Flood

I can’t write, as a personal experience, about exceptional natural disasters very famous in the world which we has been seen in all TV programmes. I am talking, for instance, about recent catastrophes like the Indian floods, the Peru earthquake or the Californian forest fire.
However, some years ago I lived a local flood in my city and I can say that it was really horrible. The causes of this flood were the prolonged and abundant rain in the up-river of Llobregat. After raining for many days in the area the water of the river overflowed and covered much of the city for many days. Luckily, no one’s been hurt because it happened during the day and people were awake, if not many people could be died.
Even now, when I close my eyes, I can see the dirty river’s water destroyed everything in its path.
Actually, Many months after the flood we knew that it happened, above all, because the Llobregat river was very dirty. What’s more, we found out that a building company threw rubbish in the river and hindered its normal flow.
After living this kind of experience let me ask an important question: are the natural disasters always inevitable? Why don’t human beings respect nature more?

Naomi Klein

Last week while I was looking for information about the war and its consequences I found various interviews to Naomi Klein. I thought that it would be worth to share it with you. What is more, I'll try to post a video to my blog.

Naomi Klein is a Canadian journalist, well known for her political analyses of corporate globalization. I knew her first book “Non Logo”, published in 2000, which for many people became a manifiesto of the anti-globalization movement. The book analysed the publicity of the large corporations and try to create a consumer culture. Klein criticized these corporations, like Nike, which are also often guilty of exploiting workers in the world's poorest countries in pursuit of ever-greater profits.

These last weeks Naomi Klein was in Barcelona to present her last book The Shock Doctrine, The Rise of Disaster Capitalism published on 4 September 2007. The book argues that governments introduce repressive legislation at times of national and international crisis. The Shock Doctrine explain how America’s “free market” policies have come to dominate the world-- through the exploitation of disaster-shocked people and countries.

After writing the book, Noemi Klein with her friend Alfonso Cuaron made a short film in order to diffuse the theory of the book. I found it really hard but very interesting. You have it there:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kieyjfZDUIc&eurl=http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine/short-film]