By TARSUS GENUS*
Earth and climate in the voice of reason — the legacies of 1789 and the crisis of the State
The pathetic side of the denialist “force” is being swept away by the Apocalypse. Not through a single event, concentrated in a communion of celestial factors that remove humans from the places of their destiny. Yes, through a sequence of spasms of waters, fires and droughts in profusion, which kill, despair and drain hope.
The long drain on hope that must be stopped in our state will not be stopped by an articulation of the right wing that denies the climate crisis and democratic politics, which is reoriented by the oligopoly of the traditional media. Nor by a programmatic split guided by traditional “classism.”
At a time when the Brazilian government is proposing that a National Authority on Climate Transition be transformed into a federal structure, in order to bring the specificities of each region into their proper place within the nation, we need to stop and think. The circumstances in which we approach common complex situations as particularities have already occurred in other countries around the world, and have always been handled according to the characteristics of each country, in order to preserve their national interests.
This behavior no longer has a chance of prospering today, because the planet is a vast web integrated by the climate tragedy. Remember the ships carrying toxic waste, circling the world in search of dumping ports?
In a country already comprehensively affected by the uncontrolled climate transition, a united reaction by the regions and the nation has been impossible, because this Authority that is now being proposed, even in time, did not exist before. The phenomena naturally connected throughout the national territory, by the laws of nature in fury, have until now been observed in a segregated manner, in moments of acute crisis. This is what motivated our “Pro-RS Movement” in the plural civil society, far beyond the political and ideological disagreements that characterize democratic regimes.
Climate scientists, researchers into the planet's diseases, scholars of the symptoms of the catastrophe, the most lucid part of the youth that knew how to sniff out the future, warned: the edge of the precipice is getting closer and closer and the abyss is getting deeper and deeper! The planet in imbalance defends itself with the rebellion of the waters, with destruction by fire and with the promise of new deserts: the environmental crisis is national and global, whose particularities have succumbed to the universal tragedy of the destruction of the environment that unifies the world.
The “rationality” of the endless exploitation of natural resources and the reason of the laws of nature clash on the territory of our rich continent. And it is time to ask: in a country that is a reserve for its people, in order to be able to be the survival of humanity, do we have a chance of winning?
In the National Assembly during the Revolution of 1789, which formed the basis of modern democratic identity in France, the most lucid deputies of the time, such as Abbé Sieyés and Talleyrand, were concerned with organizing the revolutionary government. Talleyrand was mainly concerned with standardizing “weights and measures”; Sieyés stressed the need to divide the territory into a “geographical grid of eighty identical squares” in order to rationalize the technical control of the state administration over the territory liberated from feudalism.
The rationalist vision of Abbot Sieyés — according to historians — was to transform the “hexagon” (the country’s natural shape) into a “cube”, with internal spaces of 324 “square leagues”, thus establishing a basic territorial equality, within the idea of Nation, as the basis for the other equalities of the Universal Declaration of 1789. Here we see, in fact, the principle of equality being guided especially by arithmetic, which thus creates a geometry of “arbitrary equality”.
Reason, however, does not exclude common sense, but, on the contrary, is composed of it as a subjective moment of its possible humanity. There was Mirabeau, whose instincts were both romantic and rational, who accused the Committee of “excessive geometricism” (an apriorism) and claimed that “a more reasonable unit would be that of the population, not of simple geographical extension”. Mirabeau integrated the rationalist scientism that came from the 18th century with the plebeian and bourgeois humanism that shed “light” on the science of the 19th century.
This would make it possible — said Mirabeau — “to also take into account the local topography, rivers and mountains, valleys and forests that gave identity to a given area”. On 19 June 1790, the “deputies eliminated all titles of nobility that the Constituent Assembly declared incompatible with the legal equality of citizenship”, thus completing the territorial rationalisation also based on the identity of the populations and their nature, referred to as valleys, rivers and mountains. And it blocked the mythical forces of feudalism, which still hovered as “owner” of minds, in the spaces reserved for their family territories. The comparison with “Melnickistan” cannot be avoided.
The Climate Authority, if it gets its revenge, proposes a new agenda for nation-building: first, the social and political unity of the country, in defense of our rich national natural environment; second, because it will lead to a superior stance from Brazil, in sharing solutions to the global climate crisis; and third, as a true challenge to modern entrepreneurship, of all sizes, beyond and beyond the primary “coach” mediocrity that plagues the most backward part of the country’s business community. The same one that was a health denier and now expresses itself through denial of the climate disaster, which plagues us and humanity. Those who have survived until now will continue to see it, if they continue to survive.
*Tarsus in law he was governor of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, mayor of Porto Alegre, Minister of Justice, Minister of Education and Minister of Institutional Relations in Brazil. Author, among other books, of possible utopia (Arts & Crafts).
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