The Urgency of Preserving Our Common Home: Self-Care, Community and Nature

In April of last year, María Becerra lost a pregnancy to a hemorrhage that nearly killed her. By her own account, she ended up with no vital signs, unconscious and convulsing; the doctors told her she might not survive. María and Julián have been together since 2022 and have lost four pregnancies; the last one was the most harrowing. Recently, in a comment dedicated to her partner, she thanked him for saving her that day, and for something else: for carrying everywhere “a backpack that weighs 14 kilos so he can have a blood pressure monitor, a pulse oximeter, everything inside, thinking of me.” That backpack is the loose end of a thread that, if we pull on it a little, leads to preparedness culture, the return to nature, community, music, landscape and what we do with it. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Julián Reininger, hometown hero of Morón, is better known as J Rei or just Rei. He blew up for real with “Tu turrito,” the post-pandemic 2022 hit with Callejero Fino, though by 2020 he was already a rising star of the local trap scene, peaking with “Pininfarina Remix” alongside Duki and Neo Pistea (one of my favorites, along with “Dímelo Rei”).

Turro Táctico’s first post is less than a year old and shows Julián starting a fire with a flint. Today the Instagram account gathers a community of more than a hundred thousand people, and Rei has embraced this new alter ego under the motto “you can do a lot with a little,” MacGyver-style. The account’s most-watched videos are two tutorials on how to pack an emergency backpack.

That backpack is the loose end of a thread that, if we pull on it a little, leads to preparedness culture, the return to nature, community, music, landscape and what we do with it.

All of it finally converges with music on Turrotáctico: Raíz, a concept album of eight songs that blend the trap sound with acoustic guitars and a thematic focus on resilience, community and self-care.

On August 26 of this year, a mass of ice and rock broke off the north face of Langtang Lirung, on the border between Nepal and China, fell twelve hundred meters and turned into an avalanche that tore down the Bhotekoshi River toward the Trishuli at nearly two hundred kilometers per hour in its first stretch, a phenomenon known as a flash flood. Downstream, the Trishuli rose nine meters in half an hour. A month later, Nepal’s official count confirms at least fourteen hundred dead and more than six thousand missing. For a sense of scale: in Pompeii, the most famous volcanic tragedy in history, around two thousand people died.

Seismographs registered the collapse with an intensity equivalent to a magnitude 5 earthquake, and the first reports spoke of a quake. It was actually an entire mountainside giving way. ICIMOD, the regional center that studies the Himalayas, explains it with three factors: rock heavily fractured by its proximity to a fault line, permafrost thawing at ever higher altitudes, and a retreating glacier that no longer holds up the wall. A recipe for disaster in which climate change supplied two of the three ingredients.

It’s one of the most terrifying scenes ever filmed and (like so many modern abominations) we watched it live, scrolling through social media. Once the shock of the first images wore off, the event quickly dropped out of the news cycle and the public conversation. Even its biggest local repercussion had more to do with a spin-off diplomatic spat than with the event itself.

Turro Táctico is the visible face of something bigger. The first tactical or EDC content (everyday carry, the stuff you keep on you every day) I came across here were the flashlight reviews by Proyecto Sandía, who bills himself as the flashlight nut. Alongside it grew another genre of slow, almost wordless content: people camping in tiny cars, cooking in the mountains with a pot and a camp stove, lighting a fire and just staring at it, in a mix of lo-fi and ASMR in remote places all over the world.

Byung-Chul Han has been saying for a while now that the contemporary subject isn’t repressed but exhausted. We’re worn out by an imperative to perform that makes us say yes to everything, all the time, until something collapses. And that idea predates the infinite scroll of one-minute vertical videos and attention extractivism.

The answer to that exhaustion cannot (please) be more acceleration. It has to be, somehow, deceleration. Real life, touching grass, whatever you want to call those islands of contemplation in the middle of the noise. The seventy-two-hour backpack, the weekend in the mountains with no signal, the fishing trip, even the two-hours-a-week pottery class are all versions of the same search.

Or just walking. On the first weekend of October, nearly three million people took part in the 52nd Youth Pilgrimage to Luján, sixty kilometers on foot from Liniers, the biggest turnout in its history. The search is spiritual, too.

