Arquivos da Tag: discurso ambiental

Conservation without supervision: Peruvian community group creates and patrols its own protected area (Mongabay)

By:Jenny R. Isaacs

April 30, 2013

“Rural dwellers are not passive respondents to external conservation agents but are active proponents and executers of their own conservation initiatives.”—Noga Shanee, Projects Director forNeotropical Primate Conservation (NPC), in an interview with mongabay.com.

When we think of conservation areas, many of us think of iconic National Parks overseen by uniformed government employees or wilderness areas purchased and run from afar by big-donor organizations like The Nature Conservancy, Wildlife Conservation Society, WWF, or Conservation International. But what happens to ecosystems and wildlife in areas where there’s a total lack of government presence and no money coming in for its protection? This is the story of one rural Peruvian community that took conservation matters into their own hands, with a little help from a dedicated pair of primate researchers, in order to protect a high biodiversity cloud forest.

On the 22nd of November, 2012, the Peruvian Andes village of Líbano celebrated the launch of the Hocicón Reserve, formed under an innovative conservation model in accordance with federal law which allows for local administration of lands by community organizations (in this case the Rondas Campesinas). The new reserve protects an area of tropical Andean cloud forest in one of the most diverse biomes on earth, home to many endangered and unique species including the endemic Andean night monkey (Aotus miconax), the Endangered white-bellied spider monkey (Ateles belzebuth), jaguars, tapirs and many more. Hocicón, a 505.9 hectare protected area, is on the border of the Amazonas and San Martin regions—two of the most densely populated rural regions in Peru with some of the highest deforestation rates in the country. The rural population in these regions—Campesinos or ‘peasant farmers’—are predominantly of mixed indigenous and European origin and, like the native wildlife, are also endangered, by land insecurity and degraded natural resources.

Noga and Sam Shanee have helped provide technical assistance to the creation of the Hocicón reserve. Ronda leader, Marcos Díaz Delgado, was instrumental in the reserve's creation. Photo courtesy of NPC.
Noga and Sam Shanee have helped provide technical assistance to the creation of the Hocicón reserve. Ronda leader, Marcos Díaz Delgado, was instrumental in the reserve’s creation. Photo courtesy of NPC.

Noga Shanee and her husband Sam, of the organizationNeotropical Primate Conservation (NPC), work primarily in Peru to support the connection between communities and conservation. They live most of each year not far from the Hocicón reserve they helped to create. “We created NPC as a result of our experience as conservation practitioners and the need we felt to finding efficient solutions to the grave situation in which we found the yellow tailed woolly monkey and its habitat,” Noga told mongabay.com.

The Shanees’ work in primate conservation brought them in close contact with local residents, where it became clear that protection of nature might best be achieved by supporting grassroots community efforts. In the last few years, they have administratively assisted in registering seven conservation areas with the local and national governments before helping to establish the Hocicón reserve under the Ronda Campesina group in Libano. Through NPC they offer Libano residents technical support (GPS equipment, GIS mapping, basic biological assessment and the writing of a basic report), advice on quantifying the ecological importance of the area, and help with legal matters.

Such assistance is necessary because according to governmental demands for conservation projects “local initiators have to execute plans of economic activities and reserve maintenance involving factors which many rural campesinos don’t have the capacity and/or resources to undertake,” writes Noga Shanee in a forthcoming article, which details their fieldwork and the many obstacles that prohibit local community groups from establishing official protected areas. “The main restrictions found to Campesino conservation initiatives was a lack of access to support from governmental and non-governmental institutions and a lack of access to economic resources for the extended bureaucratic processes of registering these protected areas.”

The Andean night monkey (Aotus miconax) is endemic to Peruvian forests which are being protected not by the government or big NGOs, but local communities. Photo by: Andrew Walmsley/NPC.
The Andean night monkey (Aotus miconax) is endemic to Peruvian forests which are being protected not by the government or big NGOs, but local communities. Photo by: Andrew Walmsley/NPC.

Noga Shanee says that the bigger problem is disconnect between the state’s expressed desire for conservation and the overly restrictive process of providing for it.

“The Peruvian state presents itself as an enthusiastic promoter of conservation and public participation in environmental issues, taking pride in legislation that allows private and community conservation,” she notes. “However, our experience shows us that the process of legally registering privately run conservation areas is extremely complicated, expensive and slow, requiring teams of specialists and cost on average $20,000 US dollars, just up to the initial registration of the area. After completing this arduous process, the government does not provide any support for the conservation initiators; on the contrary, they require additional reports and economic investments. Therefore, this process is inaccessible to most of the rural population creating inequality and losing opportunities for local participation and conservation efficiency…most local people are unable to create their own reserves and need the help of NGOs. The creation of these reserves including the elaboration of the proposal and waiting for registration takes from 1.5 to 5 years. During this time the land is not legally protected and other land uses are possible which in some cases has led to conflicts.”

One effect of this long, and expensive process is the exclusion of non-experts, small groups, and those lacking connections to government officials or influential NGOs in the process of establishing reserves.

“Although it is perceived locally that broad inter-institutional cooperation would be the best way towards effective regional conservation, cooperation is rare, mainly due to competitiveness related to economic pressures,” Shanee writes.

Launching community reserves from the ground up has proven to be a great way to overcome these bureaucratic obstacles while combating a myriad of threats to both animals and local people.

Ronderos voting to create Hocicón Reserve. Photo by: Noga Shanee.
Ronderos voting to create Hocicón Reserve. Photo by: Noga Shanee.

“The area suffers from high levels of deforestation fueled by immigration, road construction, extractive industries, hydroelectric dams, cattle ranching and lately a boom of palm oil plantations. The Ronda Campesina [community group, which launched the reserve,] has been protesting for many years against this development model (aggressively promoted by the government) which is so destructive to natural habitats and to rural societies,” Noga Shanee, told mongabay.com.

Such threats are caused by a number of actors, according to Shanee, including the federal government, international corporations, and even the rural campesinos [farmers] themselves.

“Severe economic and social pressures are found to force campesinos into unsustainable practices,” writes Noga Shanee, in a recently submitted paper.

Clown tree frog (Dendropsophus sarayacuensis) in the region. Nestor Allgas Marchena/NPC.
Clown tree frog (Dendropsophus sarayacuensis) in the region. Nestor Allgas Marchena/NPC.

In her PhD Thesis on the subject written for Kent University in the UK, Noga Shanee summarized that “current conservation efforts are far from sufficient to offset the mounting threats they face,” adding “an amalgam of contradicting agendas, power struggles, superficial-spectacular solutions, and prejudices towards rural populations hinder the efficiency of conservation interventions” as “the immense pressures impacting human populations transforms directly into environmentally degrading processes.”

The Hocicón conservation model is not your typical conservation solution to these problems. In contrast to uniformed park officials greeting visitors or teams of well-paid foreign biologists in the field monitoring wildlife populations, these reserves are organic extensions of the community—policed and patrolled by the local residents themselves; such projects bring, according to Shanee, “a sense of pride and inclusion to the rural people who implement them.”

The Rondas enjoy distinctive legal rights within Peruvian society because of long-standing traditional land claims by indigenous peoples in combination with large areas of territory devoid of governmental or NGO supervision.

“The areas we are working and living in (departments of Amazonas and San Martin in Northern Peru) are almost completely abandoned by the government and would be in complete anarchy if it wasn’t for the Rondas…The Ronda Campesina (Peasant Patrol) is a network of autonomous, civil organizations, aimed at self-protection,” Shanee explains. “They practice vigilance and civil justice in the rural Peruvian countryside where state control is insufficient.”

The royal sunangel (Heliangelus regalis) is listed as Endangered by the IUCN Red List. Photo by: Sachar Alterman/NPC.
The royal sunangel (Heliangelus regalis) is listed as Endangered by the IUCN Red List. Photo by: Sachar Alterman/NPC.

Ronda bases can be organized by any population (community, town, or village). Nationally, the Ronda has more than half a million active members, in more than 5,000 bases, mainly, but not only, in Northern Peru and solves about 180,000 civil justice cases per year. Rondas also protest against external environmental hazards, such as polluting mining operations. According to Noga Shanee’s thesis, “by criticism and setting examples, the Rondas pressure both the government and NGOs to act more efficiently and morally towards conservation.”

Sam Shanee, also of NPC, says Ronda self-government is purely for protective purposes. “The ronda is basically a neighborhood watch group in most villages (I myself am a ‘rondero’ in the village where we live). All that this new approach entails in its most basic form is a group of villagers (or the entire village) getting together a deciding to protect an area of forest or other natural habitat near where they live… there has been no use of force for the creation of this first ARCA and the Ronda is not really a militia organization except when necessary, for example in the face of terrorism, drug cartels, illegal mining/logging etc.”

White-bellied spider monkey (Ateles belzebuth). Photo by: Shachar Alterman.
White-bellied spider monkey (Ateles belzebuth). Photo by: Shachar Alterman.

In the absence of top-down support or supervision, the Rondas offer their own path to conservation. The Ronda-run Conservation Areas, known as ARCAs, are quick, extremely low-cost, and are uniquely tailored to the Ronda social structure, allowing for participation of local people in conservation efforts, according to the Shanees.

Marcos Díaz Delgado, a national Ronda leader, told mongabay.com that “The [Ronda-run Conservation Areas (ARCAs)] are an alternative to the state’s legal conservation system which is extremely slow, expensive and fails to reach many remote, rural parts of our country. As a special jurisdiction we don’t only defend our safety and our human rights, but we also defend the natural world inside our territories. We invite the state authorities and all social organizations to join us for the collective defense of our natural resources.”

The ARCAs were designed to streamline the process of establishing protected areas: because of the Rondas special legal status, they only necessitate the minimal process (mapping and basic biological info), and cost almost nothing. Therefore “the Ronda Campesina’s conservation initiatives are an honest and efficient answer to habitat and species loss in Peru as well as to the deficiencies of mainstream, non participative conservation,” Noga Shanee says, adding that while this project is a collaboration between NPC and the Ronda, “we are hoping that they will become more and more self sufficient with time…our help is trying to organize, augment and formalize this initiative”. Orin Starn, Chair and Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University, and author of the book Night Watch, the Politics of Protest in the Andes, told mongabay.com that, “the Rondas are the largest, most influential grassroots movement in Peru’s northern mountains. Environmentalism is a relatively new development to this area, and it’ll be very interesting to see the directions that this new collaboration between an old peasant movement and the new NGO-driven green activism may take.”

Noga Shanee (in pink) with community members. Photo courtesy of NPC.
Noga Shanee (in pink) with community members. Photo courtesy of NPC.

The Shanees’ work in the Amazon continues to illustrate the close biocultural connection between nature and community. Noga sees this connection as a positive force for change when strengthened. In her thesis she writes that destructive pressures on local communities and forests “also create positive consequences by creating new conservation opportunities.” By turning local environmental and social crisis into opportunity, new collaborations and conservation without supervision, born of necessity, can emerge, offering real hope for biocultural diversity.

“All over the world there are small groups of local farmers and indigenous people that organize themselves in order to protect their neighboring forests,” Noga Shanee says. “These initiatives are rarely heard about as these people often lack resources and expertise to promote their successes through academic or popular publications.” But she adds that she hopes the Hocicón model will become increasingly common in Peru and even spread abroad.

“This initiative can inspire other grassroots organizations to organize themselves to administer conservation, which could benefit many different species and habitats around the world. “

She believes that community-run conservation will prosper, saying, “we might be naïve and of course this project can fail, but our work in Peru has shown us that local communities put huge efforts in conserving their forests, usually with no help from mainstream conservationists and sometimes even despite them. We believe that they deserve the chance.”

Cloud forest in Northeastern Peru. Photo by: Andrew Walmsley/NPC.
Cloud forest in Northeastern Peru. Photo by: Andrew Walmsley/NPC.

Noga in front in purple with community leaders. Photo courtesy of NPC.
Noga in front in purple with community leaders. Photo courtesy of NPC.

White-fronted spider monkey (Ateles belzebuth). Photo by: Shachar Alterman.
White-fronted spider monkey (Ateles belzebuth). Photo by: Shachar Alterman.

CITATIONS:

Shanee N (2012) The Dynamics of Threats and Conservation Efforts for the Tropical Andes Hotspot in Amazonas and San Martin, Peru. PhD Thesis (Kent University, Canterbury). Supervised by Prof. Stuart R. Harrop.

Shanee, Noga, Sam Shanee, and Robert H. Horwich (2012 in revision). “Locally run conservation initiatives in northeastern Peru and their effectiveness as conservation methods,” shared by permission of the authors

Starn O (1999) Nightwatch: the politics of protest in the Andes (Duke Univ Pr, Los Angeles) p 329.

Chapin, M. (2004) A Challenge to Conservationists. World Watch, 17, 17-31

Sobrevila, Claudia. (2008) “The Role of Indigenous Peoples in Biodiversity Conservation; The Natural but Often Forgotten Partners” World Bank Report.

Read more athttp://news.mongabay.com/2013/0430-isaacs-rondas.html#LcSylhiLfpBJhPkz.99

Mainstream green is still too white (Color Lines)

By Brentin Mock; Cross-posted from ColorLines

We missing anything here?Last year was the hottest on record for the continental United States, and it wasn’t an outlier. The last 12 years have been the warmest years since 1880, the year the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration began tracking this information. And climate scientists predict that the devastating blizzards, droughts, hurricanes, and wildfires we’ve been experiencing lately will worsen due to climate change.

In many ways these punishing weather events feel like Mother Nature seeking revenge for our failure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the primary cause of global warming. Despite abundant evidence, the U.S. government has yet to pass a law that would force a reduction in these emissions.

During his first term, President Obama did make climate change a priority, both in his campaign and in office. The American Clean Energy and Security Act that Congress produced passed through the House in June 2009 by a narrow margin. Yet the bill never reached a vote in the Senate, and it died quietly.

Environmentalists have been flummoxed ever since. One prominent cause-of-death theory says that large mainstream (and predominantly white) environmental groups failed to mobilize grassroots support and ignored those who bear a disproportionate burden of climate change, namely poor people of color.

With Obama in for a second term and reaffirmed in his environmental commitments, climate legislation has another chance at life. Now, observers are wondering if mainstream environmentalists learned the right lessons from the first climate bill failure and how they’ll work with people of color this time around.

Anatomy of a conflict

To hear some environmental leaders tell it, their defeat wasn’t due to a lack of investment in black and brown people living in poor and working class communities, but to an over-investment in Obama. For example, Dan Lashof, climate and clean air director for Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), has blamed the president for having the audacity to push healthcare reform and he’s pointed the finger at green groups for being too patient with Obama.

Asked what environmental advocates who led the first climate bill effort could have done differently in 2009, Bill McKibben, founder of the online grassroots organizing campaign 350.org, says their game plan was too insular. “There was no chance last time because all the action was in the closed rooms, not in the streets,” he tells Colorlines.com.

Yet that “action” took place behind closed doors for a reason: Major mainstream green groups including the Environmental Defense Fund and The Nature Conservancy teamed up with oil companies and some of the biggest polluters and emitters in the nation to form the United States Climate Action Partnership (USCAP). This ad hoc alliance was the driving force behind the failed 2009 bill and there were no environmental justice, civil rights, or people-of-color groups at the USCAP table.

Obama can’t be blamed for the blind spots of major groups. As recent Washington Post and Politico articles have pointed out, their leadership and membership simply don’t reflect the race or socieconomic class of people most vulnerable to climate change’s wrath.

Sarah Hansen, former executive director of the Environmental Grantmakers Association, argued recently that the mainstream has been stingy with funding and resources and inept at engaging environmental justice communities. In a National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP) study, “Cultivating the Grassroots: A Winning Approach for Environmental and Climate Funders,” Hansen reported that philanthropies awarded most of their environmental dollars to large, predominantly white groups but received little return in terms of law and policy. Meanwhile, wrote Hansen, too few dollars have been invested in community- and environmental justice-based organizations.

According to the NCRP report, environmental organizations with $5 million-plus budgets made up only 2 percent of green groups in general but in 2009 received half of all grants in the field. The NCRP also found that 15 percent of all green dollars benefited marginalized populations between 2007 and 2009. Only 11 percent went to social justice causes.

In January, Harvard professor Theda Skocpol released a study of the first climate bill campaign’s failure and faulted green groups involved for choosing direct congressional lobbying over grassroots organizing. Some of the major organizations did spend money on field organizers, wrote Skocpol, but only to push public messaging like billboards and advertisements.

“The messaging campaigns would not make it their business to actually shape legislation — or even talk about details with ordinary citizens or grassroots groups,” Skocpol wrote in the report. The public “is seen as a kind of background chorus that, hopefully, will sing on key.”

Take one for the team?

That the environmental movement thought billboards and ads could replace educating and organizing actual people was their biggest flaw, a position shared by Hansen and Skocpol. In comparison, health reform advocates took a lobbying and grassroots approach while the climate-change bill made the rounds and got a law passed.

“If you want to gain the trust of the emerging non-white majority, it’s not just a messaging thing,” explains Ryan Young, legal counsel for the California-based Greenlining Institute, a policy research nonprofit focused on economic, environmental, and racial justice. “It’s a values thing. You must understand the values of these communities and craft policy around that.”

Why does this matter?

Consider how the website of the National Wildlife Federation (NWF) recently featured an article on city bird sanctuaries from the group’s print magazine titled “Urban Renewal.”

Having people of color on staff might have helped NWF understand that for some, “urban renewal” signifies a historical legacy of black and Latino neighborhoods being effectively erased by development projects such as sports stadiums. Cultural snafus like this have led to white environmental groups being clowned in influential outlets including The Daily Show.

In an interview about the unintended message of “Urban Renewal,” Jim Lyon, NWF’s vice president for conservation policy, told Colorlines.com that the group doesn’t “always get everything right” and that “he’d take it back to his staff.” (Ironically, one of the harshest critiques of urban renewal came from Jane Jacobs, a white conservationist.) On the topic of staff diversity, Lyon said the organization isn’t where they want it to be, but that they’ve made “good progress.” He would not release staff demographics, but said NWF achieves diversity through partnerships with other groups and programs like Eco-Schools USA, which he says “engages more than 1 million children of color” daily.

Beverly Wright, who heads the New Orleans-based Deep South Center for Environmental Justice, says racial oversights of traditionally white groups are the main reason black and Latino environmentalists have formed their own organizations. The culturally divided camps sometimes use the same words, but they’re often speaking different languages.

Take “cap-and-trade,” a scheme that would commodify greenhouse gas emissions for market-trading as a way to reduce those emissions. The first climate bill centered on cap-and-trade because most major environmental groups supported it. But cap-and-trade was anathema to environmental justice because it did nothing to curb local co-pollutants such as smog and soot, direct threats to communities of color. That’s not to mention that cap-and-trade was the brainchild of C. Boyden Gray, a conservative member of the Federalist Society and leader of FreedomWorks, today a major Tea Party funder.

Wright says major green groups tried to coax environmental justice organizations into supporting cap-and-trade by claiming it was for the “greater good.”

“But that meant white people get all the greater goods and we get the rest,” says Wright. “Until they want to have real discussions around racism, they won’t have our support. That’s what happened last time with the climate bill. It did not move, because they did not have diversity in their voices.”

“Diversity” doesn’t just mean hiring more people of color. As the 30-year-old Center for Health, Environment and Justice stated in March, the diversity conversation “really needs to be about resources and assistance to the front line communities rather than head counting.”

What’s next?

So in the new round of climate bill talks, will large environmental groups meaningfully engage community-based environmental justice groups?

The prognosis is mixed. Look at MomentUs, a mammoth collaborative started in January to ramp up support for new climate legislation. While MomentUs claims to be a game-changer, the strategy behind it seems very similar to that of USCAP’s — the one that failed to deliver a climate-change law the first time around. On its website, MomentUs describes its board of directors as “cultural, environmental, business, and marketing leaders who offer the diversity of viewpoints and keen insight vital to advancing MomentUs’s mission.” At press time, all of the directors are white. So is the staff, except for one office administrator.

Looking at MomentUs partners, it appears that the same traditionally white environmental organizations who teamed up for USCAP are now working with corporations including ALEC funder Duke Energy, predatory subprime mortgage king Wells Fargo, perennial labor union target Sodexho, and Disney. At press time there are no environmental justice or civil rights groups involved.

On the other side of the spectrum, The Sierra Club — one of the nation’s largest and whitest green groups — has had an expansive role in environmental justice and advocacy, particularly in the Gulf Coast. In January it joined the NAACP and labor unions in launching the Democracy Initiative, which will tackle voting rights, environmental justice, and other civil rights concerns.

To be sure, it’s way too early to make a conclusion about MomentUs or the Democracy Initiative, but the latter appears to be a step in the right direction in terms of highlighting the intersection between poor environmental outcomes and racism.

McKibben, the 350.org founder, has helped cultivate a multicultural fight against the Keystone XL pipeline project, but he admits that the overall environmental movement has “tons of work to do” on racial equity and inclusion.

“The sooner [mainstream environmentalists] absorb the message and are led by members of the environmental justice movement, the better,” he says.

In that case, the question is a matter of timing and power, of who decides when and which environmental justice activists get to lead.

Stay tuned.

Brentin Mock is a New Orleans-based journalist who serves as ColorLines’s reporting fellow on voting rights.     

How Science Can Predict Where You Stand on Keystone XL (Mother Jones)

Want to make sense of the feud between pipeline activists and “hippie-punching” moderates? Talk to the researchers.

