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Joan Nogué: A Traumatic Lost of the Sense of Place

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Joan Nogué is a geographer by vocation; he teaches at the University of Girona, and in May 2010 was awarded the prize Jaume I in Urbanism, Landscape, and Sustainability. He directs the Observatori del Paisatge, a research centre that is forcefully putting out the idea that we have a “right to landscape” - even lacking any authority. In this, it follows the philosophy of the European Landscape Convention: A well ordered and correctly managed landscape that evolves according to the consensus of its inhabitants and includes the right to drink clean water and breathe clean air. Nogué has created the web site www.catpaisatge.net.
Geography is a science as ancient as the civilizations of China, Greece, or Mesopotamia. It relates nature to culture and seeks global explanations even in today’s super-specialized world in which citizens no longer understand what is happening or who is in control. The market imposes short-term returns, and authorities obey financial speculators against the wishes of citizens.
Landscape is a basic part of our psychic health. Landscape connects us, it’s a reference, and its myths define us and create culture. I like Marc Recha’s film Dies d’Agost because it is the portrait of a landscape that expresses past and present sentiment and individual as well as collective emotions.
Of course I agree as a citizen of the Empordà since 12 years. Geographic accident, the climate and the sense of place of family epics that have civilized it since centuries – that is what creates towns, languages, and cultures. The landscape of the Alt Empordà with the Pyrenean mountains is the birthplace of Catalan.
I ask Nogué how an environmental study made by the company of Claudio Racionero could have allowed an aberration such as the C-31. This is a desolate, unnecessary road full of elevated curves that has divided the plain of the Alt Empordà in two. They’ve even kept the old road, full of its bridges and roundabouts. And there’s a second, earthen C-31, parallel to the first, which they’ll certainly tarmac when the Generalitat finishes transforming the Alt Empordà into a logistics development like the Zona Franca by the harbour of Barcelona. The AVE (high speed train), the MAT (high voltage power line) and the windmills are nothing but their propagandistic fetishes. And I haven’t even mentioned the enormous prison of Figueres.
The Empordà is a fragile landscape, human, and sensitive, marked by generations that have worked from sunup to sundown to create an exquisite and complex countryside. Anything that suddenly breaks this millenary balance destroys the structure of this land. This makes the inhabitants insecure, they no longer recognize where they are. This creates an often-undetected emotional disturbance that affects our mental health. That’s what we call “traumatic loss of sense of place.” It creates anxiety, rootlessness, confusion, and a feeling of impotence.
Joan Nogué isn’t a pessimist; he is a fighter with facts and reasons to confront the insatiable voracity of the speculators that live in a world without a soul.
Politicians should know the land better, and they should seek the agreement of citizens without demagogy and with transparency for the changes to the landscape they seek. Some of these changes are inevitable, but as many are not necessary. We cannot accept that the countryside is changed without debate to a landscape without a soul.// Pepe Ribas

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