Yayo Herrero. "Metamorphosis". Book

Yayo Herrero. "Metamorphosis". Book

Hello friends, 

Either I am a victim of the poor communication of many members of the group and most of you already know the book and/or the author, or it is for another reason, but I did not know the book or the author. 

The fact is that a couple of days ago it was my birthday and my son Toni, along with Mar and her daughters gave me this book. Toni told me that reading the back cover, and "given your fondness for humanist groups, I imagine you will like it". 

I thought it would be one more of the twenty-odd bedside books.

Normally, when I go to sleep, I take a book from the one I have on my headboard, depending on what interests me at that moment. Depending on the dream, I read a page or two, sometimes more, and, when my eyes close, I put the dot in the book, and then book and glasses at the headboard and fall asleep. 

The same day (night) I started reading this book, out of curiosity and novelty, I read well over two pages and decided to interrupt the habit of pecking at all the books, let them rest for a while and read this book until the end. Many books, when you finish them, leave you the same as before you started them, although most of them provide you with a change, either they give you some knowledge you didn't have, or some new ideas, and the most influential ones, even, can make you change your way of thinking or even some behaviors (they modify you, improve your personality and behavior).  that is, they educate you, they train you. When part of the information they give you you incorporate into yourself, you learn it, you take it for yourself. And this is the case with this book for me. It is a case of education in the opposite direction: It is said that parents, always, and school for a while, are the main educators of each person. In this case it is a child who educates the father instead of a father who educates the child. And it is not the first time that this has happened. Also 26 years ago, also on the occasion of a birthday, all the children gave me "Solc. Catalan literature with commented texts", one of the 20-odd bedside books of permanent consultation. But the first one who had given me an informative-formative book had been Fred a year before we were married. I had already "fallen off the horse", but it hadn't been an eternity of years either, the bad beast had not yet descended into hell, and the history books we had here had to be taken with a grain of salt. He gave me: "History of Francoist Spain" by Max Gallo edited by Ruedo Ibérico, which provided me with more objective information and not as partisan as that of the books published in Spain with the corresponding "nihil obstat".

What does the book's flap tell us about the author? 

Yayo Herrero (Madrid, 1965) is a consultant, researcher and professor in the fields of political ecology, ecofeminism and education for sustainability. He is currently a professor at the University of Cantabria.

She holds a PhD in Society, Politics and Culture from the University of the Basque Country, as well as a degree in Social and Cultural Anthropology, a diploma in Social Education and in Agricultural Technical Engineering.

She is an activist and collaborates with various media. She is currently a member of Garúa Sociedad Cooperativa and director of the editorial board of CTXT. She was the state coordinator of the Ecologists in Action platform and director of FUHEM.

She is the author of The Five Elements. An ecological literacy primer (2021), Absences and losses (2021), Educating for sustainability. An Ecofeminist Look at Education (2022) and Toma de tierra (2023). He has written in collective books such as Cambiar las gafas para mirarr el mundo (2011), La gran encrucijada (2016) and Petróleo (2018). She is also co-author of the illustrated books Climate Change (2019) and Human Rights (2022)

What does the back cover of the book tell us about the book itself?

In the face of the multiple crises of our present and the defeatist responses imposed by the ultra-right and other devastating forces of life on Earth, we must promote a radical transformation of our society, an authentic anthropological revolution.

Through participatory community processes of learning, dialogue and policies that cover all areas of life, a social metamorphosis must be promoted that guarantees a fair future for all on a planetary scale.

Yayo Herrero, in this essay, analyzes the drift of extractivist capitalism and, from an ecosocial perspective, deploys arguments and strategies to abandon the culture of misdirection in which we find ourselves and lays the foundations to get closer and closer to another possible world.  

Some paragraphs of the book: 

"... people that  I have so many times in front of me and with whom I share, without contemplation, data and experiences that show that the world in  which we thought we lived no longer exists".

"Literature, as always throughout  my life,  helped me. Revisiting Poet in New York, made me feel less naïve. Federico also cried and turned   into essential verses the discovery of the dehumanization and deterioration of a society that filled everything with smoke, with shit... A ruthless  culture that turns forests, glaciers, mountains, animals, plants and daughters into money and waste. And that uses that money to turn more forests, more glaciers, more mountains, more animals, more plants and more daughters into much more money and much more waste. García Lorca, inspired by the disappointment caused by the industrial modernity of New York, turned into poetry the longing, the anxious panting, for another way of being and being in the world in which freedom and justice, love and beauty were the norm"

"Pessimism is a kind of activism sustained on the conviction that what we fear most will always happen."

"Optimism is the tendency to think that the most favorable forecast will always happen.

"Building hope requires recognizing fears and knowing where we are." 

“… other times the future is projected as a return to a past that never existed." "In that future, women will be like those of before, jobs will be like those of before, markets, cycles and seasons will work as God intended. This retro-utopia leads to making authoritarian supremacisms acceptable."

"Hope is a journey that illuminates the possibility of a desired destination." 

 "The future then is a project to be imagined. To project implies to devise, plan, weave, forge, sketch, conceive, design, surprise, limit, evaluate, rehearse, explore... This book wants  to contribute to that project.

A project that begins by acknowledging two preliminary issues. The first is that the world as we know it is crumbling and that this decaying environment  , that strange world , is the one that we must learn to reinhabit. The second is that, generally speaking, we are not well prepared to make this path": 

"A project that builds presents that allow us to project desirable horizons in which all lives are lived with desire and dignity, where all lives matter and fit in the context of a planet, the only one in which life is possible and which, however, is already another".

"A project that looks to the past, the only time machine we have, to discover excesses, errors and abandoned powers that have brought us to the world we inhabit in the present".

"A proposal that draws from many shared works and experiences". 

Fire.

"The world is burning, and the strange fires of the 21st century create their own weather. A new, inhospitable and uncontrollable climate.

Pyrotornadogenesis. This is the name of the process that creates the fire tornadoes that erupt in new forest fires.

Fire tornadoes are the monstrous children of pyrocumulonimbus, clouds created by fire itself."

Capitalism. 

"Forest fires either spread or die. Like capitalism that expands or succumbs.

Under capitalist logic, growing is a synonym for burning. The consent of capitalism is tantamount to granting a 'license to burn everything'.

Like the fire in the fire, capitalism can only move forward without taking into account tomorrow, or even today. It is no use appealing to risk, caution or pity. Capitalism knows no warnings or precautions. "He doesn't know panic or hesitation because he's just not equipped for this." It has an irrepressible tendency to devour the social, political and natural bases of its own existence. It is, says Nancy Fraser, cannibalistic capitalism." 

“… More violently than any other religious fundamentalism, it declares a protracted war against territories, forms of peoples' self-sufficiency: unleashing a great transformation, or mutation.

Capitalism corners the human. It maintains a structural link with ecocide and human exploitation. It manipulates and disrupts the most basic devices of human consistency.

Capitalism in terms of  historical times is the detonation of a bomb of an uncountable amount of megatons that has turned our world into a strange place." 

If you would be so kind, please take this survey:

Before reading this, were you familiar with Yayo Herrero? Yes / No?

Send your answer to arc4698@hotmail.com 

Thank you.