Different environmental organizations from Lanzarote will participate next Saturday, April 20 in the demonstration Canarias tiene un límite, within the framework of "an essential demand" that will be held simultaneously on all the islands, including La Graciosa.
The environmental groups of Lanzarote are aware of "the chronic environmental, social and economic impacts on the island derived from an oversized, uncontrolled and unsustainable tourism industry from any rational perspective in terms of guaranteeing the general interest and the dignified future of the population and the protection of the limited and vulnerable island territory."
This model, "sponsored and maintained for decades by and with the political support and of the governing institutions, generates multimillion-dollar profits for minority business sectors, but condemns the majority of the population to precariousness and social inequality in undignified conditions of wages, housing, water and other basic and essential rights."
Thus, they add that "the massification of the island territory, derived from a tourism industry without effective and reasoned control, generates permanent impacts -direct and indirect- on marine, air and terrestrial biodiversity, on the conservation of its cultural heritage, on the maintenance of an essential primary sector that is severely punished by market policies, and on the chaotic and ruinous management of the water cycle in a scenario of increasingly serious drought, with losses of this vital resource exceeding 50% of desalinated water."
The environmental groups join this demonstration to "reject the disastrous and polluting model of treatment of urban solid waste and discharges of sewage and industrial water into the sea, the perpetual atmospheric pollution derived from the burning of fossil fuels in the generation of energy and water, the mining extractions in spaces that generate landscape and support rain-fed agriculture that, despite its abandonment, continues to constitute a resource, the alarming destruction of the coastline due to hotel occupation and other tourist infrastructures, and the effects that cause the constant degradation of the landscapes of an island that holds the award of Biosphere Reserve."
In addition, these associations have indicated that "promoting the construction of more hotels, more roads, more cars, more power lines, more roundabouts, more dual carriageways, more expansions of industrial ports destroying seabeds, and covering the island with tar in the name of progress, among other variables, only contributes to maintaining a predatory model, unfair and counterproductive for the island, antagonistic to the one that has been demanded for 40 years and is currently demanded to demand common sense, human dignity and social justice (health, salaries, education, housing, youth employment, among others), by the first economy of the Canary archipelago under the responsibility of those who govern."
The organizations signing this statement "make it clear that they are not against tourism as an economic sector, but demand that the governing bodies make a radical and immediate change to the current model for attacking the rights of the social majority and the effective conservation of a unique and very vulnerable nature, heritage of the present and future generations of Lanzarote."
To conclude, they have indicated that "Lanzarote does not support the more than 3 million annual tourists who visit it. Lanzarote is exhausted. Lanzarote has a limit."
This statement is signed by:
Association for the Development of Comprehensive Climate Actions-ADACIS
Viento del Noreste Association (Desert Watch)
Ecologists in Action Lanzarote
PANTHALASSA Dissemination and Research of the Marine Environment
Papacría
SEO/BirdLife
WWF