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Ecocultural Littoral Exhibition of Preliminary Results
Introduction
This exhibition is the result of a deep effort to understand those constructive dynamics undergoing the relationship between society and its environment, as is the case of the coastline of Cantabria.
Productive synergies between nature and human being entail ecocultural values, positive relationships between people, their environment, and their future expectations. Enriching experiences building environmental knowledge, ways to use and exploit which allow an environmentally and socially sustainable development, looking for citizens´ participation in order to define their cities, their towns, and in short, their own future.
The research project on ecocultural heritage of Cantabria´s coastline, sponsored by Marcelino Botín Foundation, is based on the integration of different disciplines in order to analyze the impact of traditional as well as modern human activities in the marine environment and ecosystem, identifying those traditions, customs, and knowledge integrated in their environments (what we call Ecocultural Heritage), with potentials for sustainable development. The use of new technologies to be applied to the ecocultural development is also analyzed in this study.
We next present a synthesis of this study’s preliminary results.
A. Describing the Littoral: Cantabria: Ecocultural Littoral
The Cantabrian Coastline is an interesting case when analyzing the relationship between society and its environment. This region is a paradigm of the confluence between mountain and sea, Mediterranean and Atlantic ecosystems and cultures, and in short, living synergies based on a great diversity that is not always appreciated. Partly due to these values, the coastline has suffered a speedy transformation, which has caused worries and uncertainty about its future.
This exhibition is the result of an integral study on human interaction with the regional coastline, and of the analysis of some future proposals.
A.1. Environment: Biological diversity in a geological meeting place
The shape of Cantabria´s Coastline shows singular characteristics which opens to rich and diverse geography with a large variety of forms: big cliffs, dune systems, large beaches, and also most of the largest estuaries of the Cantabrian “cornice” (called this way due to the shape of the coastline). The last centuries have witnessed a speedy environmental change due to human influence. Cantabria´s natural features went from implying intrinsic values to becoming in many cases a limitation for certain models of development. But many of these natural values in Cantabria coastline still remain. Questions we ask in this study are, what degree of preservation remains, and why? What possibilities of natural preservation and development we have?
A.2. Society and Culture: Social dispersion, work integration
Based on the information we have available nowadays, we may say that the littoral of Cantabria has been settled by human beings from almost the beginning of our existence. At first, the guarantee of water and food resources, weather moderation, and the existence of large cave systems used as a shelter and home through glaciations promoted semi-nomadic settlements based on a vegetable gathering, hunting, fishing, and shellfish gathering economy.
Along the progressive ice retrieval, and throughout the Neolithic and ancient ages, people also settled in high valleys. It is during the Middle Ages that the different types of traditional land ordering of rural and urban settlements to present days are defined.
Some raising questions are: What is the impact of social demographic changes in the popular culture of Cantabria? How is traditional and popular culture preserved? What possibilities of cultural preservation and development do we have?
A.3. Developmental models in Cantabria littoral
The interaction between culture and environment in the coastline of Cantabria largely explains how society has been developing. Its dynamics have undergone four basic models: Traditional subsistence, commerce, and lately, extractive industry and the tourist/urban model. Each of them has its own cultural and environmental implications.
Nowadays those models based on commerce, industry, and tourism have concentrated at the coast. This has led to a large productive imbalance and territorial segregation between the coastal region and the mountains, with important social, cultural, and environmental impacts.
Questions are, how different development models have affected Cantabria´s littoral culture and nature? What types of social development may promote the ability for cultural and natural preservation?
B. Analysing the Littoral: Research Theory, methodology, and procedure
Studying Cantabria´s Littoral from an Ecocultural Approach
We understand that in order to approach Cantabria´s Coastline with the right insight, we have to take three fundamental dimensions into account: environment, culture, and social development. But above all is the relationship among them itself, as they are not independent from each other.
The main hypothesis of this study states that relationships that integrate society and environment are valid sources of sustainable development. This means we have to identify and enhance social and environment characteristics that imply integrative values. This necessarily means to put all fundamental parts and points of view in common.
The Ecocultural Littoral project is based on an effort to integrate different disciplines, providing width to information gathering and analysis. Results came up from analyses joining environmental sciences, biology, economy, sociology, community psychology, or administration and political sciences. Data were gathered from a diversity of methods and integrated in data processing systems, providing the results with a more complete view and strengthening the validity of the conclusions.
