As a child, I loved animals. I set up an association of friends of ornithology at school, and we had a great time, because we dedicated ourselves to observing birds and not trying to fix their issues. Later on I wanted to join up my own association with other, larger ones of international relevance. I attended meetings with delegates from several organizations to formalize agreements. I soon gave up. I realized that I liked birds, and they liked politics. I liked good birds, and they liked bad politics.

My organization died soon after. It depressed me to think that all my love for robins was worthless in the eyes of environmentalists if I didn’t want to participate in demonstrations against capitalism. I never found the exact relationship between one thing and the other. In the end, the only idiot who attempted a bird massacre was not capitalist but Mao, who killed all the sparrows, caused a gigantic imbalance in the ecosystem, and created a famine that killed millions of people.

Later I became fond of astronomy, and it was a good choice, because astronomical associations were not looking to save the stars but simply to look up at them, which is more or less what I wanted to do with animals. And, in any case, at astronomers’ meetings no idiot ever thought of quoting Marx, as was the case in talks about the coming extinction of the peregrine falcon.

Today I still have a certain fondness for animals. Not all of them. I hate things that drag their bellies on the ground, and I live in a seaside town, so I hate seagulls. There are thousands here. They attack garbage cans, they attack other birds, they snatch kids’ snacks out of their hands at school recess, they scream at night, and, most of all, they attack my car whenever I decide to leave it parked on the street. On the other hand, I am still fascinated by certain small birds, the ones that peck through the wheat fields, or those other giant ones, the birds of prey, that dominate the mountains and circle above you when you are hiking, which is just an elegant way of letting you know that they are waiting for you to die so that they can eat your entrails. I don’t hold it against them; it’s their endearing nature.

I have a strange relationship with pets. I like them and the opposite is also true. I understand their role, and I know there are people who love them like one of the family. However, an Islamist cleric said something sensible — for once — the other day: that they had already won the war against the West, because in the West everyone wants to have pets, whereas they only want to have children. He is not wrong.

And I feel an intense reaction against any attempt to humanize animals, so typical of the new generations. Those people who kiss their dog on the nose, I’m guessing they know where their dog’s nose goes when it meets another dog. Considering these habits, we should celebrate that we are hit by less pandemics than we deserve.

At this point, I represent a sort of environmental conservatism, and it makes me really angry that there are no conservatives developing, in the political realm, a similar alternative to the global warming ideological garbage of the Left. My environmental conservatism leads me to reject renewable energies because the first thing I want to conserve is the landscape. I do not consider nature a mother, and I find it rather difficult to consider it a sister. I prefer to see it simply as a gift from God.

Conserving the different species and the balance of nature is not only the most intelligent way to achieve our own survival. I like to see it more as the care a child takes not to break the gift his parents have given him for his birthday. Conservatives have time to develop an authentic right-wing environmental policy that does not put Mother Nature first, is not tainted with anti-capitalist ideology, and can work toward the same simple relationship that our rural ancestors had with nature. It is true that they killed cows, pigs, and chickens with their bare hands. But they did it to feed themselves. Before that they also cared for them and fed them. The relationship of our rural elders with nature was one of love and conscience, the awareness that man’s life comes first, with its higher dignity, and then that of all other living things.

Any discussion of environmentalism should begin by putting these things in their proper place. Unless some politician can sit six dogs, three pigeons, and four cats at the negotiating table and have a conscientious dialogue with them. But, in that case, the first thing I will ask as a human is that they pay taxes.

Translated by Joel Dalmau.