—By  | Wed Apr. 17, 2013 3:00 AM PDT

Washington monument with protestors around itThe anti-Keystone “Forward on Climate” rally in Washington DC, February 17th, 2013. Jay Mallin/ZUMA Press

On February 17, more than 40,000 climate change activists—many of them quite young—rallied in Washington, DC, to oppose the Keystone XL pipeline, which will transport dirty tar sands oil from Canada across the heartland. The scornful response from media centrists was predictable. Joe Nocera of the New York Times, for one, quickly went on the attack. In a column titled “How Not to Fix Climate Change,” he wrote that the strategy of activists “who have made the Keystone pipeline their line in the sand is utterly boneheaded.”

Nocera, who accepts the science of climate change, made a string of familiar arguments: The tar sands will be exploited anyway, the total climate contribution of the oil that would be transported by Keystone XL is minimal, and so on. Perhaps inspired by Nocera-style thinking, a group of 17 Democratic senators would later cast a symbolic vote in favor of the pipeline, signaling that opposing industrial projects is not the brand of environmentalism that they, at least, have in mind.

The Keystone activists, not surprisingly, were livid. Not only did they challenge Nocera’s facts, they utterly rejected his claims as to the efficacy of their strategy: Opponents of the pipeline have often argued that it is vital to push the limits of the possible—in particular, to put unrelenting pressure on President Obama to lead on climate change. Van Jones, the onetime Obama clean-energy adviser and a close supporter of 350.org founder and Keystone protest leader Bill McKibben, has put it like this: “I think activism works…The lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender movement kept pushing on the question of marriage equality, and the president came out for marriage equality, which then had a positive effect on public opinion and helped that movement win at the ballot box and in a number of states, within months.”

This article is about the emotionally charged dispute between climate activists and environmental moderates, despite their common acceptance of the science of climate change. Why does this sort of rift exist on so many issues dividing the center from the left? And what can we actually say about which side is, you know, right?

Does Joe Nocera really have a sound basis for calling the pipeline opponents’ strategy boneheaded—or is that just his gut feeling as a centrist? Does Van Jones have any basis for claiming that activism works—or is it just his gut feeling as someone favorably disposed towards activism?

This line of inquiry should prove duly humbling to both activists and moderates—and help to unite them.

It’s high time we considered the science on these questions. There is, after all, considerable scholarly work on whether activists, by pushing the boundaries of what seems acceptable, create the conditions for progress or, instead, bring about backlashes that can complicate the jobs of sympathetic policymakers.

There’s also data that may shed light on why these rifts between “moderates” and “activists” are more the rule than the exception—across the ideological spectrum. “I can’t really think of any movement where there isn’t some internal dissent about goals and tactics,” says Carleton College political scientist Devashree Gupta, who studies social movements. The recurrence of this pattern on issues from civil rights to gun control to abortion suggests that there is something here that’s well worth understanding, preferably before the next rhetorical bloodbath around Keystone.

A chief benefit of this line of inquiry: It should prove duly humbling to activists and moderates alike—and thus might help to unite them.

FROM THE OUTSET, I think we can agree on one fundamental point: Over the past several years, driven by the failure of cap and trade and a worsening climate crisis, America’s environmental movement has become considerably more activist in nature—some might even say “radical.” Exhibit A is the successful attempt by 350.org inspirer-in-chief McKibben (who has written extensively about climate for Mother Jones) to create a grassroots protest movement rather than simply to work within the corridors of power.

“What Bill is doing is actually quite impressive—he’s the first one to create a social movement around climate change, and he’s done it by creating a common enemy, the oil industry, and a salient target, which is Keystone,” says Andrew Hoffman, a professor at the University of Michigan who studies environmental politics.

There’s really little doubt that the “dark greens” are on the ascendant.

One crucial aspect of this shift is a growing reluctance by environmentalists to work hand in hand with big polluters. The latter was a central feature of the US Climate Action Partnership, the industry-environmental collaboration that led an unsuccessful cap-and-trade push a few years back. Nowadays, the environmental movement is moving toward a more oppositional relationship with industry, as evidenced by its attempts to block a major industrial project (Keystone) and to get universities and cities to drop their investments in fossil fuel companies (another of McKibben’s goals).

The rival environmental factions are sometimes described as “dark greens” (the purists who want to force radical change) and “bright greens” (those who seek compromise and accept tradeoffs). There’s really little doubt that dark greens are on the ascendant. “He’s pulling the flank out,” Hoffman says of McKibben. “I do think he has a valuable role in creating a space where others can create a more moderate role.”

Then along come the moderates, unleashing flurries of “hippie punching” under the guise of being more rational than the activists they are criticizing.

It’s also fair to say that McKibben—the charismatic journalist-turned-organizer—lies a good way to the political left. Its centrist biases notwithstanding, a recent paper by American University communications professor Matthew Nisbet does capture McKibben’s “romantic” ideology: Like most people, he’s unhappy about environmental degradation, but he also seems opposed, in a significant sense, to the economic growth engine that drives it. He believes in living smaller, in going back to nature, in consuming less—not a position many politicians would be willing to espouse. (Indeed, President Obama’s comments about climate change often contain an explicit rejection of the idea that environmental and economic progress are mutually exclusive.)

So environmentalists are moving left and becoming more activist in response to political gridlock and scary planetary rumblings. Then along come the moderates, unleashing flurries of what Grist‘s David Roberts calls “hippie punching” under the guise of being more rational and reasoned than those they are criticizing. For example, Nisbet writes: “McKibben’s line-in-the-sand opposition to the Keystone XL oil pipeline, his skepticism of technology, and his romantic vision of a future consisting of small-scale, agrarian communities reflects his own values and priorities, rather than a pragmatic set of choices designed to effectively and realistically address the problem of climate change.”

You can see how an activist might find this just a tad irritating. For what is Nisbet’s statement if not a reflection of his own values and priorities? Words like “pragmatic” and “realistic” give away the game.

Carbon Dioxide Removal Can Lower Costs of Climate Protection (Science Daily)

Apr. 12, 2013 — Directly removing CO2 from the air has the potential to alter the costs of climate change mitigation. It could allow prolonging greenhouse-gas emissions from sectors like transport that are difficult, thus expensive, to turn away from using fossil fuels. And it may help to constrain the financial burden on future generations, a study now published by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) shows. It focuses on the use of biomass for energy generation, combined with carbon capture and storage (CCS). According to the analysis, carbon dioxide removal could be used under certain requirements to alleviate the most costly components of mitigation, but it would not replace the bulk of actual emissions reductions. 

Directly removing CO2 from the air has the potential to alter the costs of climate change mitigation. It could allow prolonging greenhouse-gas emissions from sectors like transport that are difficult, thus expensive, to turn away from using fossil fuels. And it may help to constrain the financial burden on future generations, a new study shows. It focuses on the use of biomass for energy generation, combined with carbon capture and storage. (Credit: © Jürgen Fälchle / Fotolia)

“Carbon dioxide removal from the atmosphere allows to separate emissions control from the time and location of the actual emissions. This flexibility can be important for climate protection,” says lead-author Elmar Kriegler. “You don’t have to prevent emissions in every factory or truck, but could for instance plant grasses that suck CO2 out of the air to grow — and later get processed in bioenergy plants where the CO2 gets stored underground.”

In economic terms, this flexibility allows to lower costs by compensating for emissions which would be most costly to eliminate. “This means that a phase-out of global emissions by the end of the century — that we would need to hold the 2 degree line adopted by the international community — does not necessarily require to eliminate each and every source of emissions,” says Kriegler. “Decisions whether and how to protect future generations from the risks of climate change have to be made today, but the burden of achieving these targets will increase over time. The costs for future generations can be substantially reduced if carbon dioxide removal technologies become available in the long run.”

Balancing the financial burden across generations

The study now published is the first to quantify this. If bioenergy plus CCS is available, aggregate mitigation costs over the 21st century might be halved. In the absence of such a carbon dioxide removal strategy, costs for future generations rise significantly, up to a quadrupling of mitigation costs in the period of 2070 to 2090. The calculation was carried out using a computer simulation of the economic system, energy markets, and climate, covering a range of scenarios.

Options for carbon dioxide removal from the atmosphere include afforestation and chemical approaches like direct air capture of CO2 from the atmosphere or reactions of CO2 with minerals to form carbonates. But the use of biomass for energy generation combined with carbon capture and storage is less costly than chemical options, as long as sufficient biomass feedstock is available, the scientists point out.

Serious concerns about large-scale biomass use combined with CCS

“Of course, there are serious concerns about the sustainability of large-scale biomass use for energy,” says co-author Ottmar Edenhofer, chief-economist of PIK. “We therefore considered the bioenergy with CCS option only as an example of the role that carbon dioxide removal could play for climate change mitigation.” The exploitation of bioenergy can conflict with land-use for food production or ecosystem protection. To account for sustainability concerns, the study restricts the bioenergy production to a medium level, that may be realized mostly on abandoned agricultural land.

Still, global population growth and changing dietary habits, associated with an increased demand for land, as well as improvements of agricultural productivity, associated with a decreased demand for land, are important uncertainties here. Furthermore, CCS technology is not yet available for industrial-scale use and, due to environmental concerns, is controversial in countries like Germany. Yet in this study it is assumed that it will become available in the near future.

“CO2 removal from the atmosphere could enable humankind to keep the window of opportunity open for low-stabilization targets despite of a likely delay in international cooperation, but only under certain requirements,” says Edenhofer. “The risks of scaling up bioenergy use need to be better understood, and safety concerns about CCS have to be thoroughly investigated. Still, carbon dioxide removal technologies are no science fiction and need to be further explored.” In no way should they be seen as a pretext to neglect emissions reductions now, notes Edenhofer. “By far the biggest share of climate change mitigation has to come from a large effort to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions globally.”

Journal Reference:

  1. Elmar Kriegler, Ottmar Edenhofer, Lena Reuster, Gunnar Luderer, David Klein. Is atmospheric carbon dioxide removal a game changer for climate change mitigation? Climatic Change, 2013; DOI: 10.1007/s10584-012-0681-4

Everybody Knows. Climate Denialism has peaked. Now what are we going to do? (EcoEquity)

– Tom Athanasiou (toma@ecoequity.org).  April 2, 2013.

It was never going to be easy to face the ecological crisis.  Even back in the 1970s, before climate took center stage, it was clear that we the prosperous were walking far too heavily.  And that “environmentalism,” as it was called, was only going to be a small beginning.  But it was only when the climate crisis pushed fossil energy into the spotlight that the real stakes were widely recognized.  Fossil fuels are the meat and potatoes of industrial civilization, and the need to rapidly and radically reduce their emissions cut right through to the heart of the great American dream.  And the European dream.  And, inevitably, the Chinese dream as well.

Decades later, 81% of global energy is still supplied by the fossil fuels: coal, gas, and oil.[1]  And though the solar revolution is finally beginning, the day is late.  The Arctic is melting, and, soon, as each year the northern ocean lies bare beneath the summer sun, the warming will accelerate.  Moreover, our plight is becoming visible.  We have discovered, to our considerable astonishment, that most of the fossil fuel on the books of our largest corporations is “unburnable” – in the precise sense that, if we burn it, we are doomed.[2]  Not that we know what to do with this rather strange knowledge.  Also, even as China rises, it’s obvious that it’s not the last in line for the promised land.  Billions of people, all around the world, watch the wealthy on TV, and most all of them want a drink from the well of modern prosperity.  Why wouldn’t they?  Life belongs to us all, as does the Earth.

The challenge, in short, is rather daunting.

The denial of the challenge, on the other hand, always came ready-made.  As Francis Bacon said so long ago, “what a man would rather were true, he more readily believes.”  And we really did want to believe that ours was still a boundless world.  The alternative – an honest reckoning – was just too challenging.  For one thing, there was no obvious way to reconcile the Earth’s finitude with the relentless expansion of the capitalist market.  And as long as we believed in a world without limits, there was no need to see that economic stratification would again become a fatal issue.  Sure, our world was bitterly riven between haves and have-nots, but this problem, too, would fade in time.  With enough growth – the universal balm – redistribution would never be necessary.  In time, every man would be a king.

The denial had many cheerleaders.  The chemical-company flacks who derided Rachel Carson as a “hysterical woman” couldn’t have known that they were pioneering a massive trend.  Also, and of course, big money always has plenty of mouthpieces.  But it’s no secret that, during the 20th Century, the “engineering of consent” reached new levels of sophistication.  The composed image of benign scientific competence became one of its favorite tools, and somewhere along the way tobacco-industry science became a founding prototype of anti-environmental denialism.  On this front, I’m happy to say that the long and instructive history of today’s denialist pseudo-science has already been expertly deconstructed.[3]  Given this, I can safely focus on the new world, the post-Sandy world of manifest climatic disruption in which the denialists have lost any residual aura of scientific legitimacy, and have ceased to be a decisive political force.  A world in which climate denialism is increasingly seen, and increasingly ridiculed, as the jibbering of trolls.

To be clear, I’m not claiming that the denialists are going to shut up anytime soon.  Or that they’ll call off their suicidal, demoralizing campaigns.  Or that their fogs and poisons are not useful to the fossil-fuel cartel.  But the battle of the science is over, at least as far as the scientists are concerned.  And even on the street, hard denialism is looking pretty ridiculous.  To be sure, the core partisans of the right will fight on, for the win and, of course, for the money.[4]  And they’ll continue to have real weight too, for just as long as people do not believe that life beyond carbon is possible.  But for all this, their influence has peaked, and their position is vulnerable.  They are – and visibly now – agents of a mad and dangerous ideology.  They are knaves, and often they are fools.[5]

As for the rest of us, we can at least draw conclusions, and make plans.

As bad as the human prospect may be – and it is quite bad – this is not “game over.”  We have the technology we need to save ourselves, or most of it in any case; and much of it is ready to go.  Moreover, the “clean tech” revolution is going to be disruptive indeed.  There will be cascades of innovation, delivering opportunities of all kinds, all around the world.  Also, our powers of research and development are strong.  Also, and contrary to today’s vogue for austerity and “we’re broke” political posturing, we have the money to rebuild, quickly and on a global scale.  Also, we know how to cooperate, at least when we have to.  All of which is to say that we still have options.  We are not doomed.

But we are in extremely serious danger, and it is too late to pretend otherwise.  So allow me to tip my hand by noting Jorgen Randers’ new book, 2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years.[6]  Randers is a Norwegian modeler, futurist, professor, executive, and consultant who made his name as co-author of 1972’s landmark The Limits to Growth.  Limits, of course, was a global blockbuster; it remains the best-selling environmental title of all times.  Also, Limits has been relentlessly ridiculed (the early denialists cut their teeth by distorting it[7]) so it must be said that – very much contrary to the mass-produced opinions of the denialist age – its central, climate-related projections are holding up depressingly well.[8]

By 2012 (when he published 2052) Randers had decided to step away from the detached exploration of multiple scenarios that was the methodological core of Limits, and to make actual predictions.  After a lifetime of frustrated efforts, these predictions are vivid, pessimistic and bitter.  In a nutshell, Randers doesn’t expect anything beyond what he calls “progress as usual,” and while he expects it to yield a “light green” buildout (e.g., solar on a large scale) he doesn’t think it will suffice to stabilize the climate system.  Such stabilization, he grants, is still possible, but it would require concerted global action on a scale that neither he nor Dennis Meadows, the leader of the old Limits team, see on today’s horizon.  Let’s call that kind of action global emergency mobilization.  Meadows, when he peers forwards, sees instead “many decades of uncontrolled climatic disruption and extremely difficult decline.”[9]  Randers is more precise, and predicts that we will by 2052 wake to find ourselves on a dark and frightening shore, knowing full well that our planet is irrevocably “on its way towards runaway climate change in the last third of the twenty-first century.”

This is an extraordinary claim, and it requires extraordinary evidence.[10]  Such evidence, unfortunately, is readily available, but for the moment let me simply state the public secret of this whole discussion.  To wit: we (and I use this pronoun advisedly) can still avoid a global catastrophe, but it’s not at all obvious that we will do so.  What is obvious is that stabilizing the global climate is going to be very, very hard.  Which is a real problem, because we don’t do hard anymore.  Rather, when confronted with a serious problem, we just do what we can, hoping that it will be enough and trying our best not to offend the rich.  In truth, and particularly in America, we count ourselves lucky if we can manage governance at all.

This essay is about climate politics after legitimate skepticism.  Climate politics in a world where, as Leonard Cohen put it, “everybody knows.”  What does this mean?  In the first place, it means that we’ve reached the end of what might be called “environmentalism-as-usual.”  This point is widely understood and routinely granted, as when people say something like “climate is not a merely environmental problem,” but my concern is a more particular one.  As left-green writer Eddie Yuen astutely noted in a recent book on “catastrophism,” the problems of the environmental movement are to a very large degree rooted in “the pairing of overwhelmingly bleak analysis with inadequate solutions.”[11]  This is exactly right.

The climate crisis demands a “new environmentalism,” and such a thing does seem to be emerging.  It’s final shape is unknowable, but one thing is certain – the environmentalism that we need will only exist when its solutions and strategies stand up to its own analyses.  The problem is that this requires us to take our “overwhelmingly bleak” analyses straight, rather than soft-pedaling them so that our “inadequate solutions” might look good.  Pessimism, after all, is closely related to realism.  It cannot just be wished away.

Soft-pedaling, alas, has long been standard practice, on both the scientific and the political sides of the climate movement.  Examples abound, but the best would have to be the IPCC itself, the U.N’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  The world’s premier climate-science clearinghouse, the IPCC is often attacked from the right, and has developed a shy and reticent culture.  Even more importantly, though, and far more rarely noted, is that the IPCC is conservative by definition and by design.[12]  It almost has to be conservative to do its job, which is to herd the planet’s decision makers towards scientific realism.  The wrinkle is that, at this point, this isn’t even close to being good enough, not at least in the larger scheme.  At this point, we need strategic realism as well as baseline scientific realism, and it demands a brutal honesty in which underlying scientific and political truths are clearly drawn and publicly expressed.

Yet when it comes to strategic realism, we balk.  The first impulse of the “messaging” experts is always to repeat their perennial caution that sharp portraits of the danger can be frightening, and disempowering, and thus lead to despair and passivity.  This is an excellent point, but it’s only the beginning of the truth, not the end.  The deeper problem is that the physical impacts of climate disruption – the destruction and the suffering – will continue to escalate.  “Superstorm Sandy” was bad, but the future will be much worse.  Moreover, the most severe suffering will be far away, and easy for the good citizens of the wealthy world to ignore.  Imagine, for example, a major failure of the Indian Monsoon, and a subsequent South Asian famine.  Imagine it against a drumbeat background in which food is becoming progressively more expensive.  Imagine the permanence of such droughts, and increasing evidence of tipping points on the horizon, and a world in which ever more scientists take it upon themselves to deliver desperate warnings.  The bottom line will not be the importance of communications strategies, but rather the manifest reality, no longer distant and abstract, and the certain knowledge that we are in deep trouble.  And this is where the dangers of soft-pedaling lie.  For as people come to see the scale of the danger, and then to look about for commensurate strategies and responses, the question will be if such strategies are available, and if they are known, and if they are plausible.  If they’re not, then we’ll all going, together, down the road “from aware to despair.”

Absent the public sense of a future in which human resourcefulness and cooperation can make a decisive difference, we assuredly face an even more difficult future in which denial fades into a sense of pervasive hopelessness.  The last third of the century (when Randers is predicting “runaway climate change”) is not so very far away.  Which is to say that, as denialism collapses – and it will – the challenge of working out a large and plausible response to the climate crisis will become overwhelmingly important.  If we cannot imagine such a response, and explain how it would actually work, then people will draw their own conclusions.  And, so far, it seems that we cannot.  Even those of us who are now climate full-timers don’t have a shared vision, not in any meaningful detail, nor do we have a common sense of the strategic initiatives that could make such a vision cohere.

The larger landscape is even worse.  For though many scientists are steeling themselves to speak, the elites themselves are still stiff and timid, and show few signs of rising to the occasion.  Each month, it seems, there’s another major report on the approaching crisis – the World Bank, the National Intelligence Council, and the International Energy Agency have all recently made hair-raising contributions – but they never quite get around to the really important questions.  How should we contrive the necessary global mobilization?  What conditions are needed to absolutely maximize the speed of the clean-tech revolution?  By what strategy will we actually manage to keep the fossil-fuels in the ground?  What kind of international treaties are necessary, and how shall we establish them?  What would a fast-enough global transition cost, and how shall we pay for it?  What about all those who are forced to retreat from rising waters and drying lands?  How shall they live, and where?  How shall we talk about rights and responsibilities in the Greenhouse Century?  And what about the poor?  How shall they find futures in a climate-constrained world?  Can we even imagine a world in which they do?

In the face of such questions, you have a choice.  You can conclude that we’ll just have to do the best we can, and then you can have a drink.  Or maybe two.  Or you can conclude that, despite all evidence to the contrary, enough of us will soon awaken to reality.  What’s certain is that, all around us, there is a vast potentiality – for reinvention, for resistance, for redistribution, and for renewal of all kinds – and that it could at any time snap into solidity.  And into action.

Forget about “hope.”  What we need now is intention.

***

About a decade ago, in San Francisco, I was on a PBS talk show with, among others, Myron Ebell, chief of climate propaganda at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.  Ebell is an aggressive professional, and given the host’s commitment to phony balance he was easily able to frame the conversation.[13]  The result was a travesty, but not an entirely wasted time, at least not for me.  It was instructive to speak, tentatively, of the need for global climate justice, and to hear, in response, that I was a non-governmental fraud that was only in it for the money.  Moreover, as the hour wore on, I came to appreciate the brutal simplicity of the denialist strategy.  The whole point is to suck the oxygen out of the room, to weave such a tangle of confusionism and pseudo-debate that the Really Big Question – What is to be done? – becomes impossible to even ask, let alone discuss.