C. Results: Dimensions of analysis, fields of action
Environmental analysis. When statistically crossing the social-economic and demographic (SED) features of the municipalities, grouping them according to Atlantic basins in Cantabria, with indicators of water and sediment composition in the estuaries of the same basins, results show large significant relationships between both groups of variables. Reduced groups of SED statistically explain up to 60% of the variation in sediment components and up to 30% in water. Also, degrees of concentration of local economy in the main productive branches arise as the main SEDs affecting the aquatic environment at the littoral.
Contamination, earth filling, and speedy housing development appear as the main responsible factors for the quantity and quality reduction of Cantabria coastal wetlands. Despite this, a series of ecological connected areas and spaces with high values still remain well preserved, many times invisible.
Social-community analysis. Results on the analyses of different social positions and discourses suggest that even though people highly value the cultural and natural heritage of the littoral, they not always maintain an active attitude towards its preservation. On the one hand, the “developmentist” positions stresses more a single economic model for the development of the region, and in general reduces natural preservation to a second rank. On the other hand, positions defining cultural and natural preservation as a value for development are more explicit and technical, and look for experiences and referents in other regions and countries.
Integrating results. A strong positive relationship between biodiversity, environmental quality, cultural richness and economic diversification is suggested, in quantitative well as in qualitative analyses. Mythologizing conceptions of what we understand as “developed societies” and sociocultural changes within the last decades are related to a decay of social knowledge about their own environments as well as that of those environments themselves.
However, many social activities and knowledge about the littoral remain; they show large potentials for a sustainable development. In the next sections we summarize results by fields of analysis and proposals gathered and merged in this study.
D. Formulating proposals
D.1. Low Fishing Craftman quality, a key to merge economy and ecology
The crafts and lore of low fishing in Cantabria are part of the region’s identity, they also maintain higher ecological values than other fishing methods. They imply a future source of wealth and quality in a reducing market. Traditional fishing products might become a strategic axis for local development if balanced and complemented with other economic sectors such as tourism, by enhancing its relationship with cultural identity and the quality of the products.
D.2. Ports of Cantabria Gates of the region to the World
Cantabria´s history cannot be understood without its ports and maritime transport, main historical drives of the region’s commercial development and exchange with other regions and countries.
Nowadays, Cantabria only has a public, official commercial port, the Port of Santander, gathering about 20% of the region´s Gross Domestic Product. A fundamental question is the environmental impact on the estuary by the fillings needed for its growth. There are alternative proposals to these fillings though, such as devoting the spaces and warehouses near the docks as much as possible to the products of the port, using ramps to carry the products to inner spaces, or recovering the railway to allow fast and large transport to dry ports.
Most of Cantabria’s traditional ports have projects to convert them into sport resorts, expecting to encourage high purchasing tourism to the place. However, they imply several threats that should be analysed in order to create productive balances. They face important environmental threats when being linked to big housing development projects. They could also threat traditional low fishing and shellfish gathering, also important tourist resources of the coast.
D.3. Modern Economies Re-balancing land to guarantee sustainable economy
Cantabria’s coast concentrates the most important infrastructural network of the region. It became the main axis of housing development during the last decades. This is also related to a high tourist demand for the coastal natural values. In this study, this stress in housing development seems to reflect classic development conceptions, but poses a contradiction with the value placed to the environment as main tourist attraction.
We propose a sustainable tourism based on diversifying tourist attractions, including fields such as education, culture, nature, agro-tourism, and in short a more active and integral tourism, more participative with the community. Tourism could have an important role as an integrating means for higher diffusion and trading of local products and services, especially on rural areas.
Besides, housing development, as the main economical development model of the region nowadays, not only has a tourist final end. It is also demanded by young local families and by simple investors. As the places with higher proportion of housing development match pretty well with the places with high proportion of empty houses, many of them with traditional and cultural value, it would be important to foster house restoring in order to revitalize them for tourist and other productive activities, as a cultural and environmental sustainable development strategy.
