By TALES AB'SÁBER*
A tribute on the occasion of the centenary celebrations of the geographer and environmental activist
Aziz Ab'Sáber was a very active man. From the mid-1940s, through his intense scientific life in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, to his social and political engagement in essential environmental causes that permeated his life and the life of the country from the 1980s until the 2000s, Aziz never stopped working for a minute.
His large, tall body, which always caught the attention of everyone who knew him, did not prevent him from being geographically mobile, agile and lively: Aziz Ab'Sáber produced material things with his own body, permanently crossing worlds and more worlds in Brazil. There was no landing, no pause, for Aziz's body tracking the earth. We can say that Aziz Ab'Sáber's body in transit, a body that recorded the nature through which he traveled, and gained energy from his love for it, was also, in some way, nature itself in transit and in thought.
In addition to his constant movement, Aziz Ab'Sáber also lived by writing. He wrote non-stop – notebooks, notes, field diaries, articles, and, later, books – constantly elaborating and rewriting his observations and impressions, until he made them reach a very high level in his science, with a lively and intense style.
While still a student at the Faculty of Philosophy, Literature and Human Sciences at USP, and a student of Pierre Monbeig, Jean Gagé, Roger Dion, Aroldo de Azevedo and Roger Bastide, Aziz was already moving in the space and depth of the science he had chosen and loved, which he both shared with his teachers and questioned, when he was already writing his own interpretation of the facts of space. The young scientist was admired by his own teachers for the clarity and something unique about his own work.
There was something perceptive in the young geographer's reading of earthly things, as well as an immense love for all places and all scales in which he was – São Paulo, Rio Grande do Sul, Manaus, or the great territory of the Dry Northeast… among so many other worlds of the earth that inhabited his body. As soon as he began to move, and to write, Aziz marked those around him with an intense originality, which was evident in his reasons.
What matters is that Aziz Ab'Sáber's permanent movement, his constitution as a scientist, as a builder of university institutions, USP and SBPC, and of culture, Condephat of São Paulo, of science policy and of policy of awareness for the ecological and environmental problems of Brazil, of which he was a precursor – of the generation of José Lutzenberger and contemporary of Chico Mendes – did not occur in just any territory.
Aziz Ab'Sáber was not interested in the world of ideas that merely sustain themselves, far removed from concrete, social and human situations that were historically real. On the contrary, his process of constant movement in the world, which constituted him, took place on the material, marvelous, impressive, or very arid territory of Brazil, in times of difficult access. And he also traveled, on the same national soil, to the deepest trans-human origins of the earth, with their contemporary effects on historical life.
His scientific and stylistic exploration of the world was based on successive and permanent journeys, at a time when journeys across large areas and continental territories of Brazil were still considered adventures. It would be nice to have a map of Aziz Ab'Sáber's many and constant journeys through Brazil, on various scales and in his varied research and naming of the things he saw and touched. This would be the map of the discovery of multiple spaces and problems, of the historicization of events on earth, the history of a redesign of the science of geography and the formation of a man.
In macro terms, everyone knows that Aziz Ab'Sáber traveled and described the southern plateau and the plains of the Rio Grande do Sul prairies, the formative geological structure of the State of São Paulo and the Pantanal of Mato Grosso, the world of the “sea of hills” – a scientific and poetic way of naming large Brazilian regions, which has become popular – of São Paulo and Minas Gerais, the large structures of sawmills and plateaus of the central plateau, the “dry northeast”, on many levels and scales of space and time, the macro Amazon, and in internal details, even imagining a possible “eco-economic, social and anthropological zoning” of the entire forest space, an almost continental reason, in addition to the study of several urban sites of Brazilian cities and a beautiful late book that considered the Brazilian coast as a whole, along its eight thousand and five hundred different kilometers.
