By ANTONIO VALVERDE*
The creation of green parties proved to be insufficient to carry forward the theses of nature preservation and care for the next generations
“What are these roots that take root, what branches do they branch / In this stony filth? […], / You cannot say, or even estimate, because you only know / A bundle of fractured images, beaten by the sun, / And the dead trees no longer shelter you, nor does the / song of the crickets console you, / And no one sound of water throbbing on dry stone. Only / A shadow grows under this scarlet rock. / (Come to the shadow of this scarlet rock), / And I will show you something different / From your shadow walking behind you at dawn / Or from your evening shadow rising to meet you; / I will reveal to you what fear is in a handful of dust.”
(TS ELIOT, “The Burial of the Dead,” in the desolate land).
Position
The test revolves around the The Responsibility Principle, by Hans Jonas, 1979, even though it contains few direct references to the work. In order to give some materiality to the Jonasian theses.
Answer to the question: “Is an environmental policy possible today?” – Immediately, the answer is no – an environmental policy will no longer be possible. And at the same time, dialectically, yes. Yes and no, perhaps, pendulum. Yes, if one follows the model of the indigenous peoples, the autochthonous peoples of Brazil, recovering the ancestral way of molding the nature-man metabolism, through the process of integration based on nature and not on man. On a par, complementarily, with the proposals of ecosocialism. If there's still time.
However, by reinforcing realistic pessimism in the face of neglect with the environment, which has been ongoing for centuries, the Estadão, of July 15, 2021, brings the article “Amazon in June breaks new deforestation record”.[I] Which adds data to the degraded environmental situation, adding a latent subtext pointing to serious problems of survival of the species, from the future lack of drinking water, climate warming above the tolerable, forests transformed into cerrados, soil desertification, etc.[ii] To top off the woes, the forest itself is showing clear signs of being in the process of self-destruction, due to the excessive emission of carbon dioxide.[iii] Certainly, the first and greatest evidence of the accumulation of factors is, and will continue to be, that of hunger. Therefore, a bleak environmental panorama for future generations of living beings of all species in the Biosphere.
And how did that hope, aroused by the creation of the German Green Party, under Jonasian inspiration, which spread to several countries, including Brazil, end? It proved to be, in general, insufficient to carry forward – to the field of great politics – the theses of nature preservation and care for the next generations. With the exception of the low profile environmental policies of some Nordic countries, with no possibility of becoming a hegemonic standard, not even for resentful Europe. In addition to the spectacular failure of all international conferences on climate change, measured empirically to exhaustion, Copenhagen, Doha, Rio de Janeiro, Paris...
Priorities
If at the present time, man is destroying the environment, it is necessary to register the hypothesis of extinction caused by the fall of meteorites, in the last half billion years, which caused five great mass species extinctions on Earth. Both the one that occurred in Mato Grosso, in Central Brazil, 250 million years ago, and others with meteorites of larger dimensions than the one “found” in Araguainha – close to the city of Goiás. Such a meteorite would have released methane gas, contained in rocks, enough to cause the enormous extinction of living species hitherto known, within a radius of 250 kilometers, under the greenhouse effect resulting from 1.600 gigatonnes of the gas. Energy equivalent to one million megatons of TNT, much greater than the destructive potential of a thermonuclear, hydrogen or atomic bomb – differentiated by the way of detonating them.
For the event of Araguainha, it is estimated the extinction of 96% of the species. In addition to the even more powerful meteorite that fell on the Yucatan peninsula, in Mexico, which caused more destruction than the precipitate in Araguainha. That, by hypothesis, would have caused the separation of the original Pangea, into several continents. (PIVETTA, September 2013, pp. 16-21). From which one can imagine and deduce that the organic and inorganic lives of the Planet have suffered shocks and destruction – since pristine times, perhaps, still without the known existence of time –, caused by nature itself, even before the appearance of man in the Biosphere. At present, it is the life of the spirit that is desolate.
