Born and raised in Spain, Aniol has traveled the world in the search of the hardest whitewater. He has found it and meanwhile defined what can be paddled…with a style.
Coming from Spain I’ve been raised seeing dams all over the country since a very young age. Most of these old dams produce little energy, are in poor conditions and a real danger for the villages below them…
These are hard times for the rivers of the world. After traveling all over the world with my focus on paddling rivers I can tell you that the future is very scary…. Every country in the world is trying to exploit its rivers in an unsustainable way…from rich countries to developing ones. The greed and ambition of the humans never ceases to amaze me… The excuses are always the same. Need for energy and power. “It is clean energy, ” they say… The impact of these huge or little dams is so big on the ecosystems, and on the people that live off the river…
We have a super powerful and end-less resource that the sun is, we have wind, tidal current, geo-thermal… How can we turn our backs to these natural (real clean) resources and we keep on committing the same mistakes?! I grew up in a house where all the energy we spent was produced by solar panels, where electricity was a very valuable resource and not even a bit of it was spent on an irresponsible way. The direction is to produce less and spend it on a smarter way, not the other way around, and that will only happen with the proper education of our kids.
© Eric Parker
Everything in this life happens for a reason and I do believe that not having free flowing rivers is totally related to the fact that we are getting less rain. Spain for example is slowly becoming a desert…
We are living life in this planet as if we had another one to go live when all the resources in this one is over and I think that this is totally insane…
These new dams scheduled to be built in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Serbia and Albania would be a total disaster for the ecosystems and the people around them. We can’t let them happen.
Please help us stop them. We aren’t strong individually but if we all push together we can make anything. Join the tour! 6 countries, 18 rivers and 11 events – more than enough reasons to get involved in this amazing project!!!
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The Balkan Rivers Tour is a joint activity by Leeway Collective, EuroNatur, Riverwatch, and WWF, organized within the framework of the “Save the Blue Heart of Europe” campaign. Without any regard for protected areas, endangered species or local communities, about 2,700 hydropower plants are projected to be built between Slovenia and Albania. With this campaign, we want to stop this dam tsunami.
Find out more here: http://www.balkanrivers.net/ and http://www.balkanriverstour.com/