When Superstorm Sandy slammed into the New York City region, Ebell’s style of hard denialism took a body blow, though obviously it has not dropped finally to the mat.  Had it done do, the Big Question, in all its many forms, would be buzzing constantly around us.  Clearly, that great day has not yet come.  Still, back in November of 2012, when Bloomberg’s Business Week blared “It’s Global Warming, Stupid” from its front cover, this was widely welcomed as a overdue milestone.  It may even be that Michael Tobis, the editor of the excellent Planet 3.0, will prove correct in his long-standing, half-facetious prediction that 2015 will be the date when “the Wall Street Journal will acknowledge the indisputable and apparent fact of anthropogenic climate change; the year in which it will simply be ridiculous to deny it.”[14]  Or maybe not.  Maybe that day will never come.  Maybe Ebell’s style of well-funded, front-group denialism will live on, zombie-like, forever.  Or maybe (and this is my personal prediction) hard climate denialism will soon go the way of creationism and far-right Christianity, becoming a kind of political lifestyle choice, one that’s dangerous but contained.  One that’s ultimately more dangerous to the right than it is to the reality-based community.

If so, then at some point we’re going to have to ask ourselves if we’ve been so long distracted by the hard denialists that we’ve missed the parallel danger of a “soft denialism.”  By which I mean the denialism of a world in which, though the dangers of climate change are simply too ridiculous to deny, they still – somehow – are not taken to imply courage, and reckoning, and large-scale mobilization.  This is a long story, but the point is that, now that the Big Question is finally on the table, we’re going to have to answer it.  Which is to say that we’re going to have to face the many ways in which political timidity and small-bore realism have trained us to calibrate our sense of what must be done by our sense of what can be done, which these days is inadequate by definition.

And not just because of the denialists.

George Orwell once said that “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”[15]  As we hurtle forward, this struggle will rage as never before.  The Big Question, after all, changes everything.  Another way of saying this is that our futures will be shaped by the effort to avoid a full-on global climate catastrophe.  Despite all the rest of the geo-political and geo-economic commotion that will mark the 21st Century (and there’ll be plenty) it will be most fundamentally the Greenhouse Century.  We know this now, if we care to, though still only in preliminary outline.  The details, inevitably, will surprise us all.

The core problem, of course, will be “ambition” – action on the scale that’s actually necessary, rather than the scale that is or appears to be possible.  And here, the legacies of the denialist age – the long-ingrained habits of soft-pedaling and strained optimism – will weigh heavily.  Consider the quasi-official global goal (codified, for example, in the Copenhagen Accord) to hold total planetary warming to 2°C (Earth surface average) above pre-industrial levels.  This is the so-called “2°C target.”  What are we to do with it in the post-denialist age?  Let me count the complications: One, all sorts of Very Important People are now telling us it’s going to all but impossible to avoid overshooting 2°C.[16]  Two, in so doing, they are making a political and not a scientific judgment, though they’re not always clear on this point.  (It’s probably still technically possible to hold the 2°C line – if we’re not too unlucky – though it wouldn’t be easy under the best of circumstances.)[17]  Three, the 2°C line, which was once taken to be reasonably safe, is now widely seen (at least among the scientists) to mark the approximate point of transition from “dangerous” to “extremely dangerous,” and possibly to altogether unmanageable levels of warming.[18]  Four, and finally, it’s now widely recognized that any future in which we approach the 2°C line (which we will do) is one in which we also have a real possibility of pushing the average global temperature up by 3°C, and if this were to come to pass we’d be playing a very high-stakes game indeed, one in which uncontrolled positive feedbacks and worst-case scenarios were surrounding us on every side.

The bottom line is today as it was decades ago.  Greenhouse-gas emissions were increasing then, and they are increasing now.  In late 2012, the authoritative Global Carbon Project reported that, since 1990, they had risen by an astonishing 58 percent.[19]  The climate system has unsurprisingly responded with storms, droughts, ice-melt, conflagrations and floods.  The weather has become “extreme,” and may finally be getting our attention.  In Australia, according to the acute Mark Thomson of the Institute for Backyard Studies in Adelaide, the crushing heatwave of early 2013 even pushed aside “the idiot commentariat” and cleared the path for a bit of 11th-hour optimism: “Another year of this trend will shift public opinion wholesale.  We’re used to this sort of that temperature now and then and even take a perverse pride in dealing with it, but there seems to be a subtle shift in mood that ‘This Could Be Serious.’”  Let’s hope he’s right.  Let’s hope, too, that the mood shift that swept through America after Sandy also lasts, and leads us, too, to conclude that ‘This Could Be Serious.’  Not that this alone would be enough to support a real mobilization – the “moral equivalent of war” that we need – but it would be something.  It might even lead us to wonder about our future, and about the influence of money and power on our lives, and to ask how serious things will have to get before it becomes possible to imagine a meaningful change of direction.

The wrinkle is that, before we can advocate for a meaningful change of direction, we have to have one we believe in, one that we’re willing to explain in global terms that actually scale to the problem.  None of which is going to be easy, given that we’re fast approaching a point where only tales of existential danger ring true.  (cf the zombie apocalypse).  The Arctic ice, as noted above, offers an excellent marker.  In fact, the first famous photos of Earth from space – the “blue marble” photos taken in 1972 by the crew of the Apollo 17 – allow us to anchor our predicament in time and in memory.  For these are photos of an old Earth now passed away; they must be, because they show great expanses of ice that are nowhere to be found.  By August of 2012 the Arctic Sea’s ice cover had declined by 40%,[20] a melt that’s easily large enough to be visible from space.  Moreover, beneath the surface, ice volume is dropping even more precipitously.  The polar researchers who are now feverishly evaluating the great melting haven’t yet pushed the entire scientific community to the edge of despair, though they have managed to inspire a great deal of dark muttering about positive feedbacks and tipping points.  Soon, it seems, that muttering will become louder.  Perhaps as early as 2015, the Arctic Ocean will become virtually ice free for the first time in recorded history.[21]  When it does, the solar absorptivity of the Arctic waters will increase, and shift the planetary heat balance by a surprisingly large amount, and by so doing increase the rate of  planetary warming.  And this, of course, will not be end of it.  The feedbacks will continue.  The cycles will go on.

Should we remain silent about such matters, for risk of inflaming the “idiot commentariat?”  It’s absurd to even ask.  The suffering is already high, and if you know the science, you also know that the real surprise would be an absence of positive feedbacks.  The ice melt, the methane plumes, the drying of the rainforests – they’re all real.  Which is to say that there are obviously tipping points before us, though we do not and can not know how much time will pass before they force themselves upon our attention.  The real question is what we must do if we would talk of them in good earnest, while at the same time speaking, without despair and effectively, about the human future.

[1] Jorgen Randers, 2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years, Chelsea Green, 2012, page 99.

[2] Begin at the Carbon Track Initiative’s website.  http://www.carbontracker.org/

[3] Two excellent examples: Naomi Oreskes, Erik M. M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, Bloomsbury Press, 2011,  Chris Mooney, The Republican War on Science, Basic Books, 2006.

[4] See, for example, Suzanne Goldenberg, “Secret funding helped build vast network of climate denial thinktanks,” February 14, 2013, The Guardian.

[5] “Lord Monckton,” in particular, is fantastic.  See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w833cAs9EN0

[6] Randers, 2012.  See also Randers’ essay and video at the University of Cambridge 2013 “State of Sustainability Leadership,” athttp://www.cpsl.cam.ac.uk/About-Us/What-is-Sustainability-Leadership/The-State-of-Sustainability-Leadership.aspx

[7] Ugo Bardi, in The Limits to Growth Revisited (Springer Briefs, 2011) offers this summary:

“If, at the beginning, the debate on LTG had seemed to be balanced, gradually the general attitude on the study became more negative. It tilted decisively against the study when, in 1989, Ronald Bailey published a paper in “Forbes” where he accused the authors of having predicted that the world’s economy should have already run out of some vital mineral commodities whereas that had not, obviously, occurred.

Bailey’s statement was only the result of a flawed reading of the data in a single table of the 1972 edition of LTG. In reality, none of the several scenarios presented in the book showed that the world would be running out of any important commodity before the end of the twentieth century and not even of the twenty-first. However, the concept of the “mistakes of the Club of Rome” caught on. With the 1990s, it became commonplace to state that LTG had been a mistake if not a joke designed to tease the public, or even an attempt to force humankind into a planet-wide dictatorship, as it had been claimed in some earlier appraisals (Golub and Townsend 1977; Larouche 1983). By the end of the twentieth century, the victory of the critics of LTG seemed to be complete. But the debate was far from being settled.”

[8] See, for example, Graham Turner, “A Comparison of The Limits to Growth with Thirty Years of Reality.” Global Environmental Change, Volume 18, Issue 3, August 2008, Pages 397–411.  An unprotected copy (without the graphics) can be downloaded at www.csiro.au/files/files/plje.pdf.  Also

[9] In late 2012, Dennis Meadows said that “In the early 1970s, it was possible to believe that maybe we could make the necessary changes.  But now it is too late.  We are entering a period of many decades of uncontrolled climatic disruption and extremely difficult decline.”  See Christian Parenti, “The Limits to Growth’: A Book That Launched a Movement,” The Nation, December 24, 2012.

[11] Eddie Yuen, “The Politics of Failure Have Failed: The Environmental Movement and Catastrophism,” in Catastrophism: The Apocalyptic Politics of Collapse and Rebirth, Sasha Lilley, David McNally, Eddie Yuen, James Davis, with a foreword by Doug Henwood. PM Press 2012.  Yuen’s whole line is “the main reasons that [it] has not led to more dynamic social movements; these include catastrophe fatigue, the paralyzing effects of fear; the pairing of overwhelmingly bleak analysis with inadequate solutions, and a misunderstanding of the process of politicization.” 

[12] See Glenn Scherer, “Special Report: IPCC, assessing climate risks, consistently underestimates,” The Daily Climate, December 6, 2012.   More formally (and more interestingly) see Brysse, Oreskes, O’Reilly, and Oppenheimer, “Climate change prediction: Erring on the side of least drama?,” Global Environmental Change 23 (2013), 327-337.

[13] KQED-FM, Forum, July 22, 2003.

[14] Michael Tobis, editor of Planet 3.0, is amusing on this point.  He notes that “many data-driven climate skeptics are reassessing the issue,” that “In 1996 I defined the turning point of the discussion about climate science (the point where we could actually start talking about policy) as the date when theWall Street Journal would acknowledge the indisputable and apparent fact of anthropogenic climate change; the year in which it would simply be ridiculous to deny it.  My prediction was that this would happen around 2015… I’m not sure the WSJ has actually accepted reality yet.  It’s just starting to squint in its general direction.  2015 still looks like a good bet.”  See http://planet3.org/2012/08/07/is-the-tide-turning/

[15] The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell: In Front of Your Nose, 1945-1950, Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, Editors / Paperback / Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968, p. 125.

[16] See for example, Fatih Birol and Nicholas Stern, “Urgent steps to stop the climate door closing,” The Financial Times, March 9, 2011.  And see Sir Robert Watson’s Union Frontiers of Geophysics Lecture at the 2012 meeting of the American Geophysical Union, athttp://fallmeeting.agu.org/2012/events/union-frontiers-of-geophysics-lecture-professor-sir-bob-watson-cmg-frs-chief-scientific-adviser-to-defra/

[17] I just wrote “probably still technically possible.”  I could have written “Excluding the small probability of a very bad case, and the even smaller probability of a very good case, it’s probably still technically possible to hold the 2°C line, though it wouldn’t be easy.”  This, however, is a pretty ugly sentence.  I could also have written “Unless we’re unlucky, and the climate sensitivity turns out be on the high side of the expected range, it’s still technically possible to hold the 2°C line, though it wouldn’t be easy, unless we’re very lucky, and the climate sensitivity turns out to be on the low side.”  Saying something like this, though, kind of puts the cart before the horse, since I haven’t said anything about “climate sensitivity,” or about how the scientists think about probability – and of course it’s even uglier.  The point, at least for now, is that climate projections are probabilistic by nature, which does not mean that they are merely “uncertain.”  We know a lot about the probabilities.

[18] See Kevin Anderson, a former director of Britain’s Tyndall Center, who has been unusually frank on this point.  His views are clearly laid out in a (non-peer-reviewed) essay published by the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation in Sweden.  See “Climate change going beyond dangerous – Brutal numbers and tenuous hope” in Development Dialog #61, September 2012, available at http://www.dhf.uu.se/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/dd61_art2.pdf.  For a peer-reviewed paper, see Anderson and Bows, “Beyond ‘dangerous’ climate change: emission scenarios for a new world.”  Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society, (2011) 369, 20-44 and for a lecture, see “Are climate scientists the most dangerous climate skeptics?” a Tyndall Centre video lecture (September 2010) at http://www.tyndall.ac.uk/audio/are-climate-scientist-most-dangerous-climate-sceptics.

[19] “The challenge to keep global warming below 2°C,” Glen P. Peters, et. al., Nature Climate Change (2012) 3, 4–6 (2013) doi:10.1038/nclimate1783.  December 2, 2012.  This figure might actually be revised upward, as 2012 saw the second-largest annual  concentration increase on record (http://climatedesk.org/2013/03/large-rise-in-co2-emissions-sounds-climate-change-alarm/)

[20] The story of the photos is on Wikipedia – see “blue marble.”  For the latest on the Arctic ice, see the “Arctic Sea Ice News and Analysis” page that the National Snow and Ice Data Center — http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/

[21] Climate Progress is covering the “Arctic Death Spiral” in detail.  See for example Joe Romm, “NOAA: Climate Change Driving Arctic Into A ‘New State’ With Rapid Ice Loss And Record Permafrost Warming,” Climate Progress, Dec 6, 2012.  Give yourself a few hours and follow the links.

Latour: “No estaba escrito que la ecología fuera un partido” (El País)

ENTREVISTA

“No estaba escrito que la ecología fuera un partido”

Sociólogo, antropólogo, filósofo y director científico del Instituto de Estudios Políticos de París.

Bruno Latour tiene una mirada ácida y provocadora de la sociedad y el medio ambiente.

MIGUEL MORA 25 MAR 2013 – 11:52 CET19

Bruno Latour. / MANUEL BRAUN

¿Ha servido para algo el activismo ecológico? ¿Han forjado los verdes una política común? ¿Escuchan los políticos a los científicos cuando alertan sobre el cambio climático? ¿Puede la Tierra soportar más agresiones? El sociólogo, antropólogo y filósofo francés Bruno Latour(Beaune, 1947) lleva más de 20 años reflexionando sobre estos asuntos, y su pronóstico es desolador. A su juicio, la llegada de los ecologistas a la política ha sido un fracaso porque los verdes han renunciado al debate inteligente, los políticos se limitan a aplicar viejas recetas sin darse cuenta de que la revolución se ha producido ya y fue “una catástrofe”: ocurrió en 1947, cuando la población mundial superó el número que garantizaba el acceso a los recursos. Según Latour, es urgente poner en marcha una nueva forma de hacer ecología política, basada en una constitución que comprometa a gobernantes, científicos y ciudadanos a garantizar el futuro de la Tierra. Esta idea es una de las propuestas de su libro Políticas de la naturaleza. Por una democracia de las ciencias, publicado en Francia en 1999 y que ahora edita en español RBA.

Latour, aire de sabio despistado, recibe a El País Semanal en su caótico y enorme despacho del Instituto de Estudios Políticos de París, del que es director científico y director adjunto desde 2007.

PREGUNTA: Este libro se publicó en Francia hace ya 14 años. ¿Sigue suscribiendo lo que escribió?

RESPUESTA: Casi todo, sí. Pero las cosas no han mejorado. He seguido trabajando en lo mismo, pero con otro tono. Hoy debo de ser el único que se ocupa de estas cuestiones, de una filosofía política que exige una verdadera política ecologista. Lo que no ha funcionado es que pensé que iba a ser un libro fundador para los ecologistas. ¡Y ha sido un fracaso total! Los ecologistas han desaparecido.

P: En Francia al menos hay verdes en el Gobierno.

R: Sí, pero tienen una visión muy estrecha de la ecología, no reflexionan ni sobre la economía ni sobre la sociedad. La ecología está limitada a las cuestiones de la naturaleza, cuando en realidad no tiene nada que ver con eso. Hay que elegir entre naturaleza y política. Desgraciadamente, se ha intentado hacer una política ecologista que no ha producido nada bueno porque se ha basado en la lucha tradicional, que tenía como objetivo torpedear la política o, mejor, someterla; en cierto modo, los verdes actúan como un tribunal que trata de definir una especie de soberanía.

P: ¿De superioridad moral o natural?

R: Sí, pero sobre todo de estupidez. Evidentemente, el tomar la naturaleza como un fin no ha hecho más que debilitar la posición de los ecologistas, que nunca han sido capaces de hacer política; en fin, auténtica política en el sentido de la tradición socialista, en la que se hubieran debido inspirar. No han hecho el trabajo que el socialismo primero, el marxismo después y luego la socialdemocracia hicieron. No ha habido, para nada, un trabajo de invención intelectual, de exploración; han preferido “el escaparate”. Puede que no hubiera otra solución, pues no estaba escrito que la ecología se fuera a convertir en un partido.

“Hay una ecología profunda con un gran papel en EE UU y alemania”

P: ¿Entonces el ecologismo es hoy una especie de ac­­tivismo sin conexión científica?

R: Ha habido movimientos interesantes gracias a una casuística muy concreta, importante en lo que concierne a los animales, las plantas, los dientes de los elefantes, el agua, los ríos, etcétera. Han mostrado además gran energía en las cuestiones locales, pero sin afrontar las cuestiones de la política, de la vida en común. Por eso el ecologismo sigue siendo marginal, justo en un momento en que las cuestiones ecológicas se han convertido en un asunto de todos. Y se da una paradoja: la ecología se ocupa de temas minúsculos relacionados con la naturaleza y la sociedad mientras que la cuestión de la Tierra, la presencia de la Tierra en la política, se hace cada vez más apremiante. Esa urgencia, que ya era acuciante hace 10 o 15 años, lo es mucho más ahora.

P: ¿Quizá ha faltado formar una Internacional Verde?

R: No se ha hecho porque los ecologistas pensaban que la Tierra iba a unificar todos estos movimientos. Han surgido un montón de redes, basadas en casos concretos, como Greenpeace. Hay asociaciones, pero nada a nivel político. La internacional sigue siendo la geopolítica clásica de los Estados nación. No ha habido reflexión sobre la nueva situación. Existe una ecología profunda, deep ecology, en Francia prácticamente inexistente, que ha tenido un papel importante en Alemania, en los países escandinavos y en Norteamérica. Pero está muy poco politizada.

P: Estamos ante un fracaso político y ante una mayor conciencia de los científicos. ¿Y los ciudadanos?

R: Paradójicamente, esa dolorosa pelea sobre el clima nos ha permitido progresar. En cierto modo, la querella ha tenido un papel importante en una “comprensión renovada” por parte del público de la realidad científica. El problema es que intentamos insertar las cuestiones ecológicas en el viejo modelo “ciencia y política”. Desde este punto de vista, incluso los científicos más avanzados siguen intentando poner estas cuestiones dentro del marco de esa situación superada que intento criticar. Este es el tema del libro, y en ese sentido sigue de actualidad.

P: En Francia hay una identificación entre ecologismo y territorio. José Bové, por ejemplo, es un proteccionista a ultranza. Es rara esta evolución de la ecología hacia el nacionalismo, ¿no?

R: Sí, pero al mismo tiempo es útil e interesante replantearse lo que es el territorio, el terruño, por usar la palabra francesa. Los ecologistas siempre se han mostrado indecisos sobre el carácter progresista o reaccionario de su apego a la tierra, porque la expresión en francés puede significar cosas muy distintas. Pero es importante, porque es una de las dimensiones de la cuestión ecológica, tanto de la progresista como de la arcaica. Ese era uno de los objetivos fundamentales del libro, saber si hemos sido realmente modernos alguna vez. Hay aspectos regresivos en el apego al terruño, y a la vez hay otros muy importantes sobre la definición de los límites, de los entornos en los cuales vivimos, que son decisivos para el porvenir. Una vez más, los verdes han omitido trabajar esa cuestión. Pero el problema de la orientación, de la diferencia entre el apego reaccionario o progresista a la tierra, es fundamental. Si vemos movimientos como Slow Food, nos preguntamos si están adelantados o retrasados, porque tienen aspectos regresivos. Pero si se piensa en el tema de los circuitos de distribución, ¿por qué las lasañas inglesas tendrían que estar hechas con caballo rumano y transitar por 25 intermediarios? No es una tontería: si tomamos caballo francés, rumano o turco, las cuestiones de pertenencia y de límites se convierten en cuestiones progresistas.

El antropólogo iconoclasta

Bruno Latour nació en la Borgoña, donde surgen los vinos más caros del planeta. Su padre era viticultor. De ahí sus pecualiares análisis sobre el terruño y la tradición. Cursó Antropología y Sociología. Su formación es tan variopinta como los centros donde ha impartido clase, desde la Escuela de Minas de París hasta la London School of Economics y la cátedra de Historia de Harvard.

Escritor incansable, es autor de una treintena de libros de ensayo, todos los últimos editados por Harvard, por los que circulan la tierra, la sociedad, la guerra, la energía, la ciencia, la tecnología, la modernidad y los medios de comunicación.