Also consider the recent research by historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, botanists and paleoecologists, pointing to the planting of forests in the remote past, long before the invasion of colonizers in Pindorama.[iv] As a model, from the agriculture of the Amazon Rainforest, highlighted by the research carried out by scientists from the University of Exeter, in England. Showing human interference in that region four and a half thousand years ago, which took place through the process of enriching the soil with natural fertilizers until creating the “Amazon Dark Earth”, the black earth of the indigenous people. Because, instead of deforesting to expand agriculture, the indigenous people improved the soil with a view to a “sustainable” nature-man metabolism. (VEIGA, 2018).[v] Which shows, at least in part, the anthropic origin of the Amazonian Hileia, in the expression coined by Humboldt, if it expanded beyond the borders of what would become the Amazonian part of the Terrae Brasilis.
Studies about the agriculture practiced by the indigenous people multiply, in detail. Showing how the domestication of plants may have occurred, under a process of natural transgenics, by indigenous people.[vi] The creation of an organized agriculture and the possible formation of garden cities in the Forest.[vii] The distribution of trees and geoglyphs indicating the impact of humans on the Amazon rainforest.[viii] Until the discovery of the planting of chestnut trees by indigenous populations, prior to the arrival of European invaders.[ix] This can be complemented with the study of trees, more precisely their trunks, from forests such as the Amazon, which keep records of the sustainable form of human manipulation.[X]
Thus, by all indications, the societies of the natives were societies of abundance, while the current ones are of scarcity, above all, of food for human beings, but also for wild animals. Which leads to Serres' reflection: “A living species, like ours, manages to exclude all others from its now global territory: how could these feed or inhabit the space that we cover with filth? If the dirty world is in any danger, it comes from our exclusive appropriation of things. […] (Thus) This is the bifurcation of history: either death or symbiosis.” (SERRES, Natural Contract, P. 58-59).
Regarding the environmental situation, Viveiros de Castro, in “The model and the example: two ways of changing the world”, conference given in 2017,[xi] summarizes the discussion about the superiority of the environmental preservation movement invented by the natives of Pindorama, with references to the unavoidable theme-problem of the Anthropocene and the glimpse of some alternative to the announced catastrophic situation, while there may be some time for it.
Ecosocialism
The more general background is transfigured into a very current clash, made explicit to the limit of the order of difficulties presented, among the proposals of Ecosocialism, which emerged in the 1970s, on the initiative of Manuel Sacristán, Raymond Williams, André Gorz, James O' Connor and Frieder Otto Wolf. Made effective with the launch of the International Ecosocialist Manifesto, in 2001, and the creation of the International Ecosocialist Network, in 2007, extended across Europe and Latin America, and disseminated in the Brazil-France and Europe axis, by the Brazilian Marxist intellectual, Michael Löwy, whose theses will be referred to in passing, and the so-called “green capitalism” sold under the guise of “emissions credit markets” and “compensation mechanisms”, sometimes of “sustainable market economy”, formulated in a composite way to economic growth and preservation of nature, for theses not referred to. Given the discredit of its ultimate purposes. Whereas Ecosocialism clearly points to the immediate problem: “change the system, not the climate!”. Indeed, the encyclical Laudato Si ' (2015) is in line with the same proposition, except for the perspective of reformism inherent to the social doctrine of the Church, since rerum Novarum, from 1891, while Ecosocialism proposes a revolutionary attitude. – Which may sound anachronistic, since the spirit of the revolution gave way to that of the counterrevolution in the mid-twentieth century.
For, “it is a radical proposal – that is, that attacks the root of the system – which is so different from the productivist variants of XNUMXth century socialism – social-democracy or Stalinist-type 'communism'[xii] – and the ecological currents that adapt, in one way or another, to the capitalist system. A proposal that aims not only to transform production relations, the productive apparatus and the dominant consumption pattern, but above all to build a new type of civilization, in rupture with the foundations of modern Western capitalist/industrial civilization.” (LÖWY, 2014, p. 10).
severity of the problem
“Compared with the history of organic life on Earth, […], the measly 50.000 years of Homo sapiens represent something like two seconds at the end of a 24-hour day. By that scale, the entire history of civilized humanity would fill one-fifth of the last second of the last hour. The 'now', which as a model of the messianic abbreviates in an immeasurable summary the history of all humanity, coincides rigorously with the place occupied in the universe by human history.” (Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Concept of History, 1940, thesis18).[xiii]
The contemporary environmental situation is serious, extremely serious. Certainly, Benjamin's thesis about what Marx thought: “revolutions are the locomotive of world history”, needs to be, obligatorily, in the current context, resized. Well, it became necessary to pull the emergency brakes on the train of civilization, which has been in motion since the industrial revolutions. In order to slow down and correct all deviations from excessive capitalist destruction of nature. Limitless excesses, on the margins of almost all destruction, as understood by Marques (2018), Wallace-Wells (2019), and Oliveira, Frogneaux, Vasconcelos (2020). Will humanity be able to accomplish such a feat, as a heroic deed community and global? This is the most urgent ethical-political problem. Burning.
