Oh, the joys of summer

Spatial planning might seem rather a difficult task to pull off – after all, you not only have to keep the locals happy, stay within the budget, and take into account the opinions of architects and ecologists, you also have to think about the use the site is actually going to be put to. But a single week doesn’t go by without news of some local authority that has managed to ignore not just one but all of those considerations, by happily pouring concrete all over their most important public places. And what’s their attitude towards green areas? Well, the tall grass hides ticks that transmit Lyme disease, in the trees there are chirruping birds (what a ghastly noise), while pollinators lurk on flowers drinking their fill of nectar before stinging our innocent children as they play. If we need shade, we can always stay at home – and ‘the beautiful Polish summer’ is just a myth anyway, so there’s no need to hide from the sun. All you need is a little vitamin D and rub on some fake tan to instantly add a spring to your step, and then you can gaze at yourself admiringly in the mirror, no longer confronted by the pale apparition that stared back at you through the winter.

Climatologists are sounding the alarm and fan producers are rubbing their hands in glee, while I desperately google: “How not to die with a south-east facing window”. In internet discussion forums, people blithely opine that summer is always hot, that they are always being woken by the sound of lawnmowers (and don’t forget about those ticks), and that Zbyszek in Cieszyn not only fried some scrambled eggs on the pavement but also a pile of pancakes for a family of four. Pure profit when you think of the price of electricity and gas. The modernisation trends are mirrored by the care given to us by the state, which shovels money into our pockets.

How come all this has even been made possible? It would be nice to think that you didn’t have to know everything and that it was enough to trust those responsible for our standards and legislation. However, the Polish Supreme Audit Office has published a report stating that the “continuous and irreversible degradation of nature” is a result of laws that have been in force since 2003 that allow developers to buy plots in cities and towns even if they have no plans to build on them. In this way, blocks can be built on areas that are of ecological value that should be protected and wild hedgerows replaced by strange twiggy things in concrete flower beds. Between 2015 and 2020, 100,000 trees were felled on municipal properties and permission was granted to remove a further 350,000. In more than half of the properties supposedly under supervision, fewer trees were planted than were cut down. It should come as no surprise that they retain water much better when they’ve been growing for a few dozen years than young saplings do. And despite this, while most of us are not directly suffering from a lack of water – plenty of it still pours out of our taps, after all – it’s worth pointing out that a state of drought has been declared just this year in twelve of Poland’s regions.

Do you remember 1994? Most of you probably do, but for me personally it feels like the 90s were just a few years ago. There have been 28 increasingly warm springs since then. According to a UN report, in another 28 years (in 2050), 5 bln people could have problems accessing drinking water and, while we may turn off the tap when brushing our teeth, limit our use of plastic and are busily installing beehives everywhere, it’s hard to shake off the feeling that such individual efforts are becoming more important, because the institutions responsible for looking after the system seem intent on looking the other way.

Apart from all that, everything is just fine.