Su último proyecto está conectado con el llamado medialab, un espacio donde desarrollar conexiones entre las tecnologías digitales, la sociología y los estudios científicos.

P: Su libro llama a superar los esquemas de izquierda y derecha. Pero no parece que eso haya cambiado mucho.

R: El debate afronta un gran problema. Hay una inversión de las relaciones entre el marco geográfico y la política: el marco ha cambiado mucho más que la política. Las grandes negociaciones internacionales manifiestan esa inercia de la organización económica, legal y política, mientras que el marco, lo que antes llamábamos la Tierra, la geografía, cambia a velocidad asombrosa. Esa mutación es difícil de comprender por la gente acostumbrada a la historia de antes, en la cual había humanos que se peleaban, como en el siglo XX: hombres haciéndose la guerra dentro de un marco geográfico estable desde la última glaciación. Es una razón demasiado filosófica. Así que preferimos pensar que tenemos tiempo, que todo está en su sitio, que la economía es así, que el derecho internacional es así, etcétera. Pero incluso los términos para señalar las aceleraciones rápidas han cambiado, volcándose hacia la naturaleza y los glaciares. El tiempo que vivimos es el del antropoceno, y las cosas ya no son como antes. Lo que ha cambiado desde que escribí el libro es que en aquel momento no teníamos la noción del antropoceno. Fue una invención muy útil de Crutzen, un climatólogo, pero no existía entonces, me habría ayudado mucho.

P: ¿Y qué fue de su propuesta de aprobar una constitución ecológica?

R: Intenté construir una asociación de parlamentarios y lanzar una constitución para que las cuestiones de la energía empezaran a ser tratadas de otro modo. Intentaba abrir un debate, que naturalmente no ha tenido lugar. El debate sobre la Constitución empezó bien, se consideró una gran invención de la democracia europea. El problema es que ya no se trata de la cuestión de la representación de los humanos, sino que ese debate atañe a los innumerables seres que viven en la Tierra. Me parecía necesario en aquel momento, y ahora más incluso, hacer un debate constitucional. ¿Cómo sería un Parlamento dedicado a la política ecológica? Tendrá que crearse, pero no reflexionamos lo suficiente sobre las cuestiones de fondo.

P: ¿Las grandes conferencias medioambientales resuelven algo?

R: El problema es que la geopolítica organizada en torno a una nación, con sus propios intereses y nivel de agregación, está mal adaptada a las cuestiones ecológicas, que son transnacionales. Todo el mundo sabe eso, los avances no pueden plasmarse ya a base de mapas, no jugamos en territorios clásicos. Así, desde Copenhague 2009 hay una desafección por las grandes cumbres, no solo porque no se consigue decidir nada, sino también porque nos damos cuenta de que el nivel de decisión y agregación política no es el correcto. De hecho, las ciudades, las regiones, las naciones, las provincias, toman a menudo más iniciativas que los Estados.

P: Francia es uno de los países más nuclearizados del mundo. Los ecologistas braman. ¿Le parece bien?

R: Los ecologistas se han obstinado en la cuestión nuclear, pero nadie ha venido a explicarnos por qué lo nuclear es antiecológico, mientras mucha gente seria considera que el átomo es una de las soluciones, a largo plazo no, pero a corto plazo sí. De nuevo estamos ante la ausencia total de reflexión política por parte de los ecologistas, que militan contra lo nuclear sin explicar por qué. Por consiguiente, no hemos avanzado un centímetro. De hecho, en este momento hay un gran debate público sobre la transición energética, y los verdes siguen siendo incapaces de comprender nada, incluso de discutir, porque han moralizado la cuestión nuclear. Cuando se hace ética, no hay que hacer política, hay que hacer religión.

P: ¿Está realmente en cuestión la supervivencia de la especie?

R: La especie humana se las apañará. Nadie piensa que vaya a desaparecer, ¿pero la civilización? No se sabe lo que es una Tierra a seis u ocho grados, no lo hemos conocido. Hay que remontarse centenares de millones de años. El problema no se abordaba con la misma urgencia cuando escribí el libro en 1999, se hablaba aún de las generaciones futuras. Ahora hablamos de nuestros hijos. No hay una sola empresa que haga un cálculo más allá de 2050, es el horizonte más corto que ha habido nunca. La mutación de la historia es increíblemente rápida. Ahora se trata de acontecimientos naturales, mucho más rápidos que los humanos. Es inimaginable para la gente formada en el siglo XX, una novedad total.

P: ¿Es la globalización? ¿O más que eso?

R: Tiene relación con la globalización, pero no por la extensión de las conexiones entre los humanos. Se trata de la llegada de un mundo desagradable que impide la globalización real: es un conflicto entre globos. Nos hemos globalizado, y eso resulta tranquilizador porque todo está conectado y hace de la Tierra un planeta pequeño. Pero que un gran pueblo sea aplastado al chocar con otra cosa tranquiliza menos.

La especie humana se las apañará. nadie piensa que va a desaparecer”

P: ¿Y el malestar que sentimos, la indignación, tiene que ver con ese miedo?

R: Ese catastrofismo siempre ha existido; siempre ha habido momentos de apocalipsis, de literatura de la catástrofe; pero al mismo tiempo existe un sentimiento nuevo: no se trata del apocalipsis de los humanos, sino del final de recursos, en un sentido, creo, literal.

P: ¿Nos hemos zampado el planeta?

R: La gente que analiza el antropoceno dibuja esquemas de este tipo (muestra un famoso gráfico de población y recursos). Esto se llama “la gran aceleración”, ocurrió en 1947. La revolución ya ha tenido lugar, y es una de las causas de esa nueva ansiedad. La gente sigue hablando de la revolución, desesperándose porque no llega, pero ya está aquí. Es un acontecimiento pasado y de consecuencias catastróficas. Eso también nubla la mente de progresistas y reaccionarios. ¿Qué significa vivir en una época en la cual la revolución ha ocurrido ya y cuyos resultados son catastróficos?

P: ¿No querrá decir que la austeridad es la solución?

R: Ya existe el concepto del decrecimiento feliz, no sé si la tienen en España… ¡Sí! Ustedes están muy adelantados sobre decrecimiento.

P: Estamos en plena vanguardia, pero del infeliz.

R: Es uno de los grandes temas del momento, la crisis económica es decrecimiento no deseado, desigualmente repartido; y hay algo más: austeridad no es necesariamente la palabra, sino ascetismo. Sería la visión religiosa, o espiritual, de la austeridad. Eso se mezcla con las nuevas visiones geológicas de los límites que debemos imponernos…

P: ¿Habla del regreso al campo o de reconstruir el planeta?

R: No me refiero a volver al campo, sino a otra Tierra.

P: ¿La tecnología es la única brújula?

R: La tecnología se encuentra en esa misma situación. Existe una solución muy importante de la geoingeniería, que considera que la situación es reversible, que se pueden recrear artificialmente unas condiciones favorables tras haberlas destruido sin saberlo. Así ha surgido un inmenso movimiento de geoingeniería en todas partes. Ya que es la energía de la Tierra, podemos mandar naves espaciales, modificar la acidez de las aguas del mar, etcétera. Hacer algo que contrarreste lo que se hizo mal. Si hemos podido modificar la Tierra, podemos modificarla en el otro sentido, lo que es un argumento peligroso, porque la podemos destrozar por segunda vez.

P: ¿No se regenerará sola?

R: Sí, ¡pero sin humanos! Se regenerará sola mientras no haya humanos. Puede deshacerse de nosotros, es una de las hipótesis, volviéndose invivible, pero eso no sería muy positivo. La era de los límites puede llegar hasta la extinción.

P: ¿Acabaremos fatal?

R: La historia no está repleta de ejemplos favorables. No se sabe. No hay nada en la naturaleza humana que favorezca la reflexión, por lo cual la solución solo puede ser mala.

P: Algunos temen que acabaremos devorados por los chinos.

R: Los chinos tienen más problemas que nosotros y corren el peligro de comerse a sí mismos por el suelo, el agua y el aire. No nos amenazan, desaparecerán antes que nosotros.

P: Žižek dice que nuestros problemas provienen de la mediocridad intelectual de Alemania y Francia, que esa es la razón principal de la decadencia actual. ¿Qué piensa?

R: Es una estupidez. Ocurren muchas más cosas intelectualmente en Europa que en América, infinitamente más. Por ejemplo, en arte, en filosofía, en ciencias, en urbanismo. Es insensato decir cosas así, pero es que Žižek es un viejo cretino, una especie de cosa de extrema izquierda, fruto del agotamiento de la extrema izquierda, de su decadencia final, de la cual es el síntoma. Por otra parte, es un chico muy majo. La extrema izquierda se ha equivocado tanto sobre el mundo que al final todos estos viejos de extrema izquierda no tienen otra cosa que hacer salvo vomitar sobre el mundo, como hace Alain Badiou en Francia.

P: ¿Prefiere a Marine Le Pen?

R: No soy político, no puedo responder a esta pregunta, no me interesa.

P: ¿No le gusta hablar de política?

R: Sí hablo de política, he escrito un libro sobre política, ¡que yo sepa!,Las políticas de la naturaleza.

P: ¿No le interesa la política de todos los días?

R: La de todos los días sí, pero no la de los partidos, son agitaciones superficiales, sobre todo en Francia, donde ya no hay verdaderamente política.

P: Critica a la extrema izquierda, ¿y nada a la extrema derecha?

R: Se agita, intenta agarrarse a un clavo ardiendo, pero no tiene mucha importancia. No es ahí donde las cosas están en juego.

P: ¿Cree que es residual?

R: No, no es residual, puede desarrollarse y provocar daños, tanto como la extrema izquierda; el no pensar siempre provoca daños, pero no es eso lo que va a solucionar los problemas de la Tierra, la economía, las ciudades, el transporte y la tecnología.

P: ¿Qué escenario prevé para 2050? ¿Qué Tierra, qué humanidad?

R: Ese no es mi trabajo, mi trabajo consiste en prepararnos para las guerras. Las guerras ecológicas van a ser muy importantes y tenemos que preparar nuestros ejércitos de un modo intelectual y humano. Ese es mi trabajo.

P: ¿Habrá guerras violentas por el clima?

R: La definición misma de guerra va a cambiar, estamos en una situación en la cual no podemos ganar contra la Tierra, es una guerra asimétrica: si ganamos, perdemos, y si perdemos, ganamos. Así pues, esta situación crea obligaciones a multitud de gente y antes que nada a los intelectuales.

P: ¿La batalla principal es esa?

R: Si no tenemos mundo, no podemos hacer gran cosa, ni siquiera la revolución. Cuando se lee a Marx, uno se queda impresionado por lo que dice sobre los humanos. En esta época, la cuestión de la ciencia y del margen geográfico, más la presencia de miles de millones de personas, conforma un escenario crucial. Antes teníamos otros problemas, pero este no.

P: ¿Así que se trata de ser o no ser?

R: En cada informe científico, las previsiones son peores, el plan más pesimista siempre aparece. Hay que tener en cuenta eso. Son previsiones extremas, pero de momento son las únicas válidas. No se trata de una guerra mundial, sino de una acumulación de guerras mundiales. Es parecido al invierno nuclear de la guerra fría, una situación de cataclismo, pero con algunas ventajas: es más radical, pero más lento, tenemos mucha capacidad de invención, 9.000 millones de personas y muchas mentes inteligentes. Pero también es un reto. Por tanto, es una cuestión de alta política y no de naturaleza. La política viene primero.

P: ¿Tiene la sensación de estar solo?

R: Lo que era complicado en este libro era crear el vínculo entre ciencia y política, y no puedo decir que haya convencido a mucha gente. Si además se hace el vínculo entre la religión y las artes, es más difícil. Gente como Sloterdijk sería muy capaz de comprenderlo. Sin embargo, muchos intelectuales siguen en el siglo XX, como Žižek. Permanecen en un contexto, en un ideal revolucionario, de decepción. Están decepcionados con los humanos.

P: ¿Cree que los humanos se dejarán ayudar?

R: Primero hay que ayudar a la Tierra. En el antropoceno ya no se puede hacer la distinción entre los humanos y la Tierra.

P: ¿Y sus estudiantes están listos para la lucha?

R: En mi escuela soy el único en dar clases sobre cuestiones donde no entra la política en el sentido clásico. Hay un curso o dos sobre cuestiones ecológicas. Es culpa mía, no he trabajado lo suficiente como para cambiar las cosas. Llevamos mucho retraso.

A Scientist’s Misguided Crusade (N.Y.Times)

OP-ED COLUMNIST

By JOE NOCERA

Published: March 4, 2013 

Last Friday, at 3:40 p.m., the State Department released its “Draft Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement” for the highly contentious Keystone XL pipeline, which Canada hopes to build to move its tar sands oil to refineries in the United States. In effect, the statement said there were no environmental impediments that would prevent President Obama from approving the pipeline.

Two hours and 20 minutes later, I received a blast e-mail containing a statement by James Hansen, the head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies at NASA — i.e., NASA’s chief climate scientist. “Keystone XL, if the public were to allow our well-oiled government to shepherd it into existence, would be the first step down the wrong road, perpetuating our addiction to dirty fossil fuels, moving to ever dirtier ones,” it began. After claiming that the carbon in the tar sands “exceeds that in all oil burned in human history,” Hansen’s statement concluded: “The public must demand that the government begin serving the public’s interest, not the fossil fuel industry’s interest.”

As a private citizen, Hansen, 71, has the same First Amendment rights as everyone else. He can publicly oppose the Keystone XL pipeline if he so chooses, just as he can be as politically active as he wants to be in the anti-Keystone movement, and even be arrested during protests, something he managed to do recently in front of the White House.

But the blast e-mail didn’t come from James Hansen, private citizen. It specifically identified Hansen as the head of the Goddard Institute, and went on to describe him as someone who “has drawn attention to the danger of passing climate tipping points, producing irreversible climate impacts that would yield a different planet from the one on which civilization developed.” All of which made me wonder whether such apocalyptic pronouncements were the sort of statements a government scientist should be making — and whether they were really helping the cause of reversing climate change.

Let’s acknowledge right here that the morphing of scientists into activists is nothing new. Linus Pauling, the great chemist, was a peace activist who pushed hard for a nuclear test ban treaty. Albert Einstein also became a public opponent of nuclear weapons.

It is also important to acknowledge that Hansen has been a crucial figure in developing modern climate science. In 2009, Eileen Claussen, now the president of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, told The New Yorker that Hansen was a “heroic” scientist who “faced all kinds of pressures politically.” Today, his body of work is one of the foundations upon which much climate science is built.

Yet what people hear from Hansen today is not so much his science but his broad, unscientific views on, say, the evils of oil companies. In 2008, he wrote a paper, the thesis of which was that runaway climate change would occur when carbon in the atmosphere reached 350 parts per million — a point it had already exceeded — unless it were quickly reduced. There are many climate change experts who disagree with this judgment — who believe that the 350 number is arbitrary and even meaningless. Yet an entire movement,350.org, has been built around Hansen’s line in the sand.

Meanwhile, he has a department to run. For a midlevel scientist at the Goddard Institute, what signal is Hansen sending when he takes the day off to get arrested at the White House? Do his colleagues feel unfettered in their own work? There is, in fact, enormous resentment toward Hansen inside NASA, where many officials feel that their solid, analytical work on climate science is being lost in what many of them describe as “the Hansen sideshow.” His activism is not really doing any favors for the science his own subordinates are producing.

Finally, and most important, Hansen has placed all his credibility on one battle: the fight to persuade President Obama to block the Keystone XL pipeline. It is the wrong place for him to make a stand. Even in the unlikely event the pipeline is stopped, the tar sands oil will still be extracted and shipped. It might be harder to do without a pipeline, but it is already happening. And in the grand scheme, as I’ve written before, the tar sands oil is not a game changer. The oil we import from Venezuela today is dirtier than that from the tar sands. Not that the anti-pipeline activists seem to care.

What is particularly depressing is that Hansen has some genuinely important ideas, starting with placing a graduated carbon tax on fossil fuels. Such a tax would undoubtedly do far more to reduce carbon emissions and save the planet than stopping the Keystone XL pipeline.

A carbon tax might be worth getting arrested over. But by allowing himself to be distracted by Keystone, Hansen is hurting the very cause he claims to care so much about.

Edward O. Wilson: The Riddle of the Human Species (N.Y.Times)

THE STONEFebruary 24, 2013, 7:30 pm

By EDWARD O. WILSON

The task of understanding humanity is too important and too daunting to leave to the humanities. Their many branches, from philosophy to law to history and the creative arts, have described the particularities of human nature with genius and exquisite detail, back and forth in endless permutations. But they have not explained why we possess our special nature and not some other out of a vast number of conceivable possibilities. In that sense, the humanities have not accounted for a full understanding of our species’ existence.

So, just what are we? The key to the great riddle lies in the circumstance and process that created our species. The human condition is a product of history, not just the six millenniums of civilization but very much further back, across hundreds of millenniums. The whole of it, biological and cultural evolution, in seamless unity, must be explored for an answer to the mystery. When thus viewed across its entire traverse, the history of humanity also becomes the key to learning how and why our species survived.

A majority of people prefer to interpret history as the unfolding of a supernatural design, to whose author we owe obedience. But that comforting interpretation has grown less supportable as knowledge of the real world has expanded. Scientific knowledge (measured by numbers of scientists and scientific journals) in particular has been doubling every 10 to 20 years for over a century. In traditional explanations of the past, religious creation stories have been blended with the humanities to attribute meaning to our species’s existence. It is time to consider what science might give to the humanities and the humanities to science in a common search for a more solidly grounded answer to the great riddle.

To begin, biologists have found that the biological origin of advanced social behavior in humans was similar to that occurring elsewhere in the animal kingdom. Using comparative studies of thousands of animal species, from insects to mammals, they have concluded that the most complex societies have arisen through eusociality — roughly, “true” social condition. The members of a eusocial group cooperatively rear the young across multiple generations. They also divide labor through the surrender by some members of at least some of their personal reproduction in a way that increases the “reproductive success” (lifetime reproduction) of other members.

Leif Parsons

Eusociality stands out as an oddity in a couple of ways. One is its extreme rarity. Out of hundreds of thousands of evolving lines of animals on the land during the past 400 million years, the condition, so far as we can determine, has arisen only about two dozen times. This is likely to be an underestimate, due to sampling error. Nevertheless, we can be certain that the number of originations was very small.

Furthermore, the known eusocial species arose very late in the history of life. It appears to have occurred not at all during the great Paleozoic diversification of insects, 350 to 250 million years before the present, during which the variety of insects approached that of today. Nor is there as yet any evidence of eusocial species during the Mesozoic Era until the appearance of the earliest termites and ants between 200 and 150 million years ago. Humans at the Homo level appeared only very recently, following tens of millions of years of evolution among the primates.

Once attained, advanced social behavior at the eusocial grade has proved a major ecological success. Of the two dozen independent lines, just two within the insects — ants and termites — globally dominate invertebrates on the land. Although they are represented by fewer than 20 thousand of the million known living insect species, ants and termites compose more than half of the world’s insect body weight.

The history of eusociality raises a question: given the enormous advantage it confers, why was this advanced form of social behavior so rare and long delayed? The answer appears to be the special sequence of preliminary evolutionary changes that must occur before the final step to eusociality can be taken. In all of the eusocial species analyzed to date, the final step before eusociality is the construction of a protected nest, from which foraging trips begin and within which the young are raised to maturity. The original nest builders can be a lone female, a mated pair, or a small and weakly organized group. When this final preliminary step is attained, all that is needed to create a eusocial colony is for the parents and offspring to stay at the nest and cooperate in raising additional generations of young. Such primitive assemblages then divide easily into risk-prone foragers and risk-averse parents and nurses.

Leif Parsons

What brought one primate line to the rare level of eusociality? Paleontologists have found that the circumstances were humble. In Africa about two million years ago, one species of the primarily vegetarian australopithecine evidently shifted its diet to include a much higher reliance on meat. For a group to harvest such a high-energy, widely dispersed source of food, it did not pay to roam about as a loosely organized pack of adults and young like present-day chimpanzees and bonobos. It was more efficient to occupy a campsite (thus, the nest) and send out hunters who could bring home meat, either killed or scavenged, to share with others. In exchange, the hunters received protection of the campsite and their own young offspring kept there.

From studies of modern humans, including hunter-gatherers, whose lives tell us so much about human origins, social psychologists have deduced the mental growth that began with hunting and campsites. A premium was placed on personal relationships geared to both competition and cooperation among the members. The process was ceaselessly dynamic and demanding. It far exceeded in intensity anything similar experienced by the roaming, loosely organized bands of most animal societies. It required a memory good enough to assess the intentions of fellow members, to predict their responses, from one moment to the next; and it resulted in the ability to invent and inwardly rehearse competing scenarios of future interactions.

The social intelligence of the campsite-anchored prehumans evolved as a kind of non-stop game of chess. Today, at the terminus of this evolutionary process, our immense memory banks are smoothly activated across the past, present, and future. They allow us to evaluate the prospects and consequences variously of alliances, bonding, sexual contact, rivalries, domination, deception, loyalty and betrayal. We instinctively delight in the telling of countless stories about others as players upon the inner stage. The best of it is expressed in the creative arts, political theory, and other higher-level activities we have come to call the humanities.

