The contagion of indignation in the face of environmental alarms: from SMS to TikTok

Xurxo Souto, singer of Os Diplomáticos de Monte Alto and one of the leaders of the Ahora Máis movement (and its cultural arm Burla Negra), bought his first mobile phone in the days of chapapote, when with the collapse of the Prestige Galicia began to be dyed the color of mourning and covered in dead birds between the end of 2002 and the beginning of 2003. Until then, the musician had not needed to be connected to everyone when he left home. But the landline, given the magnitude of the worst ecological disaster that Spain had ever known and the need to be present everywhere, was not enough. “We communicated by SMS, but of course, from person to person, and without videos or images as can be done now through WhatsApp,” recalls another prominent witness of those events, Xosé Manuel Pereiro, author of Prestige. Just as it was, just as we were (Prestige. Just as it was, just as we wereGalaxia Publishing) and coordinator of Chapapote (KO Books). “The way we had to disseminate information to large groups was through email lists,” explains the journalist, “this is how demonstrations and rallies were called, like those that also took place on March 11 before the Government delegations.”

The transmission of indignation in the face of environmental and social alarms was less rapid and did not reach all audiences with the astonishing agility of the current networks, in which now, since Friday, photos and videos of influencers and witnesses on the beach. More or less fortunate comments from experts and non-experts and calls for solidarity abound on TikTok, on Facebook, on Instagram. The smartphones They arrived at the sandy beaches contaminated with pellets plastics long before the political leaders, who this Monday continued arguing about the powers to manage the cleaning of those balls of less than five millimeters, coming from a container ship, whose formula remains a mystery.

This power of the networks and the WhatsApp and Telegram macro groups with hundreds of participants that have emerged are at the origin of the volunteering that has been organized since the weekend to clean the Galician coast. Ball by ball, with your hands, with sieves, strainers, baskets, dustpans and brooms. In Galicia, the strength and immediacy of the networks was proven, for the first time, with the large fires that devastated the community in October 2017, when the fire, in about three days, devastated 62,000 hectares and killed four people. The Internet was instantly saturated with terrifying videos of flames on the edge of houses and of neighbors making human chains to carry water to the outbreaks that were spreading uncontrollably.

“A lot of marine fauna is dying because it confuses pellets plastic with food,” says a young man from the Muros and Noia estuary in a recent TikTok video. “Those little threads, these little balls,” criticizes another girl in reference to the “threads of plasticine” with which Mariano Rajoy defined the thick, black fuel that drowned the Galician coast 21 years ago. “These people must have thought…, 'we are in the Christmas holidays, why are we going to worry everyone with something that is simply a Prestige white tide version?”, continues to ironize this tiktoker in reference to the Government of the Xunta. The volunteer places, contributing to doing what the Xunta de Galicia is not doing.” “This is the drama we are experiencing on the Galician coast these days,” continues the young man, also on TikTok, while he plays in the background. Grândola, vila morena. Another group of volunteers spreads on social networks a scene that they have just witnessed: they say that the cleaning crew mobilized by the Galician Executive has gone down to work on the beach coinciding with the arrival of a team of reporters from Galician Television and that when the camera left the operators have vanished. The message spreads like wildfire.

“Although the communication was by email and SMS,” recalls Pereiro, “the Prestige It was the first crisis that we experienced with the Internet: there was already the possibility of finding a lot of information, we could enter the website of the different oceanographic institutes in Europe, such as the French CEDRE [Centro de Documentación, Investigación y Experimentación sobre la Contaminación Accidental del Agua]”. Also, at that time and as a result of the catastrophe, “blogs multiplied,” he points out, “bloggers were the influencers from then, but with a fundamental characteristic: they had to know how to write,” jokes Pereiro.

An expert in covering information for many media outlets, including RTVE and EL PAÍS, about the Galician coast, the veteran reporter remembers other episodes in which, as in this crisis of the pellets, there were container ships that lost their cargo off the Galician coast. In 2006, a cargo ship littered the beaches of the Carballo area (A Coruña) with various objects. Curiously, “different merchandise arrived at each beach, in such a way that one was filled with printers, another only received computer cases, and another further, soup cans.”

Tires and tomato paste

In 2018, the MSC Eloane lost about 40 containers off the Costa da Morte. The sandy beaches were covered with cans of powdered milk, leather sofas, and cartons of American blonde tobacco. These shipwrecked goods are what in Galicia is known as crebas, and they have been pushed to the shore for centuries by the force of the ocean and the wind, and collected by the population. The current tide of pellets, plastic pellets either nurdlesa marine pollution that has affected many coasts of the planet for decades, comes from a container that fell into the sea from the deck of the merchant ship Toconao, with the Liberian flag. With this deposit, as revealed yesterday by the Government Delegation in Galicia, another five were rushed “with tomato paste, tires, aluminum bars and rolls of film.”

The accident occurred further south, off the coast of Viana do Castelo, in Portugal, but the cargo was pushed by the sea towards Galicia and reached Asturias on Sunday. According to what the legal representative of the Maersk shipowner informed the central government, there were 1,050 25-kilogram bags, about 26 tons in total, that were traveling in a container and were left adrift. Many broke in the water, and those that arrived whole on the Galician beaches have a written clue about their content: it is a “UV stabilizer” of the “UV 9000” type, used as an additive in the manufacture of all types of manufactures. plastics. The Xunta de Galicia has announced that this week the results of the analyzes will be known and it will be known what the white balls are made of and to what extent they are dangerous.

“Family, one of the biggest environmental catastrophes of recent times is occurring in Galicia,” a boy who is fond of sea sports begins his intervention in a Facebook video. “For a few weeks now, millions of microplastics have been arriving on all the beaches of our coast,” explains the young man with awareness, “and there is a more serious problem: no one can do anything. Many of us have tried to collect them on our own and it is not easy at all. It is impossible and more and more are arriving.” Humberto Less, another environmental activist on Facebook, assures that wastewater discharges pellets They are “the closest thing” to the wreck of an oil tanker, with the difference that they go unnoticed and only come to light when people detect the material on the beaches. “These balls are often mistake
n for food by the fish. Let's give it the echo it deserves” to the tide that is arriving in Galicia, he asks his followers. Simón Pardiñas, on Instagram, speaks from Riazor beach in A Coruña. Instead of white balls, he focuses in extreme close-up on hundreds of pieces of “plastics, garbage and garbage” of all colors among the algae, from bottles to dental floss brushes. “Let's see if this serves to make people aware that the sea is not a landfill,” he concludes, “but the greatest treasure we have.”

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