But any list of the many levels of his work is always incomplete: one of his last popular science books was, after all, for example, still called “Brazil: Landscapes of Exception”. The exception and the norm of the theoretical formulations of geography were checked by Aziz Ab'Sáber on their frontiers, and composed a panorama of a kind of total thought for the earth, of a total geographer, as his friend, master of Brazilian climatology, Carlos Augusto de Figueiredo Monteiro, said about him.
In the midst of this constant research into geomorphology, there was the most profound theoretical thinker on space and the history of space, an epistemological novelty that he developed, derived from geologists, biologists and, why not say, historians, important for the idea of geography. Working with the formations in prehistoric times of the worlds that he knew well now, Aziz Ab'Sáber also projected his concepts into time, constituting what he called a physiology of space.
In 1977 he presented that map, a synthesis and theoretical elevation simultaneously of so many others that he had made over thirty years of research, and which would become famous, being republished by geographers, biologists, paleontologists, archaeologists, anthropologists, in Brazil, the USA and Europe: Natural domains of South America, 13.000 – 18.000 years ago [first approximations].
This was the height of his research and the conceptual shift it implied. A Brazilian geographer, always thinking about Brazil and having studied in Brazil since his university days, was then surprising the idea and concept of geography with something that projected dispersed knowledge onto another level. With everything we know about the Earth's past, its formative processes and its signs in the present, we can project an archaeological geography and, with some scientific precision, conceive of what the morphoclimatic and phytogeographic domains (another of his innovative concepts) were like, the total spaces of a continent, thousands of years ago. In fact, a map of the Earth's nature more than ten thousand years ago.
The love for the earth as a support for life and history, and for how to think about it, was lost in the darkness of the most original time of the past that the science of the present could conceive. It was no coincidence, therefore, that among us Aziz Ab'Sáber was one of the first to warn of the future result of the material and geo-economic interventions of the present. Since the earth on which we live comes from afar, and he described this history on his maps and told it in his body like a film, it was also projected into the dense or open time of the future, now as a result of the constant action of man, and his total entropic civilization, on an ethical earth imagined to come, which should be protected.
He sensed, on a large time scale in which he was accustomed to thinking, the general environmental crisis in which we are immersed, although he read it with other criteria, much more precise than what circulates in our spectacular day-to-day consciousness. Great times of the earth, in the past and in the future, together with an unconditional love for what was alive and supported multiple Brazils in its present, became the world in which Aziz, a permanent traveler, lived.
That is why Aziz Ab'Sáber's permanent activity made his body, large and tall, become a true map of Brazil, a personal and restless body, an experience of the land and men inscribed in the flesh, as true experiences should be, and a public body, a living map, which was consulted with pleasure by everyone, the map, a communicational, scientific and social thing of the country. His map body – as Beatriz Nascimento once said in a desire to recover the horizons of the black Brazilian diaspora between the past and the future – was a very accessible being, between science and life, which was deeply confused, between the project and the land, with the idea of Brazil.
Different from, but connected at some point to, the black map body of the historian and philosopher of the Afro-Brazilian diaspora, which was the work of reconstructing the life of a people, Aziz Ab'Sáber's movement was the symbolic body of the idea of making Brazil, creating a decent and modern nation at last. It was the idea that ran through Ab'Sáber's entire generation, as an institutional action – the Public University – and as naming, invention and commitment to the knowledge of a country, Brazil. A country redescribed in its entirety by the geographer, who also redescribed its own geography with him.
That is why Aziz Ab'Sáber had contact in his time, through friendship and spiritual common ground, so to speak, with Sergio Buarque de Holanda, with Caio Prado Jr., with Florestan Fernandes – a friend with whom he identified greatly, for reasons of class origin – with Paulo Emílio Sales Gomes… They were the men who created a modern, informed Brazil, each radical in his own way for the country that needed criticism and understanding, who sought real democracy and development – intellectual builders of a country that was overwhelmingly defeated by a project of dependent integration, with strong traces of social archaism, into international capitalism, in 1964.