However, in addition to the scenario of environmental catastrophe and the “destruction” of nature, despite the fact that nature will not be destroyed, equated as the most punctual ethical-philosophical theme of the present time, there is another more serious one, however, submerged, because it is inapparent, almost in full: The dramatic problem of hunger, always latent, now emerging in a very expressive way.
digressive hiatus
Denunciations of Brazilian Popular Music. In the early 1970s, Caetano Veloso sang: “Ê, saudade / Everyone protesting against pollution / Even Walt Disney magazines / Against pollution (VELOSO, 'Épico', Blue Araçá, 1973)”,[xiv] recorded in the center of São Paulo with the random sound of noise pollution from buses, smoke..., conducted by maestro Rogério Duprat. The artist paved the way and other songs from the very lively collection of Brazilian popular music about the preservation of nature appeared, such as the one expressed in the samba plot “Amor à Natureza”, by Paulinho da Viola, 1975.[xv] Followed by Latin America's place in the world order, in "blue planet”, by Milton Nascimento, by…[xvi] And “Um Índio”, by Caetano Veloso, by …[xvii] However, earlier, Gilberto Gil sang hunger, fear and death in “Marginália 2”, by …, warning “here is the end of the world / here is the end of the world…”[xviii] However, the song “Tempo Rei”[xx] and “The End of History”,[xx] both by Gil, rescue hope through the force of time and history.
Political-philosophical references to the hunger drive
To reconstitute the problem of hunger, references to forgotten passages from political philosophy are necessary, and also to escape from the civilizational dungeon, which has been the existential experience of the Covid-19 pandemic. At first, two unavoidable references to Marx.
First. Extracted from Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts, from 1844, which may seem to the unwary a critical review of The Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith, whose result turns out to be completely different – still written with Hegelian inks. Hey there: "O man it is immediately be natural. As a natural being, and as a living natural being, he is, on the one hand, equipped with natural forces, de living forces, is a natural being active; these forces exist in him as possibilities and capacities (Anlagen und Fähigkeiten), as drives; on the other hand, as a natural, corporeal, sensitive, objective being, he is a being who suffer, dependent and limited, just like the animal and the plant, that is, the their of his drives exist outside of him, like their independent of it. But these objects are their of your lack (desire), their essential, indispensable for the performance and confirmation of its forces essential. that man is a being corporeal, endowed with natural forces, alive, effective, objective, sensitive means that he has effective, sensible objects, as the object of his being, of his manifestation of life (Lebensäusserung), or that he can just manifest (äussern) its life in actual sensible objects (wirkliche sinnliche Gegenstände). It's identical: to be (breast) objective, natural, sensitive and at the same time having an object, nature, meaning outside oneself, or being an object itself, nature, meaning for a third party. A hunger is lack Natural; it therefore needs a nature out of one's mind object out of his mind, to quench himself. Hunger is my body's confessed need for a object existing (seidenden) outside it, indispensable to its essential integration and externalization. the sun is the object of the plant, an essential object for it, confirming its life, just as the plant is the object of the sun, while externalization of the life-evoking force of the sun, of the essential force objective of the sun.” (MARX, 2006, p. 127).