The definitive part of the long creation story evidently began with the primitive Homo habilis (or a species closely related to it) two million years ago. Prior to the habilines the prehumans had been animals. Largely vegetarians, they had human-like bodies, but their cranial capacity remained chimpanzee-size, at or below 500 cubic centimeters. Starting with the habiline period the capacity grew precipitously: to 680 cubic centimeters in Homo habilis, 900 in Homo erectus, and about 1,400 in Homo sapiens. The expansion of the human brain was one of the most rapid episodes of evolution of complex organs in the history of life.

Still, to recognize the rare coming together of cooperating primates is not enough to account for the full potential of modern humans that brain capacity provides. Evolutionary biologists have searched for the grandmaster of advanced social evolution, the combination of forces and environmental circumstances that bestowed greater longevity and more successful reproduction on the possession of high social intelligence. At present there are two competing theories of the principal force. The first is kin selection: individuals favor collateral kin (relatives other than offspring) making it easier for altruism to evolve among members of the same group. Altruism in turn engenders complex social organization, and, in the one case that involves big mammals, human-level intelligence.

The second, more recently argued theory (full disclosure: I am one of the modern version’s authors), the grandmaster is multilevel selection. This formulation recognizes two levels at which natural selection operates: individual selection based on competition and cooperation among members of the same group, and group selection, which arises from competition and cooperation between groups. Multilevel selection is gaining in favor among evolutionary biologists because of a recent mathematical proof that kin selection can arise only under special conditions that demonstrably do not exist, and the better fit of multilevel selection to all of the two dozen known animal cases of eusocial evolution.

The roles of both individual and group selection are indelibly stamped (to borrow a phrase from Charles Darwin) upon our social behavior. As expected, we are intensely interested in the minutiae of behavior of those around us. Gossip is a prevailing subject of conversation, everywhere from hunter-gatherer campsites to royal courts. The mind is a kaleidoscopically shifting map of others, each of whom is drawn emotionally in shades of trust, love, hatred, suspicion, admiration, envy and sociability. We are compulsively driven to create and belong to groups, variously nested, overlapping or separate, and large or small. Almost all groups compete with those of similar kind in some manner or other. We tend to think of our own as superior, and we find our identity within them.

The existence of competition and conflict, the latter often violent, has been a hallmark of societies as far back as archaeological evidence is able to offer. These and other traits we call human nature are so deeply resident in our emotions and habits of thought as to seem just part of some greater nature, like the air we all breathe, and the molecular machinery that drives all of life. But they are not. Instead, they are among the idiosyncratic hereditary traits that define our species.

The major features of the biological origins of our species are coming into focus, and with this clarification the potential of a more fruitful contact between science and the humanities. The convergence between these two great branches of learning will matter hugely when enough people have thought it through. On the science side, genetics, the brain sciences, evolutionary biology, and paleontology will be seen in a different light. Students will be taught prehistory as well as conventional history, the whole presented as the living world’s greatest epic.

We will also, I believe, take a more serious look at our place in nature. Exalted we are indeed, risen to be the mind of the biosphere without a doubt, our spirits capable of awe and ever more breathtaking leaps of imagination. But we are still part of earth’s fauna and flora. We are bound to it by emotion, physiology, and not least, deep history. It is dangerous to think of this planet as a way station to a better world, or continue to convert it into a literal, human-engineered spaceship. Contrary to general opinion, demons and gods do not vie for our allegiance. We are self-made, independent, alone and fragile. Self-understanding is what counts for long-term survival, both for individuals and for the species.

Edward O. Wilson is Honorary Curator in Entomology and University Research Professor Emeritus, Harvard University. He has received more than 100 awards for his research and writing, including the U. S. National Medal of Science, the Crafoord Prize and two Pulitzer Prizes in non-fiction. His most recent book is “The Social Conquest of Earth.”

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Interview with Edward O. Wilson: The Origin of Morals (Spiegel)

February 26, 2013 – 01:23 PM

By Philip Bethge and Johann Grolle

American sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson is championing a controversial new approach for explaining the origins of virtue and sin. In an interview, the world-famous ant reseacher explains why he believes the inner struggle is the characteristic trait of human nature.

Edward O. Wilson doesn’t come across as the kind of man who’s looking to pick a fight. With his shoulders upright and his head tilting slightly to the side, he shuffles through the halls of Harvard University. His right eye, which has given him trouble since his childhood, is halfway closed. The other is fixed on the ground. As an ant researcher, Wilson has made a career out of things that live on the earth’s surface.

There’s also much more to Wilson. Some consider him to be the world’s most important living biologist, with some placing him on a level with Charles Darwin.

In addition to discovering and describing hundreds of species of ants, Wilson’s book on this incomparably successful group of insects is the only non-fiction biology tome ever to win a Pulitzer Prize. Another achievement was decoding the chemical communication of ants, whose vocabulary is composed of pheromones. His study of the ant colonization of islands helped to establish one of the most fruitful branches of ecology. And when it comes to the battle against the loss of biodiversity, Wilson is one of the movement’s most eloquent voices.

‘Blessed with Brilliant Enemies’

But Wilson’s fame isn’t solely the product of his scientific achievements. His enemies have also helped him to establish a name. “I have been blessed with brilliant enemies,” he says. In fact, the multitude of scholars with whom Wilson has skirmished academically is illustrious. James Watson, one of the discoverers of the double helix in DNA is among them, as is essayist Stephen Jay Gould.

At 83 years of age, Wilson is still at work making a few new enemies. The latest source of uproar is a book, “The Social Conquest of Earth,” published last April in the United States and this month in a German-language edition. In the tome, Wilson attempts to describe the triumphal advance of humans in evolutionary terms.

It is not uncommon for Wilson to look to ants for inspiration in his writings — and that proves true here, as well. When, for example, he recalls beholding two 90-million-year-old worker ants that were trapped in a piece of fossil metasequoia amber as being “among the most exciting moments in my life,” a discovery that “ranked in scientific importance withArchaeopteryx, the first fossil intermediary between birds and dinosaurs, and Australopithecus, the first ‘missing link’ discovered between modern humans and the ancestral apes.”

But that’s all just foreplay to the real controversy at the book’s core. Ultimately, Wilson uses ants to explain humans’ social behavior and, by doing so, breaks with current convention. The key question is the level at which Darwinian selection of human characteristics takes place. Did individuals enter into a fight for survival against each other, or did groups battle it out against competing groups?

Prior to this book, Wilson had been an influential champion of the theory of kin selection. He has now rejected his previous teachings, literally demolishing them. “The beautiful theory never worked well anyway, and now it has collapsed,” he writes. Today, he argues that human nature can only be understood if it is perceived as being the product of “group selection” — a view that Wilson’s fellow academics equate with sacrilege. They literally lined up to express their scientific dissent in a joint letter.

Some of the most vociferous criticism has come from Richard Dawkins, whose bestselling 1976 book “The Selfish Gene” first introduced the theory of kin selection to a mass audience. In a withering review of Wilson’s book in Britain’s Prospect magazine, Dawkins accuses a man he describes as his “lifelong hero” of “wanton arrogance” and “perverse misunderstandings”. “To borrow from Dorothy Parker,” he writes, “this is not a book to be tossed lightly aside. It should be thrown with great force.”

SPIEGEL recently sat down with sociobiologist Wilson to discuss his book and the controversy surrounding it.

SPIEGEL: Professor Wilson, lets assume that 10 million years ago some alien spacecraft had landed on this planet. Which organisms would they find particularly intriguing?

Wilson: Their interest, I believe, would not have been our ancestors. Primarily, they would have focused on ants, bees, wasps, and termites. Their discovery is what the aliens would report back to headquarters.

SPIEGEL: And you think those insects would be more interesting to them than, for example, elephants, flocks of birds or intelligent primates?

Wilson: They would be, because, at that time, ants and termites would be the most abundant creatures on the land and the most highly social creatures with very advanced division of labor and caste. We call them “eusocial,” and this phenomenon seems to be extremely rare.

SPIEGEL: What else might the aliens consider particularly interesting about ants?

Wilson: Ants engage in farming and animal husbandry. For example, some of them cultivate fungi. Others herd aphids and literally milk them by stroking them with their antennae. And the other thing the aliens would find extremely interesting would be the degree to which these insects organize their societies by pheromones, by chemical communication. Ants and termites have taken this form of communication to extremes.

SPIEGEL: So the aliens would cable back home: “We have found ants. They are the most promising candidates for a future evolution towards intelligent beings on earth?”

Wilson: No, they wouldn’t. They would see that these creatures were encased in exoskeletons and therefore had to remain very small. They would conclude that there was little chance for individual ants or termites to develop much reasoning power, nor, as a result, the capacity for culture. But at least on this planet, you have to be big in order to have sufficient cerebral cortex. And you probably have to be bipedal and develop hands with pulpy fingers, because those give you the capacity to start creating objects and to manipulate the environment.

SPIEGEL: Would our ancestors not have caught their eye?

Wilson: Ten million years ago, our ancestors indeed had developed a somewhat larger brain and versatile hands already. But the crucial step had yet to come.

SPIEGEL: What do you mean?

Wilson: Let me go back to the social insects for a moment. Why did social insects start to form colonies? Across hundreds of millions of years, insects had been proliferating as solitary forms. Some of them stayed with their young for a while, guided them and protected them. You find that widespread but far from universal in the animal kingdom. However, out of those species came a much smaller number of species who didn’t just protect their young, but started building nests that they defended …

SPIEGEL: … similar to birds.

Wilson: Yes. And I think that birds are right at the threshold of eusocial behaviour. But looking at the evolution of ants and termites again, there is another crucial step. In an even smaller group, the young don’t only grow up in their nest, but they also stay and care for the next generation. Now you have a group staying together with a division of labor. That is evidently the narrow channel of evolution that you have to pass through in order to become eusocial.

SPIEGEL: And our ancestors followed the same path?

Wilson: Yes. I argue that Homo habilis, the first humans, also went through these stages. In particular, Homo habilis was unique in that they already had shifted to eating meat.

SPIEGEL: What difference would that make?

Wilson: When animals start eating meat, they tend to form packs and to divide labor. We know that the immediate descendants of Homo habilis, Homo erectus, gathered around camp sites and that they actually had begun to use fire. These camp sites are equivalent to nests. That’s where they gathered in a tightly knit group, and then individuals went out searching for food.

SPIEGEL: And this development of groups drives evolution even further?

Wilson: Exactly. And, for example, if it now comes to staking out the hunting grounds, then group stands against group.

SPIEGEL: Meaning that this is the origin of warfare?

Wilson: Yes. But it doesn’t take necessarily the forming of an army or a battalion and meeting on the field and fighting. It was mostly what you call “vengeance raids”. One group attacks another, maybe captures a female or kills one or two males. The other group then counterraids, and this will go back and forth, group against group.

SPIEGEL: You say that this so called group selection is vital for the evolution of humans. Yet traditionally, scientists explain the emergence of social behavior in humans by kin selection.

Wilson: That, for a number of reasons, isn’t much good as an explanation.

SPIEGEL: But you yourself have long been a proponent of this theory. Why did you change your mind?

Wilson: You are right. During the 1970s, I was one of the main proponents of kin selection theory. And at first the idea sounds very reasonable. So for example, if I favored you because you were my brother and therefore we share one half of our genes, then I could sacrifice a lot for you. I could give up my chance to have children in order to get you through college and have a big family. The problem is: If you think it through, kin selection doesn’t explain anything. Instead, I came to the conclusion that selection operates on multiple levels. On one hand, you have normal Darwinian selection going on all the time, where individuals compete with each other. In addition, however, these individuals now form groups. They are staying together, and consequently it is group versus group.

SPIEGEL: Turning away from kin selection provoked a rather fierce reaction from many of your colleagues.

Wilson: No, it didn’t. The reaction was strong, but it came from a relatively small group of people whose careers are based upon studies of kin selection.

SPIEGEL: Isn’t that too easy? After all, 137 scientists signed a response to your claims. They accuse you of a “misunderstanding of evolutionary theory”.

Wilson: You know, most scientists are tribalists. Their lives are so tied up in certain theories that they can’t let go.

SPIEGEL: Does it even make a substantial difference if humans evolved through kin selection or group selection?

Wilson: Oh, it changes everything. Only the understanding of evolution offers a chance to get a real understanding of the human species. We are determined by the interplay between individual and group selection where individual selection is responsible for much of what we call sin, while group selection is responsible for the greater part of virtue. We’re all in constant conflict between self-sacrifice for the group on the one hand and egoism and selfishness on the other. I go so far as to say that all the subjects of humanities, from law to the creative arts are based upon this play of individual versus group selection.

SPIEGEL: Is this Janus-faced nature of humans our greatest strength at the end of the day?

Wilson: Exactly. This inner conflict between altruism and selfishness is the human condition. And it is very creative and probably the source of our striving, our inventiveness and imagination. It’s that eternal conflict that makes us unique.

SPIEGEL: So how do we negotiate this conflict?

Wilson: We don’t. We have to live with it.

SPIEGEL: Which element of this human condition is stronger?

Wilson: Let’s put it this way: If we would be mainly influenced by group selection, we would be living in kind of an ant society.

SPIEGEL: … the ultimate form of communism?

Wilson: Yes. Once in a while, humans form societies that emphasize the group, for example societies with Marxist ideology. But the opposite is also true. In other societies the individual is everything. Politically, that would be the Republican far right.

SPIEGEL: What determines which ideology is predominant in a society?

Wilson: If your territory is invaded, then cooperation within the group will be extreme. That’s a human instinct. If you are in a frontier area, however, then we tend to move towards the extreme individual level. That seems to be a good part of the problem still with America. We still think we’re on the frontier, so we constantly try to put forward individual initiative and individual rights and rewards based upon individual achievement.

SPIEGEL: Earlier, you differentiated between the “virtue” of altruism and the “sin” of individualism. In your book you talk about the “poorer and the better angels” of human nature. Is it helpful to use this kind of terminology?

Wilson: I will admit that using the terminology of “virtue” and “sin” is what poets call a “trope”. That is to say, I wanted the idea in crude form to take hold. Still, a lot of what we call “virtue” has to do with propensities to behave well toward others. What we call “sin” are things that people do mainly out of self-interest.

SPIEGEL: However, our virtues towards others go only so far. Outside groups are mainly greeted with hostility.

Wilson: You are right. People have to belong to a group. That’s one of the strongest propensities in the human psyche and you won’t be able to change that. However, I think we are evolving, so as to avoid war — but without giving up the joy of competition between groups. Take soccer …

SPIEGEL: … or American football.

Wilson: Oh, yes, American football, it’s a blood sport. And people live by team sports and national or regional pride connected with team sports. And that’s what we should be aiming for, because, again, that spirit is one of the most creative. It landed us on the moon, and people get so much pleasure from it. I don’t want to see any of that disturbed. That is a part of being human. We need our big games, our team sports, our competition, our Olympics.

SPIEGEL: ”Humans,” the saying goes, “have Paleolithic emotions” …

Wilson: … “Medieval institutions and god-like technology”. That’s our situation, yeah. And we really have to handle that.

SPIEGEL: How?

Wilson: So often it happens that we don’t know how, also in situations of public policy and governance, because we don’t have enough understanding of human nature. We simply haven’t looked at human nature in the best way that science might provide. I think what we need is a new Enlightenment. During the 18th century, when the original Enlightenment took place, science wasn’t up to the job. But I think science is now up to the job. We need to be harnessing our scientific knowledge now to get a better, science-based self-understanding.

SPIEGEL: It seems that, in this process, you would like to throw religions overboard altogether?

Wilson: No. That’s a misunderstanding. I don’t want to see the Catholic Church with all of its magnificent art and rituals and music disappear. I just want to have them give up their creation stories, including especially the resurrection of Christ.

SPIEGEL: That might well be a futile endeavour …

Wilson: There was this American physiologist who was asked if Mary’s bodily ascent from Earth to Heaven was possible. He said, “I wasn’t there; therefore, I’m not positive that it happened or didn’t happen; but of one thing I’m certain: She passed out at 10,000 meters.” That’s where science comes in. Seriously, I think we’re better off with no creation stories.

SPIEGEL: With this new Enlightenment, will we reach a higher state of humanity?

Wilson: Do we really want to improve ourselves? Humans are a very young species, in geologic terms, and that’s probably why we’re such a mess. We’re still living with all this aggression and ability to go to war. But do we really want to change ourselves? We’re right on the edge of an era of being able to actually alter the human genome. But do we want that? Do we want to create a race that’s more rational and free of many of these emotions? My response is no, because the only thing that distinguishes us from super-intelligent robots are our imperfect, sloppy, maybe even dangerous emotions. They are what makes us human.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Wilson, we thank you for this conversation.

Interview conducted by Philip Bethge and Johann Grolle

Why Are Environmentalists Taking Anti-Science Positions? (Yale e360)

22 OCT 2012

On issues ranging from genetically modified crops to nuclear power, environmentalists are increasingly refusing to listen to scientific arguments that challenge standard green positions. This approach risks weakening the environmental movement and empowering climate contrarians.

By Fred Pearce

From Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring to James Hansen’s modern-day tales of climate apocalypse, environmentalists have long looked to good science and good scientists and embraced their findings. Often we have had to run hard to keep up with the crescendo of warnings coming out of academia about the perils facing the world. A generation ago, biologist Paul Ehrlich’sThe Population Bomb and systems analysts Dennis and Donella Meadows’The Limits to Growth shocked us with their stark visions of where the world was headed. No wide-eyed greenie had predicted the opening of an ozone hole before the pipe-smoking boffins of the British Antarctic Survey spotted it when looking skyward back in 1985. On issues ranging from ocean acidification and tipping points in the Arctic to the dangers of nanotechnology, the scientists have always gotten there first — and the environmentalists have followed.

And yet, recently, the environment movement seems to have been turning up on the wrong side of the scientific argument. We have been making claims that simply do not stand up. We are accused of being anti-science — and not without reason. A few, even close friends, have begun to compare this casual contempt for science with the tactics of climate contrarians.

That should hurt.

Three current issues suggest that the risks of myopic adherence to ideology over rational debate are real: genetically modified (GM) crops, nuclear power, and shale gas development. The conventional green position is that we should be opposed to all three. Yet the voices of those with genuine environmental credentials, but who take a different view, are being drowned out by sometimes abusive and irrational argument.

In each instance, the issue is not so much which side environmentalists should be on, but rather the mind-set behind those positions and the tactics adopted to make the case. The wider political danger is that by taking anti-scientific positions, environmentalists end up helping the anti-environmental sirens of the new right.

The issue is not which side environmentalists should be on, but rather the mind-set behind their positions.

Most major environmental groups — from Friends of the Earth to Greenpeace to the Sierra Club — want a ban or moratorium on GM crops, especially for food. They fear the toxicity of these “Frankenfoods,” are concerned the introduced genes will pollute wild strains of the crops, and worry that GM seeds are a weapon in the takeover of the world’s food supply by agribusiness.

For myself, I am deeply concerned about the power of business over the world’s seeds and food supply. But GM crops are an insignificant part of that control, which is based on money and control of trading networks. Clearly there are issues about gene pollution, though research suggesting there is a problem is still very thin. Let’s do the research, rather than trash the test fields, which has been the default response of groups such as Greenpeace, particularly in my home country of Britain.

As for the Frankenfoods argument, the evidence is just not there. As the British former campaigner against GMs, Mark Lynas, points out: “Hundreds of millions of people have eaten GM-originated food without a single substantiated case of any harm done whatsoever.”

The most recent claim, published in September in the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology, that GM corn can produced tumors in rats, has been attacked as flawed in execution and conclusion by a wide range of experts with no axe to grind. In any event, the controversial study was primarily about the potential impact of Roundup, a herbicide widely used with GM corn, and not the GM technology itself.

Nonetheless, the reaction of some in the environment community to the reasoned critical responses of scientists to the paper has been to claim a global conspiracy among researchers to hide the terrible truth. One scientist was dismissed on the Web site GM Watch for being “a longtime member of the European Food Safety Authority, i.e. the very body that approved the GM corn in question.” That’s like dismissing the findings of a climate scientist because he sits on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — the “very body” that warned us about climate change. See what I mean about aping the worst and most hysterical tactics of the climate contrarians?

Stewart Brand wrote in his 2009 book Whole Earth Discipline: “I dare say the environmental movement has done more harm with its opposition to genetic engineering than any other thing we’ve been wrong about.” He will see nods of ascent from members of a nascent “green genes” movement — among them environmentalist scientists, such as Pamela Ronald of the University of California at Davis — who say GM crops can advance the cause of sustainable agriculture by improving resilience to changing climate and reducing applications of agrochemicals.

Yet such people are routinely condemned as apologists for an industrial conspiracy to poison the world. Thus, Greenpeace in East Asia claims that children eating nutrient-fortified GM “golden rice” are being used as “guinea pigs.” And its UK Web site’s introduction to its global campaigns says, “The introduction of genetically modified food and crops has been a disaster, posing a serious threat to biodiversity and our own health.” Where, ask their critics, is the evidence for such claims?

The problem is the same in the energy debate. Many environmentalists who argue, as I do, that climate change is probably the big overarching issue facing humanity in the 21st century, nonetheless often refuse to recognize that nuclear power could have a role in saving us from the worst.

For environmentalists to fan the flames of fear of nuclear power seems reckless and anti-scientific.

Nuclear power is the only large-scale source of low-carbon electricity that is fully developed and ready for major expansion.

Yes, we need to expand renewables as fast as we can. Yes, we need to reduce further the already small risks of nuclear accidents and of leakage of fissile material into weapons manufacturing. But as George Monbiot, Britain’s most prominent environment columnist, puts it: “To abandon our primary current source of low carbon energy during a climate change emergency is madness.”