Aziz Ab'Sáber was in fact the map body, in geological depth, in anthropological commitment to the human geography of the many Brazils he knew from the ground up, of that generation of scientists, historians and older sociologists, great interpreters of social structures, who consulted him when necessary to learn more, when it was a matter of specifying the differences between Mato Grosso and Goiás... The project of all of them was common, they all brought together knowledge and criticism about the greater meaning, a total map, of the country, which they were also constituting in a scientific way.
And Aziz Ab'Sáber, the youngest among them, and also the most positive of them due to the very nature of his science, came to bridge, not always without setbacks, two worlds and two generations of researchers in Brazil. His work led in the 1980s and 1990s to the awareness of the country's necessary environmental policy, when he became a kind of icon of this new order of historical critique of capitalism, deaf, blind and mute to its effects on the nature of things here.
His generational partners, with whom he worked closely and whose work and thought he also promoted at the Institute of Geography, which he directed at USP, were, among many others, the geographers Pasquale Petrone, João José Bigarella, Carlos Augusto de Figueiredo Monteiro, Antonio Teixeira Guerra, Miguel Costa Jr., José Teixeira de Araújo Filho, Ari França.
The relationship with Paulo Emílio Vanzolini, a biologist and man of extensive modern knowledge about the country, was special for both. Aziz Ab'Sáber's studies of the surface of the past were checked, confirmed, and expanded by Vanzolini into what became known as the theory of refuges and redoubts: true islands of unity and ecological discontinuity in the past, which were transformed into temporal, geographical and biological clocks that accelerated or slowed down the adaptive choice in the formation of species in the Brazilian space.
His relationship with Milton Santos was personal, converging critical perspectives on the degradation and indiscriminate use of space by Capital, but it also indicated a great difference in training and nature of criticism: while Milton Santos always thought of space and society as an effect of the economic production of the deep and structural contradictions of capitalism, anticipating many of the Marxist-based critical readings of geographers, urban planners and social scientists who consider land and space in their work, Aziz Ab'Sáber seemed, but only in appearance, conservative in the character of his intense ecological criticism of the last years of his life.
Criticism, for him, was inherent to the profound knowledge of the land, its history and its self-production, so that a type of knowledge of the land, always at risk and dilapidated, guided him in the sometimes very harsh attack he made on the generalized use of space as a support for any type of gain. Milton Santos already knew from the outset, from his reading of The capital, and its implications, which the geographer of the formation and land of Brazil would come to be fully aware of, at the time of the worldwide expansion of globalized capitalism and its exclusive logic, transforming every problem of space and the possible humanities connected to it into a mere abstract support for the accumulation of value.
At the end of their lives, both said similar things, coming from different choices of knowledge foundations. The first time I heard the motto of all the criticism of environmental science that assesses the end of the world from the current stage of the last globalization of capitalism was in an interview with Aziz Ab'Sáber, back in the 1990s: “Today's generations, and their indiscriminate and destructive use of life and nature, do not have the right to harm the environmental heritage, the world and the lives of future generations.” It was Aziz's own way of speaking about the same alienations and violence of the accelerated and privatizing pace of the world, which Milton Santos spoke about.
Throughout the 1990s, Aziz Ab'Sáber proposed and guided, in the space and research of human geography, a political project of recognition of the total concept of Brazil, so to speak: the famous citizenship caravans that rooted Lula's presence in the interior of the country, and renewed in the democratic left politician the connection with the non-urban and non-modernized sectors of popular life, particularly in the great sertões of the northeast – “the most intensely populated semiarid zone in the world”, as Ab'Sáber said – and in the north of the country.
Something important in Lula's understanding of the concrete existence of the poor, marked by the country's own spatial and climatic situations, and their need for state support – social grants, energy extension, integrated education and health policies – was constituted in that practical demonstration by Aziz Ab'Sáber about “the knowledge of Brazil”, as he said, the lessons on the human geography of masses of people semi-included in income and citizenship.