Still from Marx, the reflections about the countryside-city metabolism, in The capital: “With the ever-increasing predominance of the urban population, crowded into large centers by capitalist production, this, on the one hand, accumulates the historical driving force of society and, on the other hand, distorts the metabolism between man and earth, that is , the return to the soil of those elements that are constitutive of it and were consumed by man in the form of food and clothing, a return that is the eternal natural condition of the permanent fertility of the soil. By doing so, it destroys both the physical health of urban workers and the spiritual life of rural workers. But at the same time that it destroys the conditions of this metabolism,[xxx] engendered in an entirely natural-spontaneous manner, capitalist production obliges it to be systematically restored to its status as a regulating law of social production and in a form adequate to full human development.”[xxiii]
To which Marx adds: "In agriculture, as in manufacturing, the capitalist transformation of the production process appears at once as the martyrology of the producers, the worker's milieu, the social combination of labor processes as an organized oppression of his vitality, individual freedom and independence. The dispersion of rural workers over ever larger areas weakens their capacity for resistance, just as the concentration in large industrial centers increases that of urban workers. As in urban industry, in modern agriculture the increase in productive power and the greater mobilization of labor are obtained through the devastation and exhaustion of the labor force itself. And every progress in capitalist agriculture is progress in the art of plundering not only the worker but also the soil, for every progress made in increasing the fertility of the soil for a certain period is at the same time progress in exhausting the lasting sources of that fertility. fertility".
To conclude: “The more a country, like the United States of America, has large-scale industry as the starting point of its development, the faster this process of destruction appears. Therefore, capitalist production only develops the technique and combination of the process of social production to the extent that it undermines the sources of all wealth: the land and the worker.” (MARX, I, Section IV, Chapter 13).[xxiii]
Updating Marx's reflections, perhaps the philosopher who best understood the previous passages and reinterpreted them under a new key and philosophical-political pitch, contrary to Freud's position regarding the drives of life and death, should be Ernst Bloch, in The Hope Principle, in two moments of the work. First, when dealing with the individual body and the drive, say primary, under apparent crudity of exposition and translation mishaps: “The drive needs someone (something) behind it. However, who is the stimulable he seeks? Who moves in the living movement? Who gives the impulse to the animal? Who desires in human beings? Here, not everything revolves around the I, as a drive in supervenes. However, this does not mean that there is no individual being, complete in itself, who carries the impulses, feels them and, through their satisfaction, gets rid of all feelings of disgust. On the contrary, this being is, in the first place, the individual living body: being moved by stimuli and overflowing with them, it possesses the impulses, which do not hover in a generic way. If the animal eats, it is its body that is satisfied, and nothing else. (BLOCH, I, 11, 2005, pp.51-52).”[xxv]
However, Bloch adds: “There are several drives that the human being always carries with him, because he not only preserves most of the animal drives but also generates others. So not only your body but your self is equally affective. The conscious human being is the most difficult animal to satisfy himself: he is the animal that, for the satisfaction of his desires, does not go straight to the point. If he lacks what is necessary for life, he feels this lack like no other being: visions of hunger emerge. If he has what he needs, with the enjoyment new appetites emerge, which bother him in a different way and no less than sheer lack did before. […] (For this) Xerxes stipulated a prize for the invention of a new amusement. It wasn't just boredom, but an impulse that he didn't know, at least as a clamor, and that claimed to be satiated”. (BLOCH, I, 11, 2005, p. 53).
Bloch ends by showing hunger as the “most reliable basic drive for self-preservation”. For, “very little, infinitely little has been said so far about hunger, although this sting has a rather original or archaic aspect, for a human being without food perishes, while it is possible to live without enjoying love at least for a while. . It is all the more possible to live without satisfying the drive for power, all the more so without returning to the unconscious of ancestors from 500 years ago. But the unemployed person who is dying, who hasn't eaten for days, has really been brought into the most ancient situation of need in our existence and makes it visible. […] the complaint of hunger is in fact the strongest, the only one that can be presented bluntly. The misfortune of the hungry is given credit. […] The stomach is the first lamp into which the oil must be poured. Its yearning is precise, its impulse so inevitable that it cannot even be repressed for a long time” (BLOCH, I, 13, pp. 67-68). of complex analysis, in the item “Once more drive and nourishment or subjectivity, objectivity of goods, values and the supreme good” (BLOCH, III, 54, pp. 409-419).
From the experience lived on the streets of the future Oslo, in Norway, the theme of hunger appears in a homonymous novel by Knut Hamsum (1859-1952), published in 1890: hunger, despair, delirium provoked by hunger. Later on, Josué de Castro (1908-1973), a doctor from Pernambuco, wrote the seminal work of the XNUMXth century on the problem, Geopolitics of Hunger: the Brazilian dilemma: bread or steel, from 1946, the result of empirical research. Also Carolina de Jesus, in Eviction room: diary of a slum dweller, begun on July 15, 1955, harshly reports the cruelty of her and her children's hunger. Not having anything to eat for days and days at a time.