Monbiot attacks the gratuitous misrepresentation of the risks of radiation from nuclear plants. It is widely suggested, on the basis of a thoroughly discredited piece of Russian head-counting, that up to a million people were killed by the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986. In fact, it is far from clear that many people at all — beyond the 28 workers who received fatal doses while trying to douse the flames at the stricken reactor — actually died from Chernobyl radiation. Certainly, the death toll was nothing remotely on the scale claimed.

“We have a moral duty,” Monbiot says, “not to spread unnecessary and unfounded fears. If we persuade people that they or their children are likely to suffer from horrible and dangerous health problems, and if these fears are baseless, we cause great distress and anxiety, needlessly damaging the quality of people’s lives.”

Many people have a visceral fear of nuclear power and its invisible radiation. But for environmentalists to fan the flames — especially when it gets in the way of fighting a far more real threat, from climate change — seems reckless, anti-scientific and deeply damaging to the world’s climate future.

One sure result of Germany deciding to abandon nuclear power in the wake of last year’s Fukushima nuclear accident (calamitous, but any death toll will be tiny compared to that from the tsunami that caused it) will be rising carbon emissions from a revived coal industry. By one estimate, the end of nuclear power in Germany will result in an extra 300 million tons of carbon dioxide reaching the atmosphere between now and 2020 — more than the annual emissions of Italy and Spain combined.

Last, let’s look at the latest source of green angst: shale gas and the drilling technique of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, used to extract it. There are probably good reasons for not developing shale gas in many places. Its extraction can pollute water and cause minor earth tremors, for instance. But at root this is an argument about carbon — a genuinely double-edged issue that needs debating. For there is a good environmental case to be made that shale gas, like nuclear energy, can be part of the solution to climate change. That case should be heard and not shouted down.

Opponents of shale gas rightly say it is a carbon-based fossil fuel. But it is a much less dangerous fossil fuel than coal. Carbon emissions from burning natural gas are roughly half those from burning coal. A switch from coal to shale gas is the main reason why, in 2011, U.S. CO2 emissions fell by almost 2 percent.

Many environmentalists are imbued with a sense of their own exceptionalism and original virtue.

We cannot ignore that. With coal’s share of the world’s energy supply rising from 25 to 30 percent in the past half decade, a good argument can be made that a dash to exploit cheap shale gas and undercut this surge in coal would do more to cut carbon emissions than almost anything else. The noted environmental economist Dieter Helm of the University of Oxford argues just this in a new book, The Carbon Crunch, out this month.

But this is an unpopular argument. Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, was pilloried by activists for making the case that gas could be a “bridge fuel” to a low-carbon future. And when he stepped down, his successor condemned him for taking cash from the gas industry to fund the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign. Pope was probably wrong to take donations of that type, though some environment groups do such things all the time. But his real crime to those in the green movement seems to have been to side with the gas lobby at all.

Many environmentalists are imbued with a sense of their own exceptionalism and original virtue. But we have been dangerously wrong before. When Rachel Carson’s sound case against the mass application of DDT as an agricultural pesticide morphed into blanket opposition to much smaller indoor applications to fight malaria, it arguably resulted in millions of deaths as the diseases resurged.

And more recently, remember the confusion over biofuels? They were a new green energy source we could all support. I remember, when the biofuels craze began about 2005, I reported on a few voices urging caution. They warned that the huge land take of crops like corn and sugar cane for biofuels might threaten food supplies; that the crops would add to the destruction of rainforests; and that the carbon gains were often small to non-existent. But Friends of the Earth and others trashed them as traitors to the cause of green energy.
Well, today most greens are against most biofuels. Not least Friends of the Earth, which calls them a “big green con.” In fact, we may have swung too far in the other direction, undermining research into second-generation biofuels that could be both land- and carbon-efficient.

We don’t have to be slaves to science. There is plenty of room for raising questions about ethics and priorities that challenge the world view of the average lab grunt. And we should blow the whistle on bad science. But to indulge in hysterical attacks on any new technology that does not excite our prejudices, or to accuse genuine researchers of being part of a global conspiracy, is dishonest and self-defeating.

We environmentalists should learn to be more humble about our policy prescriptions, more willing to hear competing arguments, and less keen to engage in hectoring and bullying.

Cacique Cobra Coral rompe parceria com a prefeitura (O Globo)

Governo teria deixado de entregar, nos prazos previstos, relatórios com um balanço dos investimentos em prevenção realizados ano passado na cidade

O GLOBO

Publicado:14/01/13 - 0h08

RIO — Em pleno verão carioca, o sistema de alerta e prevenção a enchentes do Rio perdeu um colaborador incomum. O porta-voz da Fundação Cacique Cobra Coral, Osmar Santos, anunciou no domingo que rompeu o convênio técnico-científico que mantinha com a prefeitura do Rio. O motivo é que a prefeitura deixou de entregar, nos prazos previstos, relatórios com um balanço dos investimentos em prevenção realizados ano passado na cidade. A ONG é comandada pela médium Adelaide Scritori, que afirma ter o poder de controlar o tempo. Desde a administração do ex-prefeito Cesar Maia, Adelaide esteve à disposição para prestar assistência espiritual a fim de tentar reduzir os estragos causados por temporais. Em janeiro de 2009, a prefeitura chegou a anunciar o fim da parceria, mas voltou atrás após uma forte chuva.

— Alguém da burocracia muito atarefado esqueceu da gente. Mas, caso a prefeitura queira continuar a receber nossa consultoria, que é gratuita, estamos à disposição — disse Osmar Santos.

Leia mais sobre esse assunto em http://oglobo.globo.com/rio/cacique-cobra-coral-rompe-parceria-com-prefeitura-7285402#ixzz2Il9blV38 © 1996 – 2013. Todos direitos reservados a Infoglobo Comunicação e Participações S.A. Este material não pode ser publicado, transmitido por broadcast, reescrito ou redistribuído sem autorização.

Medo e tensão no Oeste (Rolling Stone)

Edição 49 – Outubro de 2010

Paraíso perdido na Amazônia, a região de Nova Olinda vive em conflito: de um lado, comunidades a favor da extração da madeira; de outro, aquelas que querem manter suas terras. O impasse continua

Medo e tensão no Oeste

Foto: GREENPEACE

por POR FELIPE MILANEZ

O excesso de céu e águas que se abre à minha frente a partir da proa do barco é deslumbrante. A floresta é uma linha verdejante suave no horizonte, que marca a distinção entre o azul cósmico e o azul mais escuro do rio. Nas margens, praias com areias brancas. Dinael Cardoso, liderança indígena e uma das personalidades mais ativas no Movimento, me acompanha. Chegando a uma pequena comunidade estendida na beira do rio Arapiuns, ele aponta para uma dessas margens paradisíacas, que poderiam estar no Caribe, escoltadas pelo verde da mata: “Foi ali, ano passado. Vai fazer um ano agora que as balsas queimaram”.

É apenas uma ponta de areia, chamada São Pedro, que marca uma confluência. A partir daqui, cada vez mais o Arapiuns, afluente do Tapajós, se fecha, até culminar em uma bifurcação. De um lado, o Maró. Do outro, o Aruã. Essa terra em frente, para onde sigo, se chama Gleba Nova Olinda. O fogo de um ano antes selou a ligação política entre a insurgência presente na Nova Olinda e as comunidades ribeirinhas ao longo do Arapiuns, criando o Movimento em Defesa da Vida e da Cultura do Rio Arapiuns. Em oposição estariam os empresários que comercializam madeira da região, as comunidades que são ligadas a esses empresários e os agentes econômicos com interesse mais amplo: a mineradora Alcoa, que explora bauxita e faz prospecção em toda a área, e os produtores de soja.

Não apenas pelo significado político, mas também pela dimensão social de unir as comunidades, o protesto e o fogo rebelde em balsas carregadas de madeira marcou definitivamente essa curva do Arapiuns.

O fogo explodiu em chamas gigantes pelo meio do rio, de um tamanho nunca antes visto, em um calor nunca antes sentido. As labaredas invadiram o breu, seguiram o outro dia e queimaram por mais duas noites. As comunidades da beira do rio estavam unidas na revolta.

O sindicato dos trabalhadores rurais, que convocou a manifestação, havia abandonado a luta. O Procurador Federal declarou que havia indícios de extração irregular da madeira. A Secretaria de Meio Ambiente (Sema) veio fiscalizar a origem das toras e disse que tudo era legal e dentro dos conformes. Ou seja, a madeira continuaria saindo. “Sendo saqueada”, pensaram as lideranças que estavam no local. Não houve ordem de ninguém para dar início ao fogo, mas uma reação coletiva, em assembleias. “O motivador maior da queima foi a conivência do Estado com a exploração madeireira. O Estado não quis discutir com as comunidades, mandou apenas um técnico para fiscalizar. Isso revoltou os manifestantes, que esperaram por um mês”, afirmou uma liderança que não quis ser identificada.

Quase um ano atrás, no dia 10 de novembro, cansada de uma manifestação que já durava um mês, a multidão queimou duas balsas carregadas de madeira, avaliadas em R$ 5 milhões. Se a região vivia tempos de medo e tensão, o ato tornou-se um divisor, o momento em que as comunidades que lutam contra os empresários perceberam que poderiam se insurgir.

Neste último ano, sem a demarcação da terra indígena pretendida pelos índios borari, sem a regularização dos assentamentos das comunidades ribeirinhas, mas com as autorizações de corte de madeira na área e o patrimônio florestal sendo assim comercializado, o ambiente na Gleba Nova Olinda está tomado de medo e tensão.

“O medo sempre existiu. Mas eu não fiquei com medo de abandonar a luta. Fiquei com mais vontade de lutar”, diz Odair José Alves de Sousa, o Dadá, 28 anos, segundo cacique da aldeia borari Novo Lugar (o primeiro cacique é seu tio Higino, mais velho e experiente). À noite, a água do rio é ainda mais escura. Reflete as estrelas tão nitidamente que a sensação é a de que o barco levita. A aldeia Novo Lugar dorme na terra firme onde atracamos. Há calma no ar. Nessa hora, Dadá pode ficar tranquilo para conversar. Em 2007 ele foi sequestrado e espancado. Desde então faz parte do programa de proteção à testemunha e anda com seguranças. Mas, depois que surgiu o Movimento, a confiança na capacidade de luta aumentou. “O movimento está forte. Nossa luta é justa”, afirma.

Antes do episódio do fogo, escorriam semanalmente pelo Arapiuns cerca de 40 balsas carregadas de toras. Cada uma com uma média de dois mil metros cúbicos de madeira. Agora, diz Dadá, se passarem três balsas por mês é muito. Foi o fogo? “Questão de amedrontamento”, analisa o jovem cacique. O fogo transferiu, ao menos em parte, o medo para o “outro lado”. “A gente está falando no canal de rádio que não tem hora nem momento para ter outra manifestação, para pegar outra balsa. Então eles reduziram a quantidade”, explica. O foco da pressão é a empacada regularização fundiária da Gleba, estacionada em gabinetes e negociada entre audiências públicas e lobbies políticos.

Nova Olinda se divide em duas posições antagônicas. Para entrar na Gleba, é preciso estar de um lado. “A gente vai ter que discutir com a comunidade.” Minha recepção na aldeia Novo Lugar é permeada de desconfiança. Poucas semanas antes, eles haviam recebido uma jornalista que se mostrou envolvida com o tal “outro lado”. Para ter acesso, era preciso explicar que minha presença não implicava em vínculos diretos com o “lado de lá”, os empresários madeireiros, identificados pelo apoio que recebem de comunidades como Fé em Deus, Repartimento e Vista Alegre. Em todas as outras comunidades, o procedimento de abordagem foi o mesmo. Como iniciei a viagem pelo lado da resistência aos empresários, que se encontrava antes pela logística do rio, as comunidades opostas fecharam as portas.

Um daqueles paraísos perdidos na Amazônia, lugar de floresta altamente preservada, onde um sonho de éden ainda parece persistir, a região de Nova Olinda é banhada por rios de águas escuras, que escorrem de forma sinuosa, de difícil acesso, praticamente isolando a área na seca do acesso de barcos maiores – com o rio cheio, leva-se pelo menos um dia para se chegar de barco até Santarém, percurso feito em semanas nas canoas tradicionais.

Com 182 mil hectares, a Gleba integra um mosaico de terras, no Oeste do Pará, parte em Santarém e outra em Juriti, que está em lento processo de regularização fundiária: o conjunto de glebas Mamuru-Arapiuns, com 1,2 milhão de hectares. Seria a primeira de cinco glebas de terras públicas nessa região a ter o problema de destinação do uso resolvido – para exploração, preservação ou uso tradicional. O processo, assim que concluído, poderia servir de modelo de resolução para as demais terras. Algumas áreas de assentamento já foram regularizadas. Falta definir a situação dos assentamentos de duas comunidades, Prainha e Vista Alegre, e a demarcação da terra indígena. A conclusão estacionou, e a tensão cresceu.

Há cerca de 15 comunidades na área. Pela lei, elas devem ser ouvidas sobre sua ocupação e o uso que fazem da terra, e as necessidades devem ser respeitadas na hora da concessão do título, seja na forma de projeto de assentamento, que pode ser coletivo ou em lotes individuais, seja na forma de uma reserva indígena. Mas as interferências externas, ou seja, dos novos migrantes, mudaram a relação pacífica que existia entre as comunidades, que hoje não se comunicam.

Seria natural imaginar que todas demandariam direitos semelhantes. Mas há aquelas que querem a presença dos empresários, e as que refutam. Permeada por essa disputa, surge uma batalha por identidades: para marcar suas diferenças e posições políticas assumem cada uma suas raízes. A grande batalha acontece entre as que reivindicam a identidade indígena, do povo Borari, e aquelas que querem se ver brasileiras e modernas.

Foram os gaúchos (termo genérico para forasteiros) que trouxeram o sonho do progresso e os conflitos. Empresários madeireiros transferidos pelo governo do Pará, eles ocupavam uma área pública que havia sido transformada em terra indígena de ocupação dos índios caiapós no Sul do Estado. O governo paraense decidiu, à época, fazer uma espécie de permuta com os empresários, transferindo-os para outra área administrada pelo Instituto de Terras do Pará (Iterpa). Com a transferência dos títulos, veio junto a grilagem da terra. A partir de 2002, começaram a surgir “laranjas” e milhares de novos madeireiros permutados. Na floresta, cortes de lotes sobrepunham-se, enquanto as populações locais observavam tudo cada vez mais esmagadas nas margens.

Para as comunidades a favor da chegada dos madeireiros, da pesquisa mineral de bauxita ou da instalação da agricultura mecanizada de soja, deixar a vida dura da exclusão em que vivem tornou-se um objetivo urgente. Ainda que tenham se dividido entre grupos que passaram a apoiar a entrada dos empresários, recebendo benfeitorias para isso, e os que os enfrentaram, recebendo ameaças, mas mantendo o sonho da autonomia. A comunidade Repartimento, no rio Aruã, foi a primeira a ceder. No rio Maró, o povoado de Fé em Deus tomou a frente, liderado por Manoel Benezildo Sousa, que passou a agrupar lideranças com ações financiadas pelos empresários. Os benefícios imediatos como um gerador mais potente, alguns salários e alguns empregos na extração da madeira, são de grande importância para quem vive na área. Mas podem ser considerados baixos se comparados ao valor em potencial das terras que estão em jogo. A contrapartida exigida para a chegada do progresso é a demanda por terras menores no processo fundiário em curso.

Contrárias aos madeireiros, as outras comunidades se organizaram com o sindicato dos trabalhadores rurais e os movimentos sociais da região. Decidiram lutar para garantir a terra de uso tradicional. Pelo menos, a maior fatia possível do bolo que estava sendo dividido. Esse é o lado do chamado Movimento no conflito instaurado na Nova Olinda.

Em uma terça-feira pela manhã, estive em Fé em Deus, para conhecer as reivindicações, demandas e os benefícios que têm sido distribuídos. Chovia, ventava, e o dia tinha um aspecto antipático. Eu havia sido informado de que poderia não ser recebido quando o barco que faz a linha de transporte até Santarém, o Crê em Deus, que levava as lideranças aliadas aos madeireiros para uma audiência pública na cidade, atracou junto ao que eu estava para me avisar: a minha presença na área não estava autorizada.

Não souberam informar do que se tratava a audiência pública para a qual haviam sido convocados – no caso, era para discutir a situação ambiental de um porto construído em Santarém, pela Cargill, para o escoamento da soja. Mas o transporte era pago.

Chegando em Fé em Deus, percebi um clima de tensão. Pessoas assustadas, conversas em voz baixa sobre a presença do forasteiro, olhares preocupados. Até que jovens líderes vieram informar que não seria realmente possível o diálogo na ausência de Benezildo de Souza e outras lideranças políticas. No pátio da escola vi tremularem bandeirinhas coloridas que anunciam a festa junina, marcada para o sábado seguinte. A comunidade borari Novo Lugar não vai ser convidada. Na festa deles tampouco alguém de Fé em Deus foi chamado. Sequer fui convidado para entrar na comunidade. A justificativa: eu estaria comprometido com o “outro lado”. Nova Olinda, dividida, vive uma guerra fria.

“Não queremos conversa. Vocês vieram aqui criar índio. Nós queremos ficar em paz e resolver os problemas”, disse um dos líderes da Fé em Deus. Atrás da roda de homens, gritou uma senhora: “A gente fala com vocês, depois vocês vão embora e a gente fica aqui, correndo perigo”. O temor que ela expressa representa alguma repressão interna que aquele povo vive e sobre a qual não quiseram falar.

Em Fé em Deus e nas demais comunidades que se comportam como se tivessem sido pressionadas, também se desconfia de jornalistas. Quando têm interesse de que algo seja publicado, convidam aqueles vistos como pertencentes a “seu lado”. Assim foi com um jornal local, de Santarém, o Impacto, e a revista Veja, que publicaram reportagens sob a égide de progresso e desenvolvimento. Ambos veículos de imprensa deixaram naquelas terras um rastro de desconforto que atinge qualquer jornalista que for para a Gleba, tornando infrutíferas qualquer tentativa de contato com os produtores rurais e os empresários.

Acompanhando um antropólogo de um instituto federal de pesquisa, interessado em compreender a relação das populações tradicionais com o Estado e sem nenhuma relação com questões étnicas, eu não havia sido levado por quaisquer dos dois lados do conflito por terras na região. Da mesma forma que os que desejam o progresso consideram terem “seus” jornalistas, também pensam disporem de antropólogos que os defendem. Nesse caso, eles contrataram Edward Luz, um antropólogo missionário, cuja missão é provar que nessa área não existem índios. Engajado de corpo e alma em acabar com o assunto, jovem líder evangélico na faixa de 30 anos, casado e pai de família, filho do pastor e presidente da Missão Novas Tribos do Brasil e formado em antropologia pela Universidade de Brasília, Edward Luz “nasceu e cresceu em berço missionário”, o próprio me diz numa linda manhã de sol em São Paulo. Era o primeiro dia da primavera de 2009, a mesma época em que tinham início as revoltas no Arapiuns. Estávamos em uma sala confortável na Universidade Mackenzie, junto de uns 15 alunos. Ele ministrava um curso para ensinar outros missionários a traduzirem a Bíblia para línguas indígenas. A missão, aqui, é levar a palavra da religião protestante para povos indígenas de pouco contato ou mesmo isolados. Um caso de proselitismo, que causou ao pai de Edward Luz (os dois têm o mesmo nome) a expulsão do território dos índios Zo’é, quando o filho ainda era criança. Além do proselitismo, também foram acusados de genocídio pela Funai, em razão de epidemias que podem ter provocado. Os Luz, desde então, foram proibidos de entrar em terras indígenas na posição de missionários.

Contratado pela Associação Comunitária dos Trabalhadores Rurais do Aruã e Maró (Acutarm), que é ligada aos empresários, foi solicitado a Luz, segundo ele escreveu em uma carta à qual tive acesso, “que se inteirasse dos fatos que vinham transcorrendo na região da mesopotâmia do Maró e o Aruan” para orientar a associação. Ele esteve nas três comunidades que “se autointitulam indígenas”, mas o acesso lhe foi negado. Ele quer analisar a situação étnica dos borari, que vivem em Cachoeira do Maró, Novo Lugar e São José. Essa demanda fundiária dos indígenas, dependendo dos cálculos da Funai, pode ficar entre 35 e 80 mil hectares. Edward sabe como funciona a Funai – ele já foi contratado pela própria para identificar terras indígenas do povo Kokama, na região do rio Solimões. Mas ele derrubou as pretensões da própria Funai e hoje responde a um processo.

A mais recente disputa de antropólogos sobre o tema ocorreu em meados de agosto, em Santarém, numa audiência pública. De um lado estavam Edward e Inácio Regis – intelectual local que também se apresenta como pesquisador e que também quer provar que aqueles índios, na verdade, não são índios, e que a terra deve ser destinada ao desenvolvimento. Em oposição estavam a antropóloga Manoela Carneiro da Cunha, professora aposentada da Universidade de Chicago, e Maria Rosário Carvalho, da Universidade Federal da Bahia.

Régis, que, procurado por e-mail, não respondeu a tentativas de entrevista, afirmou que os índios do Tapajós estão sendo induzidos a se assumirem indígenas. Luz disse que os vizinhos e parentes dos índios do Maró afirmam que eles não são índios. As duas mulheres foram polidas, e disseram que não estavam na área fazendo pesquisas de campo e, portanto, não poderiam opinar sobre o caso específico. Deixaram no ar, no entanto, que consideram essas comunidades indígenas sem colocar em questão a legitimidade da identidade.

