The great thing about cycling without a plan, pre knowledge or a decent map is you pass through landscapes you never expected and observe them with fresh eyes.
So it happened that cycling across the North West interior of Spain, what was pine forest gradually became agriculture, firstly small fields later develping into a monoculture of corn as far as the eye could see.
As we cycled on we noticed rivers running dry, pretty strange for the winter. Ditches lined the fields filled with stagnant irrigation water murky with topsoil and there were few hedges or thickets to give wildlife a chance to hang on. All this information gently trickles in leaving the feeling that this is a landscape almost entirely owned and exploited by man. It leaves the feeling this is deeply wrong.
As we reached Bibliofuente this use of this land became clear. A bioethanol plant sparkled silver in the sea of corn, burning food for fuel and bellowing cloud into the sky.
Biofuels which could be such a positive development when using a waste product on a small scale, empowering communities to be able to provide their own fuel, has of course been taken a used in the most illogical of ways, high imput, high impact, largescale.
Round the corner, was a new park and reserve, complete with artistic representations of nature, stone circles and a layout design for new leisure apartments on the river front. The social project perhaps to ‘make up´ for the transformation of a landscape, ecology and lives of a people.
Its hard to know passing through a brief observer, how the local people feel about it all. Of what rationality decided that it was ok to sacrafice a huge swath of land to be a cornfield factory as long as you leave one small patch to express our reverence of nature.