Aziz Ab'Sáber's total, environmental and human geography informed the urban labor and trade union left, which understood life as modernized, about deep human sectors, still especially linked to the land, whose distance from life inserted in the market, and from citizenship as its double, was real and tangible. It was these oppressed and forgotten progress, due to long-lasting spatial and geographic ties, that Aziz called “knowing Brazil”.
A Brazil that he knew was unknown to the powers linked to global industrial capitalism and to the cosmopolitan bourgeoisie, who wanted little to know. Interestingly, it was precisely these sectors of national life, under the secular code of latifundiary and oligarchic rule and local coronelismo, that the left of the 1964 crisis for basic reforms, including the young socialists of the CPCs and their Cinema Novo, tried to recognize and connect to the political and social development of the country, with the catastrophic results of the preventive counterrevolution of the military coup and its support in those secular modes of great powers, exploitation and lack of social recognition.
Aziz Ab'Sáber, a social scientist who has a special focus on the material life of the earth, which is particularly true in Brazil, tried to reconnect the democratic left of urbanized masses, somewhat fetishized by shopping malls and the total and constant cultural industry, to the rural masses dispersed in a long-term human geography. Because as he said, with Caio Prado Jr., “above Bahia, something of Brazil can be thought of more in terms of geography than history”… His proposal and relationship with Lula deepened attention and action for this largely invisible popular life for the modern integration of a people with rights. At the same time, his removal from the Lula governments of 2003 and 2007 was certainly a huge loss in the constitution of a consistent and contemporary environmental policy, which would situate and position Brazil in the world from the perspective of this vanguard of earthly things.
Yes, because in 1996, seven years before the first arrival of the democratic left that Aziz Ab'Sáber supported in the figure of Lula to the federal government, he presented the result of a project of science, construction of the country, development and political positioning in the world, carried out at the Institute of Advanced Studies of USP, for the reforestation of Brazil on a national scale, his highly prized Floram Project. Instigated and in connection with and debates with German eco-socialist scientists, still in the 1980s Aziz Ab'Sáber organized a large multidisciplinary team, coordinated by him, Leopold Rodés and Werner Zulauf, which conceived – in the register of agronomy, climatology, geomorphology of natural and productive trends, local, regional and sectoral economy of the territory, technology and cultural anthropology and its earth sciences – the systematic reforestation of all of Brazil, degraded in its flora and fauna by the modernization process of the last 480 years.
The project, which was not a matter of limited perspectives on being in the world of globalized capitalism and enemies of science produced in the country, constituted the basis for the implementation of “14 million hectares in Brazil, as a spearhead for inducing parallel afforestation, on a global scale, totaling 400 million hectares”. Brazil could recover its forested territory, without losing productivity where intense modes of production were necessary, and become an active reference in global environmental policy, positioning itself in a privileged way in the process of the necessary critique of the universal crisis of the present. As we all know, in that historical period the left in government ignored the most radical contribution of Aziz Ab'Sáber, assuming the consequences of backwardness and alienation in a truly essential field of today's politics.
These were the things that the poor boy, always recognized as brilliant, born in a small town in the Paraíba Valley, which was in decline after 1929, São Luiz do Paraitinga, the son of a Lebanese immigrant who had fled the religious and imperial wars of his time, who barely spoke Portuguese, and of a genuine country girl from the interior of São Paulo who never learned to read, dreamed of. Aziz Ab'Sáber was an exponent of the country's formation with knowledge and commitment, in his lifetime.
A man who closely followed the real lives of people, the land, the flora and fauna, always looking at everything from the point of view of the most fragile, in the social world and in the natural world, which he did not separate, at the same time he had the power to completely review his science, everything he perceived and what he made others look at. Rarely has the epithet “a great Brazilian” been so real and so fair.
*Tales Ab´Sáber He is a professor in the Philosophy Department at Unifesp. He is the author of, among other books, The Anthropophagic Soldier (Hedra). [https://amzn.to/4ay2e2g]
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