D.4. Shellfish gathering and marine cultures Potentials of integration among culture, nature, and development
Cantabria’s littoral has the highest surface of shellfish gathering within the Cantabrian Sea coast (that is, the Spanish Atlantic northern coast except the Galician coast that lines up with Portugal, which is one of the World’s most important shellfish producing regions). Cantabria’s littoral includes marvellous estuaries for shellfish such as San Vicente, San Martín, and specially the Asón estuary and Santader’s Bay.
We know that present shelfish gathering at Cantabria Littoral is an activity transmitted with no interruptions through generations since the paleolithic age. This is why its knowledge and arts may teach us a lot about our littoral and about its people. Women have always had a fundamental role in preserving this activity. They provide an integral knowledge of the whole process: Gathering, transportation, and shelling without mediators. But the most important value of shellfish gathering rests on the wide knowledge and ecological quality about the aquatic medium that the activity and product need. Shellfish gatherers keep ancestral techniques that promote a rich ecosystem. Also, they are the first ones to detect and report any spill, and the most interested ones to have a control on this. This is why, shellfish gathering and marine cultures, if developed maintaining the diversity of shellfish species, may guarantee water quality, implying as well an important income to local economy.
This is why we chose for this exhibition shellfish gathering [and its] in estuaries as an example of ecocultural heritage of Cantabria Littoral.
D.5. Water Cycle and Uses Cantabria, the Place Where Water Lives
H2O is not a simple formula of just one more element. *It means water, a symbolic reference deeply rooted in the culture of Cantabria´s people. To understand water situation at the littoral entails analysing the environmental impact of the different water uses and dynamics in the entire basins of the rivers that pour into Cantabria littoral. Water conduction and supply to population centers supposed a great social advance, although lack of water in the coast is a current problem partly due to growing housing developments, and partly to the short run of the rivers and therefore low flow.
But other problem related to low water quantity and quality of the rivers is visible in many littoral areas: the decrease of small and big wetlands due to all shorts of fillings and due to contamination by different kinds of spills.
Integral water management should preserve Cantabria´s natural river flows and wetlands as much as possible in order to maintain their function as large ecological connectors, and thus maintaining the moisture and water of a region identified with it.
D.6 Citizen participation Towards sustainable development from local knowledge
In this study, citizen participation has been approached as a tool for diagnose elaboration and debate around actions of improvement, development proposals, collective creations… All this based on the analysis of what development model should be used to transform Cantabria Littoral, as people´s knowledge and experiences are the real drives to create effective fields and lines of action.
The regional social “fabric” offers an important space for debate and elaboration of shared development models: public administrations and political entities should search for more effective formulas to meet with the elements of this social fabric, such as cultural, neighbors´, or professional associations, cooperatives, etc., and those entities linked to more global issues such as ecology, youth, gender, handicap people, immigration, etc. The results of this study suggest the need to build more creative and constructive models of participation integrating different social actors committed to social development, creating spaces for debate and search of consensus, for exchange of expectations and needs, in order to elaborate proposals of creative shared actions.
D.7 Planning Water, the master of sustainable land ordering
Up to not long ago, water was the main land orderer in Cantabria. But modern development models allowed a large housing development concentration and industrial activities at the coastal area, which had a negative impact in cultural and natural heritage. All developments, including Cantabrian highway crossing the coast from one corner to the other, concentrate at the coast. However, the inland mountain region is left alone and youth emigrate as they do not find it attractive. Awareness on the need for a coastal global planning has crystallized through the last decades. As a result, a reference normative framework has been elaborated, being the Littoral Ordering Plan a good example of it.
However, results of this study suggest that economic and demographic unbalance between the coast and the mountain and the tendency for a sectorial concentration of the economy are the main factors related to the negative impact on the cultural and natural heritage at the coastline. A littoral sustainable development planning should include all the region into account, using cultural knowledge about the environment diversity as a resource. The final goal should allow the integration of coastal wetlands as ecological connectors among valleys through a corridor that we call Ecocultural Littoral.
Planning regionally, acting locally. Higher public funding to local administrations should be guaranteed to enable all this.
5. Conclusions
Even though littoral´s cultural and natural heritage has speedy deteriorated during the last decades, it is still alive and generates alternatives that might guarantee its own survival. Society should place the real value that it deserves, showing us that is it possible to live together with our environment through a diversifying as well as integrating relationship. This should be a basic value for a littoral management that provided wealth and environmental and cultural sustainability, becoming one of the main identity signs of this region.
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