Assim como minha presença na área foi notada com rapidez, o mesmo ocorre quando os órgãos públicos aportam para debates fundiários. De acordo com o relatório de um funcionário do Ibama que participou de uma fiscalização em 2007, a embarcação da equipe foi interceptada por uma lancha conduzida por Edson Taparello, na qual também estava Fernando Belusso, dono e gerente, respectivamente, da empresa Rondobel: “Indagaram para onde ia a equipe”, escreveu o funcionário.

Os empresários estavam acompanhados de Manoel Benezildo e da repórter Gerciene Belo, do jornal Impacto. Convocaram uma reunião-surpresa, sem programação oficial – burocracia que se faz necessária para ter a presença de representantes públicos. A equipe do Iterpa cedeu à pressão e deslocou-se na lancha do empresário. O técnico do Ibama preferiu não comparecer, pois, segundo ele, tratava-se de transporte oferecido por uma empresa que tinha interesse direto no problema e isso poderia causar interferência na fiscalização.

O relatório do Ibama, cujo integrante não compareceu à reunião, descreve o que a funcionária do Iterpa lhe contou: “Os participantes decidiram pela regularização fundiária dos lotes comunitários na modalidade individual, conforme era desejo, também, dos empresários”. A Terra Indígena Cachoeira do Maró está em processo de demarcação pela Funai. A última visita de funcionários do órgão ocorreu em setembro deste ano e buscava identificar fisicamente o local de ocupação. Para a Funai, não está em questão a autenticidade da reivindicação dos índios. “Não cabe ao Estado, ou à Funai, dizer quem é índio e quem não é”, afirma Márcio Meira, presidente da entidade

A lei e a antropologia, segundo Meira, definem a legitimidade da afirmação étnica pela autodeclaração. “Índio é qualquer membro de uma comunidade indígena, que se reconhece como tal e é reconhecido pela comunidade como um membro”, explica. É questão de afirmação social, histórica, econômica e cultural.

Na complexa teia de demandas por terras da Gleba Nova Olinda, a bola da vez é a criação do Projeto de Assentamento Estadual Agroextrativista (Peaex), que envolve as comunidades Vista Alegre e Prainha. Os títulos podem ser regularizados em cinco ou 25 mil hectares, em lotes individuais ou coletivos. E, para cada possibilidade, surge uma pressão contrária. É onde ocorrem os maiores achaques, já que a demanda dos boraris está nas mãos da Funai. Em Vista Alegre e Prainha também há divisão. Um lado, liderado por Márcio Crispim, na Prainha, e Sidiclei Fernandes dos Santos, na Vista Alegre, presidentes de associações locais montadas pelos empresários, pede ao Iterpa uma pequena área de cinco mil hectares e lotes individuais, de forma que vão poder seguir vendendo madeira para os empresários. A maioria se mostra contra esse posicionamento, mas não sabe como se manifestar oficialmente. Pedem um assentamento de lote coletivo, com cerca de 25 mil hectares – número próximo ao definido por uma pesquisa realizada pelo Museu Paraense Emilio Goeldi, e que identifica a área realmente ocupada pelo uso tradicional, incluindo reservas de caça e terras para plantações de mandioca, como entre 15 e 20 mil hectares.

Algumas associações comunitárias, como a Acutarm, estão unidas para a luta por uma terra menor. No dia 18 de junho ocorreu uma reunião com os empresários, os presidentes das associações, equipes do Iterpa e da Sema. “Os funcionários públicos não estavam capacitados juridicamente para a discussão fundiária. Estavam ali apenas para fazer vistorias dos planos de manejo de madeira”, relatou um funcionário do Ministério Público que não quis se identificar. Isso não foi um empecilho, pois a reunião ocorreu, de acordo com um relatório do MP, inclusive com a presença dos madeireiros Rosenil Vaz, Francisco Souza e Alfredo Sippert.

Laurimar dos santos, o guariba, 63 anos, vive na Prainha e mostrou-se revoltado com a situação que está vivendo quando nos encontramos. Simpático, ele afirmou que não gosta de ir à cidade: “Lá nos tratam que nem bicho, nos chamam de índio”. Santos não aceita um terreno de cinco mil hectares para toda sua família e comunidade. “Estão nos espremendo, vamos comer areia”, esbraveja.

Contrário à posição de Santos está o desejo de Márcio Crispim, que me recebeu de uma forma também simpática, ainda que um tanto desconfiada. Crispim é presidente da associação da sua comunidade, mas ele não se lembra do nome. Diz que não precisam dessa terra toda. Sobre a associação que preside (mais tarde descobri que se trata da Ainorma), Crispim afirmou que nunca houve uma reunião ou assembleia, assumiu sem desconforto que é ligado aos madeireiros, e que por isso recebe um salário com carteira assinada. Está certo de estar contribuindo para o desenvolvimento da região. Mas em outra roda de conversa comentaram que ele deseja partir para Manaus com o dinheiro que tem recebido.

Crispim é amigo de Sidiclei, pastor evangélico da Vista Alegre, que por sua vez é amigo de Edward Luz, o antropólogo missionário. Sidiclei também luta para convencer sua comunidade a aceitar um território menor, ajudar os empresários e receber benefícios e investimentos em troca. Só que Sidiclei deu uma derrapada no terreno da ética, logo após o episódio do fogo no Arapiuns. E foi obrigado a retratar-se publicamente de seus atos, acusado de achacar sua própria comunidade. Ele havia escrito uma carta, “impulsionado pela raiva da informação que foi repassada para nós”, em suas palavras, e resolveu escrever outra em seguida, para as autoridades, desmentindo-se da primeira. As duas cartas estão com o Ministério Público do Estado. A primeira é um abaixo-assinado organizado por ele, no qual a comunidade abria mão de 20 mil hectares em favor das empresas madeireiras e do desenvolvimento regional. Mas a história não foi bem assim, segundo Sidiclei. Em 7 de dezembro passado, ele assinou a segunda carta, direcionada ao Iterpa, na qual constava: “A lista foi feita como um abaixo-assinado das pessoas que queriam um gerador e não dos que queriam a ampliação da área da comunidade… quem foi coletar essas assinaturas fui eu… quando conversava com os moradores, explicava que era uma lista para conseguir o gerador”. Resumo: o abaixo-assinado que ele mesmo organizou foi feito para pedir a diminuição de terras, e não para ganhar um gerador elétrico.

Sidiclei abriu para o Iterpa o jogo para reduzir o território comunitário. Mas seguiu lutando ao lado daqueles que ofereciam o gerador em troca de madeira de lei. As doações têm sido feitas, e a comunidade tem se mostrado receptiva com as benfeitorias. De acordo com o que se ouviu numa recente visita do MP à Vista Alegre, disseram que “receberam doações de seu Francisco Souza, ganharam um grupo gerador, fiação elétrica, vão construir um templo”. Eles “preferem ficar com os cinco mil hectares e ter certeza de que terão os empregos com os empresários madeireiros”. A promotora de justiça também os ouviu dizer que “há pessoas empregadas de carteira assinada e que recebem direitinho e que a vida melhorou bastante e acham que pode melhorar ainda mais”.

Desde que a indústria madeireira passou a sofrer com a repressão à extração ilegal, a partir de 2008, o Oeste paraense foi alçado à posição de um dos grandes fornecedores do mercado. No último ano houve um crescimento de 76% das autorizações de manejo florestal, segundo o jornal Folha de S. Paulo. Operações de fiscalização têm sido realizadas – inclusive, contando com apoio logístico dos madeireiros. Por vezes são distribuídas multas. Os bens apreendidos, como carretas, motosserras, tratores, quando pegos em flagrante, têm sido liberados pela Justiça Federal de Santarém. E, por mais que os fiscais do Ibama percebam que há algo estranho no ar, eles não têm conseguido comprovar. E, em ano eleitoral, um dos setores mais importantes da economia do estado, o setor madeireiro passou a ter ainda mais influência política. “A gente sabe que tem coisa errada, que extraem madeira fora do plano. O problema é que é difícil provar”, afirma um ex-funcionário do Ibama local que também não quer se identificar.

No caso do incêndio das balsas, como nem o IBAMA nem a Sema conseguiam provar as ações ilegais na região, e a demanda fundiária não foi resolvida, surgiu a revolta. Para reagir contra a retirada da madeira e a falta de definição dos títulos de terras, os moradores da Gleba Nova Olinda se juntaram com os ribeirinhos e indígenas do Arapiuns e apreenderam as duas balsas.

Diversas lideranças comunitárias estavam presentes. Agiam de forma coletiva. Mas uma personalidade, já de destaque no movimento social de resistência, foi acusada de ser uma das responsáveis e responde judicialmente pelo ato, junto de um grupo de líderes. É Dadá, do Novo Lugar. “Sou perseguido”, ele diz. Tem sido assim desde que ele fez um curso de agente ambiental do Ibama, em 2003, época em que teria iniciado sua luta política.

Foi nos tempos do Ibama que Dadá, com acesso a relatórios de fiscalização e autorizações de manejo de madeira, descobriu a chegada dos madeireiros na área e passou a organizar a resistência. Com ele estavam Edil e Valnei, líderes de suas respectivas comunidades (Novo Lugar, Cachoeira do Maró e Sociedade dos Parentes). Esses dois tiveram de fugir da região, sob escolta do programa de proteção, para não serem mortos. Dadá ficou: “O que adianta eu ter uma proteção fora, se na aldeia vão ficar meus filhos, minha esposa, minha mãe, meus tios? Se querem me proteger, que seja na minha casa, na aldeia”.

José Heder Benatti, presidente do Iterpa, diz que está informado das negociações por terra que estão ocorrendo sob pressão e achaque. Justifica que o Estado está tomando providências para regularizar a região e consertar os erros anteriores. “As comunidades estão sendo ouvidas, com prioridade, sobre o uso tradicional da terra”, afirma, lembrando que isso não ocorreu quando transferiram os madeireiros.

Se insistirem em trocar um gerador por 20 mil hectares, Benatti diz que o instituto vai negar a titulação. “Essa pressão vai ser inócua”, garante. “A área vai ser formalizada, junto ao Ministério Público, com referência ao estudo do Museu Goeldi. Eles vão ter direito à área que ocupam e usufruem.” Se a programação correr da maneira que ele espera, em três anos o Oeste do Pará, que era uma área esquecida, terá regularizado 1,3 milhão de hectares. No entanto, “período eleitoral não é muito favorável para esse tipo de conversa”, pondera o presidente do Iterpa. Outro problema é que, enquanto isso, a valiosa madeira que pertence em parte às comunidades, e em parte ao patrimônio público, terá sido escoada por mãos privadas.

“Eu tenho medo”, relata a mãe de dadá. Dona Edite assistiu seu filho chegar em casa ferido após o espancamento, a casa dele ser queimada na aldeia, e, neste ano, o outro filho, Poró, também chegar em casa espancado, em maio último. “Dizem por aí que não tem conflito”, ela diz, em alusão a declarações de lideranças de Fé em Deus e Vista Alegre. “Isso é mentira! Aqui tem conflito, e temo por meus filhos. Eu fico muito preocupada. Tem noite que não durmo. Fico tensa quando vão à cidade. Sonho que meu filho pode estar sendo morto”, desabafa a senhora. “Eu tenho muito medo.”

AL aprova lei que institui Sistema Estadual de REDD+ em MT (ICV)

André Alves – Especial para o Institutto Centro de Vida – ICV

21/12/2012

A Assembleia Legislativa de Mato Grosso aprovou nesta quarta-feira (19/12) projeto de lei que cria o Sistema Estadual de REDD+ em Mato Grosso. O projeto, de autoria do poder executivo, segue agora para a sanção do governador Silval Barbosa (PMDB) e não deverá sofrer alterações no texto. O sistema tem como objetivo promover a redução das emissões dos gases de efeito estufa com origem no desmatamento e degradação florestal e também estimular o manejo florestal sustentável, além do aumento de estoques de carbono no estado.

“A aprovação desta lei representa um marco regulatório para o estado, pois vamos compartilhar os benefícios da conservação ambiental”, declarou o secretário estadual de Meio Ambiente Vicente Falcão. “É uma conquista do governo, mas também da sociedade civil que durante dois anos discutiu uma proposta que veio na maturidade certa”, complementou.

O texto aprovado na Assembleia prevê ainda a participação efetiva dos diferentes grupos sociais envolvidos ou afetados pelas ações de REDD. Ou seja, os projetos e programas de desmatamento evitado em áreas de assentamentos ou terras indígenas, por exemplo, terão que atender as demandas dessas comunidades, além de prever um mecanismo de distribuição justa de benefícios.

Para o secretário a implantação de um sistema de REDD+ consolida as políticas ambientais e significa um passo importante para cumprir a meta de reduzir o desmatamento no estado em 89% até o ano de 2020. “Agora há uma nova leitura, pois além do comando e controle vamos ter instrumentos de incentivo para inibir o desmatamento”, concluiu.

Laurent Micol, coordenador executivo do Instituto Centro de Vida – ICV, entidade que coordena o GT REDD no Fórum Mato-grossense de Mudanças Climáticas, explica que com a aprovação da lei, Mato Grosso assume um protagonismo nacional em relação a instrumentos de desmatamento evitado. “Os futuros projetos e programas de redução de desmatamento em andamento poderão se enquadrar na lei assim como os futuros projetos terão que assegurar as questões sociais e ambientais previstas na lei”, explicou. “Há também uma maior segurança para os investidores e doadores para estes projetos e programas”, completou. Micol usou como exemplo a recente doação do banco alemão KFW que repassou 8 milhões de reais ao governo do Acre, o primeiro estado na Amazônia a ter uma legislação com esta finalidade, como pagamento por serviços ambientais.

A discussão da proposta da lei começou com a instituição do Grupo de Trabalho REDD, em março de 2009, no âmbito do Fórum Mato-grossense de Mudanças Climáticas. O grupo trabalhou durante dois anos na elaboração da proposta, que foi debatida em consultas públicas e recebeu propostas de modificações pela internet. Ao todo foram 171 proposições que foram analisadas até a versão final da minuta ser validada pelo Fórum.

Assim que sancionada a lei, o governo deverá instituir o Conselho Gestor do Sistema Estadual de REDD+, que terá função deliberativa. O conselho terá 12 representantes e será paritário entre governo estadual e federal com a sociedade civil. Enquanto isso, o GT REDD está trabalhando na proposta de um programa setorial para o manejo florestal para ser apresentado a Secretaria de Estado de Meio Ambiente (Sema).

Sobre o GT REDD

O GT REDD MT conta com 78 membros, incluindo a Sema e outras secretarias estaduais, a Procuradoria do Estado, a Assembleia Legislativa, representações de organizações dos setores agropecuário, florestal, organizações da sociedade civil e movimentos sociais, a Ordem dos Advogados do Brasil e a Universidade Federal de Mato Grosso. O ICV foi eleito para coordenar e facilitar os trabalhos do grupo.

REDD+

REDD+ é a sigla em inglês para Redução de Emissões por Desmatamento e Degradação Florestal, incluindo a conservação e ao manejo das florestas e o aumento dos estoques de carbono.

Outras informações ICV: 65 3621-3148

Água marginalizada: O reflexo da sociedade (Envolverde)

9/12/2012 – 10h35

por Sarah Bueno Motter e Giovani de Oliveira, da EcoAgência

Diluvio Água marginalizada: O reflexo da sociedade

O Dilúvio é o maior riacho que corta a cidade de Porto Alegre. Foto: Divulgação/Internet

As margens são um limite. Até onde o Dilúvio vai, até onde ele pode ir. Balizado pelo concreto humano, o arroio que corta a capital faz parte da rotina da cidade. Em suas margens, estão os congestionamentos e a ansiedade de Porto Alegre. Nas suas beiradas, está, na hora do rush, o stress de querer chegar rápido ao outro lado da cidade e não conseguir a velocidade pretendida. A poluição que corre dentro do Dilúvio também passa nos seus limiares, os quais são contaminados pela exaustão da sociedade perante sua rotina.

As margens do Dilúvio transbordam o vazio de nossa civilização que corre apressada sem nem saber o motivo. Que deixa à sua margem aqueles que não têm o capital e as oportunidades iguais, aqueles que não têm o carro, aqueles que não têm a casa. Esses ficam às margens.

As bordas também refletem as novas tendências. O desejo da ciclovia, do transporte limpo. Elas falam de um novo caminho que a cidade “quer” abrir. Um caminho para o sustentável.

Mas a sustentabilidade não caminha junto da miséria e da desigualdade e ela não é parceira do descaso. A sustentabilidade não está nas aparências. Ela não é balizada por frágeis mudanças sem conteúdo maciço, sem a pretensão de uma metamorfose. Ela não parte do nada e não chega a lugar nenhum. Ela não se inaugura com uma quadra de ciclovia, ela é uma estrada inteira.

A água, quando cai no Dilúvio, faz o barulho característico dos riachos, aquele som que muitas vezes queremos levar para casa, comprando uma fonte de decoração. O barulho é tão bonito e característico, mas o concreto afasta a cidade da natureza, que suja de nossos resíduos, continua seu caminho. As margens do Dilúvio são uma síntese do que somos. Os carros, os excluídos, a sujeira, os “novos caminhos” e a natureza que teima e vive entre o cinza da ambição humana.

O Dilúvio é o símbolo de uma sociedade precária, individualista e agressiva. Como muitas das crianças que moram embaixo de suas pontes, suas águas são agredidas desde o começo de sua vida. Já em sua nascente, na Lomba do Sabão, o arroio é violentado pela ocupação irregular da área. Famílias, sem condições de moradia, ocupam um local protegido por lei, e jogam seus dejetos nas águas do Dilúvio. Pessoas violentadas pela sociedade do ter, sem espaço para tentar ser, violentam também o arroio e invadem seu espaço.

Espaço que cada vez existe menos. Espaço cada vez mais ocupado pelo lixo, espaço que nós não temos mais. O espaço que poderia ser de lazer, de contato com a natureza em meio à cidade, torna-se um espaço do qual fugimos. Não a toa, algumas pessoas defendem que se cubra o Dilúvio. Defendem uma grande tampa de concreto, que não cure a ferida, mas nos impeça de ver ou sentir.

Mas incrivelmente, violentado do começo ao fim, o Dilúvio segue vivo, suas águas, são a moradia de peixes, pescados por improváveis gaivotas porto-alegrenses. E suas margens, costeadas pelo cinza, ainda conservam um verde, que insiste em se manter vivo.

* Publicado originalmente no site EcoAgência.

The Opportunistic Apocalypse (Savage Minds)

by  on December 14th, 2012

The third in a guest series about the “Mayan Apocalypse” predicted for Dec. 21, 2012.  The first two posts are here and here.

There are opportunities in the apocalypse.  The end of the world has been commodified.  A few are seriously investing in bunkers, boats, and survival supplies. Tourism is up, not only to Mayan archaeological sites, but also to places like Bugarach, France and Mt. Rtanj, Serbia.  But even those of us on a budget can afford at least a book, a T-shirt or a handbag.

There are opportunities here for academics, too. Many scholars have been quoted in the press lately saying that nothing will happen on Dec 21 , in addition to those who have written comprehensive books and articles discrediting the impending doom. Obviously publishing helps individual careers, and that does not detract from our collective responsibility to debunk ideas that might lead people to physical or financial harm.  But neither can we divorce our work from its larger social implications.

It is telling that the main scholarly players in debunking the Mayan Apocalypse in the U.S. are NASA (which is facing budget cuts) and anthropologists.  Both groups feel the need to prove they are relevant because our collective jobs depend on it. I don’t need to go into great detail with this crowd about academia’s current situation. Academia has gone from being a well-respected, stable job to one where most classes are taught by underpaid, uninsured part-time adjuncts, and many Ph.D.s never find work in academia at all. Tuition fees for undergraduates have skyrocketed while full-time faculty salaries have stagnated.

Among the public (too often talked about as being in “the real world,” as if academics were somehow immune to taxes or swine flu), there seems to be a general distrust of intellectuals. That, combined with the current economic situation, has translated into a loss of research funding, such as cuts to the Fulbright program and NSF. Some public officials specifically state that science and engineering are worth funding, but anthropology is not.  To add insult to injury, the University of California wants to move away from that whole “reading” thing and rebrand itself as a web startup.

Articles, books with general readership, being quoted in the newspaper, and yes, blogging are all concrete ways to show funding agencies and review committees that what we do matters. The way to get exposure among those general audiences is to engage with what interests them — like the end of the world.  Dec. 21, 2012 has become an internet meme. Many online references to it are debunkings or tongue-in-cheek. Newspaper articles on unrelated topics make passing references in jest, stores offer just-in-case-it’s-real sales, people are planning parties.  There seems to be more written to discredit the apocalypse, or make fun on it, than to prepare for it.

We need to remember that this non-believer attention has a purpose, and that purpose is not just (or even primarily) about convincing believers that nothing is going to happen. Rather, it serves to demonstrate something about non-believers themselves.  “We” are sensible and logical, while “they” are superstitious and credulous. “We” value science and data, while “they” turn to astrology, misreadings of ancient texts, and esoteric spirituality.   ”We” remember the non-apocalypses of the past, while “they” have forgotten.

I would argue that discrediting the Mayan Apocalypse is part of an ongoing process of creating western modernity (cue Latour). That modernity requires an “other,” and here that “other” is defined in this case primarily by religious/spiritual belief in the Mayan apocalypse.  The more “other” these Apocalypse believers are, the more clearly they reflect the modernity of non-believers.  (Of course, there are also the “others” of the Maya themselves, and I’ll address that issue in my next post.)