It so happens that the globalized scenario of hunger entered the contemporary scene on the periphery of the world, from inapparent to evident. But not just on the periphery. Since no “green revolution”, in the United States of America and Europe, has solved the announced misery, as promised in the 1960s. Along with megacities that produce little food, they only consume more and more. Like the Tokyo metropolitan area with thirty-seven million inhabitants. In addition to the much-touted Chinese megacity designed to contain one hundred and thirty million inhabitants. Functional and irrational at the same time. More irrational in purpose than functional in terms of management. In general, completely polluted and inhumane cities. Jonas reflected on the unbalanced movement of expansion of cities in relation to nature. (JONAS, 2006, pp. 33-34).[xxiv]
However, Marcuse, in a conference given to militant students of the ecological movement in California, in 1977, also extended Marxian reflection to the limit, referring to Bloch about the “concrete utopia” in at least three passages. But at the outset, he notes that President Jimmy Carter that year had turned over “about thirty-six million acres of virgin land for commercial development. (Thus, asserts Marcuse), There was not much virgin land left to preserve.” (MARCUSE, 1999, p. 143). The same Carter, a peanut planter in Plains, Georgia, who, on a trip to Brazil, spoke privately with Dom Paulo Evaristo Arns, and heard the report about human rights violations, under the military dictatorship, in the mid-1970s. The first American democratic president to break the silence of the torture practiced in the basements of the dictatorship.
Marcuse's reflection starts from the tension between the drives driven by Eros and Thanatos – life drive versus death drive –, retheorized by Freudian psychoanalysis. Showing how, in advanced industrial society, social accommodation allows for a certain unstable, anguished, redundantly conformist balance. However, repressive and destructive, more general social mirror, which persists in the present. Marcuse points out that capitalist destruction is not confined to that of physical nature external to man. Because man is also destroyed in his nature by the logic of capital, marked by alienation or estrangement, in all the senses listed by Marx in the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.
In the current Brazilian case, compassionate and without action in the line of civil disobedience, as Thoureau had prophesied in the face of the excesses of the law and the increasingly authoritarian State, as an index of the emptying of the freedoms of the citizen full of (civil) rights. However, for such an occurrence it will be necessary for the principle of universality of the law to enter the scene, present in the agenda of the Magna Carta of 1988, which is under constant mutilation. Which forces us to remember what Lévi-Strauss predicted when he hurled ethnological curses at the city of São Paulo: it had not yet reached its urban climax and was already a ruin. Plagues that continue to be fulfilled, extended to the institutional legal field. But it remains to be seen what the 1988 Constitution says about the preservation of nature.
Back to the ethical-political and material problem of hunger. Once the natural, original metabolism between the countryside and the city has been lost, what political solution can be offered to the contemporary environmental situation? At the end of Late Antiquity, the fall of the Roman Empire disorganized the subjugated world around its political and social organization. However, the recourse to the Germanic feudal model, by the way, reorganized society at least until the twelfth century. If today, the capitalist mode of production is disorganized and can recompose its logical operating structure, based on the exploitation of natural wealth (of nature) and of work via the exacerbated expropriation of more value, how will the likely next historical stage be organized, material, of humanity's survival? Where will the disinherited of the Earth go, since there are no more lands free of owners to return to, nor new lands to be invaded as in the case of America, at the beginning of the XNUMXth century? Furthermore, what will become of the populations of megacities?
Without appealing to some dystopian model, probably the countries of the North of the world, possessing superior technologies, will survive by inventing systems to protect water, air, agricultural production. And how will the peoples of the South lead their future lives? By the way, Milton composed the song “blue planet”, to politicize the socio-political problem of inequality, in an aesthetically heightened way.
Signing Off
A viable solution to the degradation of the environment, a ready and proven model to guide the complete turnaround in the face of the evident civilizational failure of Modernity, of empty progress, perhaps was the one projected by Davi Kopenawa, in a long mythical autobiographical testimony of a shaman – text spoken to a French anthropologist –, for the possibility of a Biocene, the geological Age of natural Life, still without conceptualization or definition, however, disposed, frontally and contrary, as an alternative to the Anthropocene, a term named for the current Era. By considering nature through its (natural) rhythms to guide man's life, not the opposite, as experienced in the last four centuries.
