way we see what surrounds us. There was a time when the habit of understanding life as an experience decided by an ethereal and external being began to give way to more empirical interpretations. In the end, it seems that we have chosen to replace the gods of the past with the economic religion.

In the seventies, it was not at all easy for a woman to lead teams with international impact. Donella Meadows, an environmental scientist, led a publication that is still fully relevant today, in which the effects of one of the key issues affecting our times were analysed: the limits to growth.

And today, from her native United States to the island of Menorca, the things that are happening constantly speak to us of the aim of her study. Endless economic growth means tearing at the seams of the planet. The devastating consequences seem not to matter, as in a kind of addiction from which many people do not know how to break free.

Donella, who left us a few years ago, predicted this after battling over the issue in many offices. We will go down in history as the first civilisation that did not save itself because it was not profitable. That is what she said, with intelligent irony. And it does not seem that she was far off the mark.

There are those who claim that our society has entered a recession, because resources are no longer as abundant as they were after the Second World War. Because since the involution of the eighties, wealth has been distributed in an increasingly unfair way. Because the results of our new worship are already beginning to surface with various symptoms.

Menorca is a territory that attracts people with high purchasing power, that increases every year the number of tourists, rental cars, and people who come to work there. It is a fashionable place, a place of success.

But the average age of residents’ vehicles is 13 years, 98% of the houses that are sold are not affordable for normal wages, young people live in exhausting job insecurity, the municipality that has a desalination plant is the one with the most affected aquifer… If we are indeed making a fortune, it must be very badly distributed.

Like the hamster on its wheel, we keep going to all the tourism fairs and promotion budgets continue to increase. Those who are in charge do not have time to lift their heads and look at the real repercussions of this devotion.

If the Meadows report made a great deal of sense at a planetary level, it is even clearer that an island like Menorca must have limits to growth. Or we will lose identity and quality of life, under the belief of being profitable.

 

(This text is an adaptation of the original article published by Miquel Camps, as coordinator of territorial policy for the GOB, in the Menorca newspaper on 12/05/26).