By EUGENIO BUCCI*
The facts bring us face to face with the exhaustion not of empires, not of humanity, but of planet Earth.
On the cover of the newspaper The State of S. Paul Last Tuesday, a photo shows Brasília submerged in dense, almost opaque smoke. On TV, walls of fire rise and march. To the naked eye, soot pours over the city; filaments of coal blown by the wind land like dragonflies on the hood of the million-real car.
The climate disaster is a social disaster, which punishes those at the bottom first, but when it really takes hold it does not respect the segregation between classes. It respects nothing, it even covers the stars in the sky. The moon turns red, as if obeying the Apocalypse (6,12): “whole as blood”.
Silver sun, black rain (when it rains). Hospital admissions are on the rise. Deaths from respiratory problems are on the rise. The news reports that an area equivalent to the state of Roraima has already turned to ash. Reality is proving to be worse than the theory predicted.
The book The Uninhabitable Earth, by American journalist David Wallace-Wells, was considered pessimistic when it was released in 2017, but now it seems mild. Its warning that thawing ice in Alaska and Siberia would release greenhouse gases and revive microorganisms capable of triggering unknown epidemics has been overtaken by even more frightening scenarios.
Scientist Carlos Nobre declared himself “terrified”. In an article published on the website UOL, he used the adjective that gave the title to Wallace-Wells' book and declared: “if global temperatures rise by 4ºC by 2100, much of the planet, including Brazil, could become uninhabitable.” The Solimões River has been reduced to a ghost stream, uninhabitable for fish. Metropolises are torn between two extremes: in the first, infectious floods inundate homes with disease and mud; in the second, drought threatens to kill residents from thirst.
A sense of cataclysm takes over everyone's mind. It is an all-encompassing premonition, which is not limited to atmospheric conditions, furious storms and the gusts of heat that scorch us in the middle of winter. Catastrophism contaminates every sphere, from the street to the kitchen, from the bar to the sacristy.
The gaseous impression is formed that we are on the brink of Armageddon, as if existence were going to collapse next week. The subject gives in to depressive negativity. Did the electricity go out? “A symptom of the irreversible environmental crisis.” Fatalism is rampant and moralism goes crazy. Seeing two men walking hand in hand on the sidewalk, the prude looks at the ground, imagining Sodom and Gomorrah reincarnated.
The couple turns on the television to watch the debate between mayoral candidates and witnesses, live, one of the candidates throwing a chair at his opponent. A chair! The husband huffs: “Politics has rotted.” The wife leaves without saying anything.
Everywhere you look, signs of widespread disintegration proliferate. Telemarketing is relentless – most of it is a scam. Children are addicted to gambling on their cell phones. The vaccine has not arrived. Organized crime controls markets and public offices. Half a century ago, London punks were shouting “in the future”. You see, they were right.
It's not that the dull feeling that the world will end the day after tomorrow is new. It's been around for a long time.O tempora! O mores!”, lamented Cicero two thousand years ago, convinced that the degradation of customs in Julius Caesar’s Rome foreshadowed the empire’s agony. Did Cicero exaggerate? In other words: the empire lasted longer than he did, but it would soon fall apart. All powers, even the most colossal, eventually die.
Civilizations too. At the beginning of the 20th century, the philosopher and poet Paul Valéry wrote: “We, civilizations, know that we are mortal.” He was obviously right, but recently the situation has become more exasperating: we have come to live with the idea that, in addition to civilizations, humanity itself may disappear.
In the 18th century, in the midst of the Enlightenment, the Marquis de Sade made a point of emphasizing the finitude of our species. In Philosophy in the bedroom, the libertine aristocrat Madame Sain-Ange sighs, sensually and perfidiously: “The total extinction of the human race would be a service rendered to nature.”
At the end of the 19th century, Tolstoy said almost the same thing in Sonata to Kreutzer. “Will the human species become extinct?” asks the narrator, who quickly responds with a new question: “But is it possible that anyone, whatever their way of seeing the world, could doubt this?”
Now, the situation has worsened. The facts bring us face to face with the exhaustion not of empires, not of humanity, but of planet Earth. We are witnessing the fatigue of the material and the immaterial: fatigue of nature and of narratives about nature, fatigue of the roofs of temples and religions, fatigue of the fire brigade and of the incorporeal methods of fighting fires. Fatigue of fatigue.
Around Brasília, the murmuring springs evaporate, the green forests burn and the plateau crackles. While Congress discusses amnesties, fog fire engulfs the federal capital. Is it a metaphor? Is it the end?
* Eugene Bucci He is a professor at the School of Communications and Arts at USP. Author, among other books, of Uncertainty, an essay: how we think about the idea that disorients us (and orients the digital world) (authentic). [https://amzn.to/3SytDKl]
Originally published in the newspaper The State of S. Paul.
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