So, without this "king of animals". But for the return of living the local life, along the lines of that protected by the spirits of the forest, the xapiri. No more global life with pretensions to cosmic interaction. –After all, man is “such a small animal of the Earth”, from the verse of The Lusiads, Canto I, 106, by Camões.[xxv]
Michel Serres, almost apropos as if summarizing the situation, wrote in The Natural Contract, that “by dint of dominating it, we have become so much and so little master of the Earth that it threatens to dominate us again. For her and within her, we share the same temporal destiny. And because we possess it, it will possess us as before, when the old need existed that subjected us to natural constraints, but this time in a different way. […] Once locally, today globally. Why is it necessary, from now on, to seek to dominate our domain? Because unregulated, exceeding its purpose, counterproductive, pure dominion turns against itself. (After all), Earth existed without our unimaginable ancestors, it could very well exist without any of our possible descendants, but we cannot exist without it… (SERRES, sd, pp. 59 and 58).”
However, the Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa recorded that “At first, the whites were very far from us. They had not yet brought measles, cough and malaria into our forest. Our ancestors didn't get sick as much as we do today. They were in good health most of the time, and when they died, the fumes of the epidemic did not sully their ghosts. Now, when one dies of the white's disease, even his specter is infested, and he returns to the shores of heaven with a fever. Your breath of life and your flesh are tainted by then! Before, we didn't all get sick at the same time either. People didn't die so much! the evil spirits në wari they ate the image of a man here, or a woman there. […] At that time, the Yanomami really loved the beauty and freshness of the forest. The oldest died out like the embers of a bonfire, when their heads were white and their eyes were blind. Then they became dry like dead trees and broke.” (Davi KOPENAWA, 2015, p. 224).[xxviii]
After all, who knows, maybe the poetic-musical imaginary provides the device for the key to the Yanomami environmental situation, of the present, from the verses of the song “Um Índio”, by Caetano Veloso?[xxviii] It remains to be seen whether the songs “Tempo Rei” and “O fim da História”, by Gilberto Gil and Torquato Neto can poetically explain the aims of Ecosocialism.
It ends with the lyrics of the song “Comida e Bebida”, music by Zé Miguel Wisnik and Zé Celso Martinez Corrêa, recorded by Elza Soares. In fact, it is a “speech” of the blind Tiresias to Pentheus, extracted from the tragedy The Bacchae, by Eurípedes, in a free translation from the Greek, but faithful to the original poetic text, by Zé Celso, Marcelo Drummond, Catherine Hirsch and Denise Assunção. According to Wisnik, the song circumscribes the staging of the Brazilian “tragicomedy orgy”, performed at Teatro Oficina / Uzyna, São Paulo, based on the original text of The Bacchae. The tragic move transfigured to travel in time reassembled here and now, showing what is valuable in life. At the turn of the XNUMXst century.[xxix]
A very rich “speech” due to its direct and indirect reference to Dionysus, the god Bacchus of the Romans, of parties and free and unbridled sensuality. Hey there:
“Only two things have value in life / Food and drink / Food and drink / Food is earth / Goddess earth / Give me earth / Your old acquaintance / Which you call / By the name you please / For with solid food / She gives / She suckles / She feeds / To mortals / Now she adds to multiply the drink / That the son of Semele brought divine / From the wet fruit of the vine / Getting mortals drunk / And ending their woes / Bringing the dream the erasure / Of everyday indebtedness / A God who gives himself to the gods / A God who makes himself available / There is no better drugstore for pain / To him you owe what you give and receive / The good you have and that stops / A messiah that drinks”.[xxx]
To reiterate, the essay designed here takes place from the extensive understanding of a ethics of responsibility, by Hans Jonas.[xxxii]
*Antonio Jose Romera Valverde is a professor at the Graduate Program in Philosophy at PUC-SP.
References
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_____ (2006), The Hope Principle, volume III, translated by Nélio Schneider, Rio de Janeiro, Counterpoint / EdUERJ.