Nepal accounts for less than 0.1% of the greenhouse gas emissions driving climate change. International law calls that asymmetry “common but differentiated responsibilities” and assigns it a compensation mechanism (“loss and damage,” in COP lingo), which remains a fairly modest financial promise compared to the real size of the problem.

On September 24, Nepal’s prime minister addressed the UN General Assembly. His name is Balendra Shah, he’s 36, he’s a structural engineer, and before politics he was also a rapper. He said he would have liked to be there to talk about development and the hopes of a young nation. “We did not create this crisis. And yet we are paying a colossal price for it,” he declared. Rebuilding what the water swept away costs around 10% of the country’s GDP, the compensation funds are grossly insufficient, and climate finance cannot be a bureaucratic maze.

When the house is on fire, he said, you don’t ask the family to fill out fifty forms. Pope Francis had already addressed this in his 2015 encyclical Laudato si’, on care for our common home. In it, he spoke of an ecological debt between the North and the South. The house belongs to everyone, but it’s burning faster for those who spilled the least fuel.

Trekking, mountaineering and religious pilgrimages to sacred lakes like Gosaikunda (which this year overlapped with the exact area of the disaster) are among the few export activities available to a country rich in natural resources but with no industrial base of its own (a description that, with some nuances, doesn’t hit too far from home). Among August’s victims were Hindu pilgrims on their way to Mount Kailash and workers from the valley’s hydroelectric dams, on both sides of the border. Every new lodge, every trail opened at higher altitude, increases exposure on the very terrain that climate change is making more unstable.

But Nepal can’t simply stop selling access to its mountains, one of its main sources of legitimate income. And never have so many people wanted to climb. In the April–May season this year, Nepal issued nearly five hundred Everest permits, at fifteen thousand dollars each, the highest number ever. 1,008 people summited, 274 of them on the same day. Landscape extractivism, plain and simple: the resource leaves just as it is and you charge by the meter of altitude reached.

The house belongs to everyone, but it’s burning faster for those who spilled the least fuel.

An estimated twenty-five thousand people are currently associated with the prepper movement in Argentina. What drives them is very concrete and all too familiar: power outages, floods, and the feeling that public services can fail at any moment and that it’s wise to rely on them a little less. In Bahía Blanca, on March 7, 2025, 290 millimeters of rain fell in twelve hours (almost double the previous record), 16 people died and the city went days without power or water.

In July, Rei invited a hundred of his followers to an in-person campout. The T.T.s, as they call themselves, are people who want to know how to do things with their hands and depend a little less on others.

Tomás Rebord said on his stream that Juan Grabois had invited him to a meeting with preppers. As he tells it, the congressman talked about prepared rural properties in different parts of the country, about routes, drinking-water reserves and a bus to head for the mountains “when it all blows up.” Rebord turned it into a bit about mole men, until Grabois asked him whether he really thought it was dumb for people to know first aid or how to manage their resources. Rebord ended up saying that every time his power goes out he’s going to think of Grabois. There’s definitely something there.

In Santa Cruz, in the Southern Patagonian Ice Field, CONICET researchers have been monitoring for years the movement of a slope on Cerro Solo, above Laguna Torre, ten kilometers from El Chaltén. If that slope gives way, the resulting wave could breach the moraine holding back the water and rush down the Fitz Roy River valley in under an hour.

Authorities are working on what would be the country’s first early warning system for this kind of flood. Nepal had one, but it was designed for the monsoon: the sensors were downstream of where the blockage formed, and the text messages arrived more than ten minutes after the water had wiped out Timure, the first village. Glaciers and floods don’t travel with a visa in their passport, Shah said at the UN, and he proposed a joint mechanism between Nepal, India and China to share satellite data, monitor dangerous glacial lakes and issue alerts together.

An unusually strong El Niño and the advance of climate change make mountaineering riskier every year in our country, where demand also keeps growing. Aconcagua Provincial Park closed its last season with more than 106,000 visitors.

