The Right-Wing Environmentalist (Deusto) is a great title that paradoxically implies a defeat: it validates, that title, the hegemony of the left in the climate discourse. “It seems like an oxymoron,” says Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo, PP deputy and moderator of the conversation between the authors, Toni Timoner and Luis Quiroga. It is a book, comments its editor Verónica Puertollano before the event, full of ideas and arguments that invite debate with the same weapons: the defense of ecology by everyone, including the right, each in their own way.
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“The left has appropriated climate change because it sees in it an advantage to carry out its political agenda, an agenda of economic interventionism and, in some cases, openly anti-capitalist,” Timoner said a few days ago in EL PAÍS.
What am I doing here?, asks Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo at the start of the presentation. Álvarez de Toledo recalls that she is not a climate expert although “I know something about the countryside,” referring to her childhood “herding cattle with the gauchos,” marking that cattle and taking care of the crops. “I have been happy,” she clarifies to make it clear that it is not as if she had been working from dawn to dusk at 11 years old for a wage.
“It is a patriotic book,” announces Álvarez de Toledo: “It is a book of great ideas not because they are ours, nor because they are right-wing, but because they are good for everyone.” “Environmentalism for patriots,” she proposes as an alternative title for the essay.
The Ateneo is packed, more than 200 people, while outside, at seven in the evening, the heat is scandalous. Listening to a debate about environmentalism, anywhere, is preparing for the continuous formation of words with eco as a prefix, like “ecotinglado” or “ecofarsa,” which soon appear here.
“And why must it be titled The Right-Wing Environmentalist?” asks the moderator. The authors shrug: “We had no other choice,” and refer to the hijacking of the word by the left and the need to redefine the terms of the debate. “Denialism has become an insult and reasonable people are expelled from the public space,” lament Timoner and Quiroga. Immediately after, they list numerous environmental advances made by Republican presidents of the United States. “And the politician who first globally warned about the consequences of climate change was Margaret Thatcher, who warned that we must be the custodians of the planet. And who created in 1996 the first Ministry of Environment in Spain?” But this was neither capitalized on nor made a banner, they comment.
In 1996 Aznar was governing Spain, whose government created that first ministry, which was held by Isabel Tocino. Aznar writes the book’s prologue. Valentina Martínez Ferro, from the Ateneo, highlighted a phrase from the former president in the prologue: “Promoting civilized controversy is important.” “Let’s see who this right-wing environmentalism annoys more, some or others,” jokes Álvarez de Toledo.
It was said that Aznar himself might appear at the presentation, but Aznar is already in myth mode among his own, so his absences are more revered than his presences, so flesh and blood.