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Notes
[I] Access link https://marsemfim.com.br/amazonia-em-junho-bate-novo-recorde-de-desmatamento/#.YO_nfYPoKiM.whatsapp, accessed on July 15, 2021. It reads “The Amazon continues to be deforested month after month, since the beginning of the Bolsonaro government. In the first six months of 2021, deforestation was 17% higher than in the same period last year. Our greatest asset, biodiversity, has never been treated as badly as it is now. The destruction of terrestrial biomes continues at a strong pace despite the fact that we have barely entered the dry season. After deforestation, the worst moment of the year begins: the fires; Will they return with the frightening intensity of 2020? Likely yes. opinion post, Amazon in June breaks new deforestation record. "
[ii] Against the grain of the environmental “future”, see “23. The spirit of the forest”. (KOPENAWA, 2015. Pp. 467-487).
[iii]ALENCAR, Bruna (2021), “Amazon forest already emits more carbon dioxide than it absorbs, study points out”, G1, issue of July 14, 2021. With the headline “Inpe researcher says that the forest emits 0,29 billion tons of carbon per year into the atmosphere in addition to what it can absorb. Research was published in the scientific journal Nature.”
Access link https://g1.globo.com/natureza/noticia/2021/07/14/floresta-amazonica-ja-emite-mais-gas-carbonico-do-absorve-aponta-estudo.ghtml, accessed on July 15, 2021.
[iv] By the way, check out the essays “The garden of Pindorama: manifesto for the 21st century” and “Reflections on the mysteries of the Brazilian landscape”, In SEVCENKO, 2000, pp. 12-22 and pp. 24-35, respectively.
[v] VEIGA, E. “Scientists discover signs that the Amazon had agriculture 4,5 years ago”, BBC News / Brasil, from Milan to BBC Brasil, 27 July 2020.Access link https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/brasil-44929482, accessed on June 11, 2021.
[vi]OLIVEIRA, Joana (2017), “Indigenous people were the first to alter the Amazon ecosystem”, access link https://brasil.elpais.com/brasil/2017/03/02/ciencia/1488466173_526998.html, accessed on July 15, 2021.
[vii]PIVETTA, Marcos (2018), “More people in the forest”, Research FAPESP, issue 267, May 2018.Access link https://revistapesquisa.fapesp.br/mais-gente-na-floresta/, accessed on July 15, 2021.
[viii] LEVIS, Carolina (2017), “An immense orchard”, Research FAPESP, issue 253, Mar 2017. Access link https://revistapesquisa.fapesp.br/um-imenso-pomar/, accessed on July 15, 2021.
[ix]MARQUES, Fabrício (2009), “The human factor”, Fapesp Research, edition 156, Feb 2009. Access link https://revistapesquisa.fapesp.br/o-fator-humano-2/, accessed on July 15, 2021.
[X]CAETANO-ANDRADE (2020), “Time capsules: how trees can teach how to preserve”, Trends in Plant Science, reproduced by the website Earth.news, issue of February 06, 2020. Thus presented: “A study based on the analysis of tree trunks indicates that forests like the Amazon are not sanctuaries untouched by man and that human management in ancient periods was done in a sustainable way. Brazilian forestry Victor Lery Caetano-Andrade each tree is a true time capsule: it carries precious information about the relationship between human beings and nature. Researching and understanding how this has been happening for thousands of years could be a key for contemporary humanity to be able to consciously, sustainably and responsibly manage natural resources.”
Access link https://www.terra.com.br/noticias/capsulas-do-tempo-como-arvores-podem-ensinar-a-preservar,60941b601021f044b16c1fb0cdc509d22eklh8ti.html, accessed on July 15, 2021.
[xi] CASTRO, EV de (2017), “The model and the example: two ways of changing the world”, conference given during the “UFMG Cycle, 90 – Contemporary Challenges”, on 09/10/2017. access link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PfE54pj1wU, accessed on June 11, 2021.
[xii]On the “historical development and the obscure disaster of Stalinism…”, see Daniel BENSAID, “Socialist democracy is not soluble in bureaucratic statism”, In BENSAID, 2008, pp. 73-79.
[xiii]BENJAMIN, Walter (1987), “Magic and technique, art and politics. Essays on Literature and the History of Culture”, pp. 222-232.
[xiv] “Épico”, Caetano Veloso, 1973. Access link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylv626nMOl8, accessed on July 17, 2021.