The Costanera Sur Ecological Reserve is made of rubble. That’s where the construction debris ended up from the highways the dictatorship bulldozed through the city. Nature did its thing: first came the plants, then the birds. It was declared a reserve in 1986. This year it turned forty, and in July a British travel insurer ranked it ninth among the best places in the world for birdwatching, out of a hundred and fifteen destinations. The reserve’s birding club has counted 351 species over forty years. More than two million people visit it every year, making it the most visited protected area in the country.

Birdwatching is maybe the most radical way to touch grass. Silence, patience, and birds that show up whenever they feel like it. On May 9, during the Global Big Day organized by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, birders across the planet documented more than eight thousand species in a single day. They uploaded nearly two hundred thousand checklists, and two million one hundred thousand people used an app to identify what they were seeing or hearing. Argentina ranked among the top ten countries by number of participants, and more than thirty-five national parks served as hosts.

Every one of those checklists ends up in a database that scientists use to track migrations and population changes, among other projects. The contemplative hobby is part of one of the most popular citizen science initiatives in the world. More and more foreign birders come to the country for the Litoral or Patagonia and tack on a day or two in Buenos Aires just to see birds (and leave behind foreign currency for something nobody had to extract or export).

Beyond individual efforts and grassroots, self-organized micro-communities, there’s an opportunity Argentina keeps leaving out of any kind of planning. We have landscapes on par with any adventure destination in the world (Patagonia, the Andes, the Puna, even Antarctica as both a research and tourism frontier) and one of the most solid university and scientific traditions in the region. On the other side of the Andes they’ve already run the numbers: a study by Rewilding Chile and McKinsey published in July of this year calculated that for every dollar the Chilean state invested in 2024 in the national parks of the Route of Parks of Patagonia, six went to local communities.

While we argue about all this, the Argentine government has called climate change a socialist invention, and the Climate Action Tracker rates the country's climate policy as highly insufficient (in July the grade went up a notch, only because the economy shrank more than expected). In April, Congress amended the Glacier Law so that each province gets to decide which ice it protects and where it allows mining. More recently, protests and debate erupted over foreign ownership of land. And public investment in science for 2026 is the lowest on record (0.14% of GDP).

For decades we've been saying that it's not enough to export grain, hydrocarbons or critical minerals straight out of the ground, that natural resources need to be industrialized and given added value through the country's other great asset: its scientific and technological capacity. It almost never occurs to us that the landscape belongs in the same equation.

It might sound contradictory to go touch grass to escape the yoke of productivity and end up talking about economics. But the landscape that gives us back our calm doesn't take care of itself, and whatever isn't planned ends up getting exploited anyway, cheaply and by someone else. The idea is to apply that same logic to the landscape and build a tourism sector, along with other nature-based businesses, with knowledge built into the product, put to work for what defines the value of a natural destination today: its ability to stay preserved on a planet that's changing. That means knowing which slope is shifting and which glacier is retreating, how many people a trail can handle, how an ecosystem recovers after high season, how to run mountain huts and transport with fewer emissions, how to see the next El Niño coming.

The landscape that gives us back our calm doesn't take care of itself, and whatever isn't planned ends up getting exploited anyway, cheaply and by someone else.

That knowledge already exists in the country. It's produced by the researchers who measure Cerro Solo and the birders who fill out their species checklists, but it almost never reaches the guide, the tour operator or the town that lives off the experience. Destinations like the Nepalese Himalayas or Machu Picchu let the numbers keep growing and pay the price in the very place they're selling. Argentina can compete on quality. With climate change, safe, well-preserved nature is becoming increasingly scarce, and a destination that knows its resource takes better care of it, welcomes people without putting them at risk, and can guarantee the landscape will still be there twenty years from now. That's the real added value, the kind that can generate foreign currency and skilled jobs at scale.

The innovation we need (in monitoring, in services, in guide training, in new ventures) has to be geared toward adaptation and sustainability. Mazzucato calls this a mission: a concrete goal that organizes existing state and private capabilities. Ours should be making Argentine nature tourism the best prepared in the region for climate change, and the one that best protects the landscape it sells.

A kid from Morón hauling a fourteen-kilo backpack because he almost lost the person he loves ended up being, without meaning to, the most honest way of saying something we have a hard time understanding. Taking care of yourself, taking care of your people and taking care of our common home, at this scale, with the climate crisis deepening, with this country, with this nature, is no longer a personal choice.