[xv] “Love of nature”, Paulinho da Viola, 1975.
Access link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuPJPfYDzdA, accessed on July 17, 2021.
[xvi] “Planet Blue”, Milton Nascimento and Fernando Brandt, from 1991.
Access link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuPJPfYDzdA, accessed on July 17, 2021.
[xvii] “Um Índio”, by Caetano Veloso, from 1977.
Access link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rb_gaaibOHw , accessed on July 17, 2021.
[xviii] “Marginália 2”, Gilberto Gil and Torquato Neto, from 1968.
Access link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TT5Mt5G8CzM, accessed on July 17, 2021.
[xx] “Tempo Rei”, Gilberto Gil, from 1984. access link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXgz_3KdTkI, accessed on July 17, 2021.
[xx] “The End of History”, Gilberto Gil, 1992. Access link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5_X-Hz_2RQ, accessed on July 17, 2021.
[xxx] Author's Griffins.
[xxiii] By the way, check out Kohei SAITO, “The Capital as a theory of metabolism”. In SAITO, 2021, pp. 129-175. See Daniel BENSAID, “The exchange between the human species and its natural environment is irreducible to the miserable measure of financial markets”, In BENSAID, 2008, pp. 69.
[xxiii]about nature in The capital, it is necessary to consult the reflections of Rodrigo Duarte, Marx and nature in Capital, 1985, and by Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik, The dialectical relationship between man and nature: historical-philosophical studies on the problem of nature in Karl Marx, 2019.
[xxv] On the subject of the hunger drive, in Bloch, see VALVERDE, “Ernst Bloch: to see through the Fog”, 2019, pp.124-125.
[xxiv]By the way, check out the account of the culture shock of the shaman Davi Kopenawa, reported in Chapter “20. In the city", In KOPENAWA, 2015, pp. 421-438.
[xxv]Zé Miguel Wisnik and Caetano Veloso set the poem by Camões to music, under the title of “Tão Pequeno”, from the album Ongoto, danced by Grupo Corpo,
access link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YkF3EoV7N4, accessed on August 01, 2021.
Carlos Drummond de Andrade, in “O HOMEM; THE TRAVELS”, by The impurities of white: “MAN, so small an Earth creature / gets bored with the Earth / a place of much misery and little fun, makes a rocket, a capsule, a module / plays for the Moon…” (DRUMMOND, 1979, p. 440) . Drummond reciting the poem, accessible via the link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pt5wAezIlFQ, accessed on August 01, 2021.
[xxviii]“White people call us ignorant only because we are different people from them. Indeed, it is their thinking that is short and obscure. It cannot expand and rise, because they want to ignore death. […] White people don't dream as far as we do. They sleep a lot, but only dream of themselves. Their thinking remains obstructed and they sleep like tapirs or tortoises. That is why they cannot understand our words.” (KOPENAWA, 2015, p. 390). About the passage, see the commentary by DANOWSKI and VIVEIROS de CASTRO, 2014, pp. 99-100. By the way, in the work, Kopenawa refers to whites, synthetically and brilliantly, as “commodity people”.
[xxviii] “An Indian will descend from a colorful, brilliant star / From a star that will come with dizzying speed / And will land in the heart of the southern hemisphere in America, / in a clear instant / After the last indigenous nation has been exterminated / And the spirit of the birds of the fountains of clear water / More advanced than the most advanced of the most advanced technologies / It will come that I saw […] / And what at that moment will be revealed to the people / Will surprise everyone not because it is exotic / But because it could have always been there hidden / When will the obvious have been”. (VELOSO, credits note 17).
[xxix] See SANTOS, Valmir (1999), “Zé Celso and Uzyna stage a show at the turn of the year and the public makes the Choir”, “Ilustrada”, Newspaper, issue dated December 31, 1999. Access link
https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/fsp/ilustrad/fq3112199916.htm, accessed on July 18, 2021.
[xxx]“Food and drink”, Zé Miguel Wisnik and Zé Celso Martinez Corrêa, from 2000.
Access link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXOnTWPIXGg, accessed on July 15, 2021.
[xxxii] For a more comprehensive approach to the problem at hand, other considerations related to the “ecology of the mind”, created by Gregory Bateson, and the “deep ecology”, exposed in the ten volumes of the work Arne Ness, would fit.