This returns us to the difference I drew in my first post between “Transitional Apocalyptic Expectations” (TAE) and “Catastrophic Apocalyptic Expectations” (CAE).  I suspect the majority of believers are expecting something like a TAE-type event, but media attention focuses on discrediting CAE beliefs, such as a rogue planet hitting the Earth or massive floods. These would be dire catastrophes, but they will also be far easier to disprove. We will all notice if a planet does or does not hit the Earth next week, but many of us — myself included — will miss a transformation in human consciousness among the enlightened.

By providing the (very real) scientific data to discredit the apocalypse, scholars are incorporated into this project of modernity.  Much of the scholarly work on this phenomenon is fascinating and subtle, but the press picks up on two main themes.  One is scientific proof that the apocalypse will not happen, such as astronomical data that Earth is not on a collision course with another planet, Mayan epigraphy that shows the Long Count does not really end, and ethnography that suggests most Maya themselves are not worried about any of this.  The other scholarly theme the press circulates is the long history of apocalyptic beliefs in the west.  In the logic of the metanarrative of western progress, this connects contemporary Apocalypse believers to the past, nonmodernity and “otherness.”

I now find myself in an uncomfortable position, although it is an intellectually interesting corner to be backed into. I agree with my colleagues that the world will not end, that Mayan ideas have been misappropriated, and that we have a responsibility to address public concerns.  At the same time, I can’t help but feel we are being drawn, either reluctantly or willingly, into a larger project than extends far beyond next week.

*   *   *

2012, the movie we love to hate

by  on December 11th, 2012

The second in a guest series about the “Mayan Apocalypse” predicted for Dec. 21, 2012.  The first post is here.

Last summer, I traveled to Philadelphia to visit the Penn Museum exhibit “Maya: the Lords of Time.” It was, as one might expect given the museum collection and the scholars involved, fantastic.  I want to comment on just the beginning of the exhibit, however. On entering, one is immediately greeted by a wall crowded with TV screens, all showing different clips of predicted disasters and people talking fearfully about the end of the world. The destruction, paranoia, and cacophony create a ambiance of chaos and uncertainty. Turning the corner, these images are replaced by widely spaced Mayan artifacts and stela. The effect is striking.  One moves from media-induced insanity to serenity, from endless disturbing jump-cuts to the well-lit, quiet contemplation of beautiful art.

Among these images were scenes from Director Roland Emmerich’s blockbuster film 2012 (2009). This over-the-top disaster film is well used in that context.  Still, it is interesting how often 2012 is mentioned by academics and other debunkers — almost as often as they mention serious alternative thinkers about the Mayan calendar, such as Jose Arguelles (although the film receives less in-depth coverage than he does).

I find this interesting because 2012 is clearly not trying to convince us to stockpile canned goods or build boats to prepare for the end of the Maya Long Count, any more than Emmerich’s previous films were meant to prepare us for alien invasion (Independence Day, 1996) or the effects of global climate change (The Day After Tomorrow, 2004).  Like Emmerich’s previous films,2012 is a chance to watch the urban industrialized world burn (in that way, it has much in common with the currently popular zombie film genre). If you want to see John Cusack survive increasingly implausible crumbling urban landscapes, this film is for you.

The Maya, however, are barely mentioned in 2012. There are no Mayan characters, no one travels to Mesoamerica, there is no mention of the Long Count.  Emmerich’s goal for 2012 was, in his own words (here and here), “a modern retelling of Noah’s Ark.” In fact, he claims that the movie originally had nothing to do with the 2012 phenomenon at all.  Instead, he was convinced – reluctantly – to include the concept because of public interest in the Maya calendar.

This explains why the Maya only receive two passing mentions in 2012 — one is a brief comment that even “they” had been able to predict the end of the world, the other a short news report on a cult suicide in Tikal. The marketing aspect of the film emphasized these Maya themes (all of the film footage about the Maya is in the trailer, the movie website starts with a rotating image of the Maya calendar, and there are related extras on the DVD), but the movie itself had basically nothing to do with the Maya, the Mayan Long Count, or Dec 21.

Nevertheless, this film’s impact on public interest in Dec 21 is measurable.  Google Trends, which gives data on the number of times particular search terms are used, gives us a sense of the impact of this $200,000,000  film. I looked at a number of related terms, but have picked the ones that show thegeneral pattern: There is a spike of interest in 2012 apocalyptic ideas when the 2012 marketing campaign starts (November 2008), a huge spike when the film is released (November 2009), and a higher baseline of interest from then until now. Since January, interest in the Mayan calendar/apocalypse has been steadily climbing (and in fact, is higher every time I check this link; it automatically updates). In other words, the 2012 movie both responded to, and reinforced, public interest in the 2012 phenomenon.

Here I return to Michael D. Gordin’s The Pseudoscience Wars (2012).  This delightful book deals with the scientific response to Velikovsky, who believed that the miracles of the Old Testament and other ancient myths documented the emergence of a comet from Jupiter, its traumatic interactions with Earth, and its eventual settling into the role of the planet Venus. (The final chapter also discusses the 2012 situation.)  Gordin’s main focus is understanding why Velikovsky — unlike others labeled “crackpots” before him — stirred the public ire of astronomers and physicists. Academics’ real concern was not Velikovsky’s ideas per se, but how much attention he received by being published by MacMillan — a major publisher of science textbooks — which implied the book had scientific legitimacy. Velikovsky’s “Worlds in Collision” was a major bestseller when it was released in 1950, and academics felt the ideas had to be addressed so that the public would not be misled.

With the Mayan Apocalypse, no major academic publisher is lending legitimacy to these theories.   Books about expected events of 2012 (mainly TAE ideas) are published by specialty presses that focus on the spiritual counterculture, such as Evolver Editions, Inner Traditions/Bear & Company, Shambhala, and John Hunt Publishing.  Instead, film media has become the battleground for public attention (perhaps because reading is declining?). The immense amount of money put into movies, documentaries, and TV shows about the Mayan Apocalypse is creating public interest today, and in some ways this parallels what Macmillan did for Velikovsky in the 1950s.

One example of this is the viral marketing campaign for 2012 conducted in November 2008.   Columbia pictures created webpages that were not clearly marked as advertising (these no longer appear to be available), promoting the idea that scientists really did know the world would end and were preparing.  This type of advertising was not unique to this film, but in this case it reinforced already existing fears that the end really was nigh.  NASA began responding to public fears about 2012 as a result of this marketing campaign, and many of the academics interested in addressing these concerns also published after this time.

Academics are caught in something of a bind here.  Do we respond to public fears, in the hopes of debunking them, but no doubt also increasing the public interest in the very ideas we wish to discredit?  Should we respond in the hopes of selling a few more books or receiving a few more citations, thus generating interest in the rest of what our discipline does?  As anthropologists we are not immune to the desires of public interest, certainly (obviously I’m not — here I am, blogging away), nor should we be.  Perhaps something good can come of the non-end-of-the-world.  I’ll turn to this question next time.

*   *   *

The End is Nigh. Start blogging.

by  on December 4th, 2012

Savage Minds welcomes guest blogger Clare A. Sammells.

My thanks to the editors of Savage Minds for allowing me to guest blog this month. Hopefully I will not be among the last of Savage Mind’s guests, given that the End of the World is nigh.

You hadn’t heard? On or around Dec 21, 2012, the Maya Long Count will mark the end of a 5125 year cycle. Will this be a mere a calendrical turn, no more inherently eventful that the transition from Dec 31, 2012 to Jan 1, 2013? Will this be a moment of astronomical alignments, fiery conflagrations, and social upheavals? Or will there be a shift in human consciousness, an opportunity for the prepared to improve their lives and achieve enlightenment?

I am going to bet with the house: I do not think the world is going to end in a few weeks.  That way, either the world doesn’t end — another victory for predictive anthropology! — or the world does end, and nothing I write here will matter much anyway. (More seriously, I don’t think our world is destined to end with a bang).

I am not a Mayanist, an archaeologist, or an astronomer. I won’t be discussing conflicting interpretations of Maya long count dates, astronomical observations, or Classical-era Maya stela inscriptions. Books by David Stuart,Anthony Aveni, and Matthew Restall and Amara Solari all provide detailed arguments using those data, and analyze the current phenomenon in light of the long history of western fascinations with End Times.  Articles by John Hoopes, Kevin Whitesides, and Robert Sitler, among others, address “New Age” interpretations of the Maya.  Many ethnographers have considered how Maya peoples understand their complex interactions with “New Age” spiritualists and tourists, among them Judith Maxwell, Quetzil Casteneda and Walter Little.

My own interest lies in how indigenous timekeeping is interpreted in the Andes. I conducted ethnographic research focusing on tourism in Tiwanaku, Bolivia — a pre-Incan archaeological site near Lake Titicaca, and a contemporary Aymara village.  One of the first things I noticed was that every tour guide tells visitors about multiple calendars inscribed in the stones of the site, most famously in the Puerta del Sol.  These calendrical interpretations are meaningful to Bolivian visitors, foreign tourists, and local Tiwanakenos for understanding the histories, ethnicities, and politics centered in this place. I took a stab at addressing some of these ideas in a recent article, where I considered how interconnected archaeological theories and political projects of the 1930s fed into what is today accepted conventional knowledge about Tiwanakota calendars.  I’m now putting together a book manuscript about temporal intersections in Tiwanaku.  The parallels between that situation and the Maya 2012 Phenomena led me to consider the prophecies, expectations, YouTube videos, blog posts, scholarly debunkings, and tourist travels motivated by the end of the Maya Long Count.

A survey by the National Geographic Channel suggested that 27% of those in the United States think the Maya may have predicted a catastrophe for December 21.  But it is important to note that there is no agreement, even among believers, about what will happen. I tend to think of these beliefs as collecting into two broad (and often overlapping) camps.

Many believe that “something” will happen on (or around) Dec 21, 2012, but do not anticipate world destruction. I think of these beliefs as “Transitional Apocalyptic Expectations” (TAE). Writers such as José Argüelles and John Major Jenkins, for example, believe that there will be a shift in human consciousness, and tend to view the end of the 13th baktun as an opportunity for human improvement.

On the other hand, there are those who believe that the world will end abruptly, in fire, flood, cosmic radiation, or collision with other planets. I think of these beliefs as “Catastrophic Apocalyptic Expectations” (CAE).  While some share my belief that the numbers of serious CAE-ers is small, there are panics and survivalists reported by the press in Russia, France, and Los Angeles.  Tragically, there has been at least one suicide.  And of course, there has been a major Hollywood movie (“2012″), which I’ll be discussing more in my next post.

As anthropologists, we certainly should respond to public fears.  But we should also wonder why this fear, out of so many possible fears, is the one to capture public imagination.  Beliefs in paranormal activities, astrology, and the like are historically common, although the specifics change over time.  Michael D. Gordin’s excellent book The Pseudoscience Wars (2012) convincingly suggests that there are larger societal reasons why some fringe theories attract scholarly and public attention while others go ignored.  The Mayan Apocalypse has certainly attracted massive attention, from scholarly rebuttals from anthropologists, NASA, and others, to numerous popular parodies such as GQ’s survival tips, LOLcats, and my personal favorite, an advertisement for Mystic Mayan Power Cloaks.

There seems to be a general fascination with the Mayan calendar — even among those who know relatively little about the peoples that label refers to.  Some are anxiously watching the calendar count down, others are trying to reassure them, and many more simply watching, cracking jokes, or even selling supplies.  But there is something interesting about the fact that so many in the United States and Europe are talking about it at all.  I look forward to exploring these questions further with all of you.

Clare A. Sammells is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Bucknell University. She is currently living in Madrid, where she is writing about concepts of time in Tiwanaku and conducting ethnographic research on food among Bolivian migrants.  She is not stockpiling canned goods.

Moral Injuries and the Environment: Healing the Soul Wounds of the Body Politic (Science & Environmental Health Network)

By Carolyn Raffensperger - December 6th, 2012

I have a hypothesis about the lack of public support for environmental action. I suspect that many people suffer from a sense of moral failure over environmental matters. They know that we are in deep trouble, that their actions are part of it, but there is so little they or anyone can do individually. Anne Karpf writing about climate change in the Guardian said this: “I now recycle everything possible, drive a hybrid car and turn down the heating. Yet somewhere in my marrow I know that this is just a vain attempt to exculpate myself – it wasn’t me, guv.”

To fully acknowledge our complicity in the problem but to be unable to act at the scale of the problem creates cognitive dissonance. Renee Aron Lertzman describes this as “environmental melancholia”, a form of hopelessness.  It is not apathy.  It is sorrow. The moral failure and the inability to act leads to what some now identify in other spheres as a moral injury, which is at the root of some post-traumatic stress disorders or ptsd.

The US military has been investigating the causes of soldiers’ ptsd because the early interpretations of it being fear-based didn’t match what psychologists were hearing from the soldiers themselves. What psychologists heard wasn’t fear, but sorrow and loss. Soldiers suffering from ptsd expressed enormous grief over things like killing children and civilians or over not being able to save a fellow soldier. They discovered that at the core of much of ptsd was a moral injury, which author Ed Tick calls a soul wound.

According to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, “[e]vents are considered morally injurious if they “transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expectations”. Thus, the key precondition for moral injury is an act of transgression, which shatters moral and ethical expectations that are rooted in religious or spiritual beliefs, or culture-based, organizational, and group-based rules about fairness, the value of life, and so forth.”

The moral injury stemming from our participation in destruction of the planet has two dimensions: knowledge of our role and an inability to act. We know that we are causing irreparable damage. We are both individually and collectively responsible. But we are individually unable to make systemic changes that actually matter. The moral injury isn’t so much a matter of the individual psyche, but a matter of the body politic. Our culture lacks the mechanisms for taking account of collective moral injuries and then finding the vision and creativity to address them.  The difference between a soldier’s moral injury and our environmental moral injuries is that environmental soul wounds aren’t a shattering of moral expectations but a steady, grinding erosion, a slow-motion relentless sorrow.

My environmental lawyer friend Bob Gough says that he suffers from pre-traumatic stress disorder. Pre-traumatic stress disorder is short hand for the fact that he is fully aware of the future trauma, the moral injury that we individually and collectively suffer, the effects on the Earth of that injury and our inability to act in time.  Essentially pre-traumatic stress disorder, the environmentalist’s malady, is a result of our inability to prevent harm.

James Hillman once wrote a book with Michael Ventura called “We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World’s getting Worse.” In it Hillman said that for years people would go into a therapist and say “the traffic in L.A. is making me crazy” and the therapist would say “let’s deal with your mother issues.” Hillman said “deal with the traffic in L.A.”

So much of environmental or health messaging speaks to us as individuals.  “Stop smoking, get more exercise, change your light bulbs.”  We take on the individual responsibility for the moral failure.  Sure, we need to do all that we can as individuals–that is part of preventing any further damage to the planet or our own souls.  But that isn’t enough.  We all know it.  We have to overcome our assumption that the problem is our mother issues (or the equivalent) and deal with the traffic in L.A., climate change, the loss of the pollinators.  These are not things we can address individually.  We have to do them together.

Healing the moral injury we suffer individually and collectively from our participation in destruction of the planet will require strong intervention in all spheres of life. Actions like creating a cabinet level office of the guardian of future generations or 350.org’s campaign for colleges to divest of oil stocks, or revamping public transportation are beginning steps. Can we think of a hundred more bold moves to make reparations and give future generations a sporting chance? Our moral health, our sanity—and our survival—depend on it.

Monbiot: The Gift of Death (The Guardian)

December 10, 2012

Pathological consumption has become so normalised that we scarcely notice it.

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 11th December 2012

There’s nothing they need, nothing they don’t own already, nothing they even want. So you buy them a solar-powered waving queen; a belly button brush; a silver-plated ice cream tub holder; a “hilarious” inflatable zimmer frame; a confection of plastic and electronics called Terry the Swearing Turtle; or – and somehow I find this significant – a Scratch Off World wall map.

They seem amusing on the first day of Christmas, daft on the second, embarrassing on the third. By the twelfth they’re in landfill. For thirty seconds of dubious entertainment, or a hedonic stimulus that lasts no longer than a nicotine hit, we commission the use of materials whose impacts will ramify for generations.

Researching her film The Story of Stuff, Annie Leonard discovered that of the materials flowing through the consumer economy, only 1% remain in use six months after sale(1). Even the goods we might have expected to hold onto are soon condemned to destruction through either planned obsolescence (breaking quickly) or perceived obsolesence (becoming unfashionable).

But many of the products we buy, especially for Christmas, cannot become obsolescent. The term implies a loss of utility, but they had no utility in the first place. An electronic drum-machine t-shirt; a Darth Vader talking piggy bank; an ear-shaped i-phone case; an individual beer can chiller; an electronic wine breather; a sonic screwdriver remote control; bacon toothpaste; a dancing dog: no one is expected to use them, or even look at them, after Christmas Day. They are designed to elicit thanks, perhaps a snigger or two, and then be thrown away.

The fatuity of the products is matched by the profundity of the impacts. Rare materials, complex electronics, the energy needed for manufacture and transport are extracted and refined and combined into compounds of utter pointlessness. When you take account of the fossil fuels whose use we commission in other countries, manufacturing and consumption are responsible for more than half of our carbon dioxide production(2). We are screwing the planet to make solar-powered bath thermometers and desktop crazy golfers.

People in eastern Congo are massacred to facilitate smart phone upgrades of ever diminishing marginal utility(3). Forests are felled to make “personalised heart-shaped wooden cheese board sets”. Rivers are poisoned to manufacture talking fish. This is pathological consumption: a world-consuming epidemic of collective madness, rendered so normal by advertising and the media that we scarcely notice what has happened to us.

In 2007, the journalist Adam Welz records, 13 rhinos were killed by poachers in South Africa. This year, so far, 585 have been shot(4). No one is entirely sure why. But one answer is that very rich people in Vietnam are now sprinkling ground rhino horn on their food or snorting it like cocaine to display their wealth. It’s grotesque, but it scarcely differs from what almost everyone in industrialised nations is doing: trashing the living world through pointless consumption.

This boom has not happened by accident. Our lives have been corralled and shaped in order to encourage it. World trade rules force countries to participate in the festival of junk. Governments cut taxes, deregulate business, manipulate interest rates to stimulate spending. But seldom do the engineers of these policies stop and ask “spending on what?”. When every conceivable want and need has been met (among those who have disposable money), growth depends on selling the utterly useless. The solemnity of the state, its might and majesty, are harnessed to the task of delivering Terry the Swearing Turtle to our doors.

Grown men and women devote their lives to manufacturing and marketing this rubbish, and dissing the idea of living without it. “I always knit my gifts”, says a woman in a television ad for an electronics outlet. “Well you shouldn’t,” replies the narrator(5). An advertisement for Google’s latest tablet shows a father and son camping in the woods. Their enjoyment depends on the Nexus 7’s special features(6). The best things in life are free, but we’ve found a way of selling them to you.

The growth of inequality that has accompanied the consumer boom ensures that the rising economic tide no longer lifts all boats. In the US in 2010 a remarkable 93% of the growth in incomes accrued to the top 1% of the population(7). The old excuse, that we must trash the planet to help the poor, simply does not wash. For a few decades of extra enrichment for those who already possess more money than they know how to spend, the prospects of everyone else who will live on this earth are diminished.

So effectively have governments, the media and advertisers associated consumption with prosperity and happiness that to say these things is to expose yourself to opprobrium and ridicule. Witness last week’s Moral Maze programme, in which most of the panel lined up to decry the idea of consuming less, and to associate it, somehow, with authoritarianism(8). When the world goes mad, those who resist are denounced as lunatics.

Bake them a cake, write them a poem, give them a kiss, tell them a joke, but for god’s sake stop trashing the planet to tell someone you care. All it shows is that you don’t.

http://www.monbiot.com

1. http://www.storyofstuff.org/movies-all/story-of-stuff/

2. It’s 57%. See http://www.monbiot.com/2010/05/05/carbon-graveyard/

3. See the film Blood in the Mobile. http://bloodinthemobile.org/

4.http://e360.yale.edu/feature/the_dirty_war_against_africas_remaining_rhinos/2595/

5. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7VE2wlDkr8&list=UU25QbTq58EYBGf2_PDTqzFQ&index=9

6. http://www.ubergizmo.com/2012/07/commercial-for-googles-nexus-7-tablet-revealed/

7. Emmanuel Saez, 2nd March 2012. Striking it Richer: the Evolution of Top Incomes in the United States (Updated with 2009 and 2010 estimates).http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/saez-UStopincomes-2010.pdf

8. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01p424r

Saúde mental, outra vítima da mudança climática (IPS)

23/11/2012 – 10h05

por Patricia Grogg, da IPS

clima Saúde mental, outra vítima da mudança climática

As tensões e angústias acompanham toda pessoa que sofre um desastre. Foto: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

Santiago de Cuba, Cuba, 23/11/2012 – “A cidade parecia bombardeada. Caminho para meu escritório, cruzo com pessoas que levavam em seus rostos o mesmo – diria dramático – espanto que eu. Nos olhávamos e, sem nos conhecermos, nos perguntávamos: como foi com você? Aconteceu alguma coisa com sua casa? Foi uma solidariedade afetiva muito importante para mim”. Este testemunho dado à IPS, por uma jornalista de Santiago de Cuba, coloca na balança um dos lados bons da reação coletiva após um desastre como o sofrido por esta cidade na madrugada do dia 25 de outubro, quando o furacão Sandy, apesar do alerta meteorológico e das advertências oficiais, surpreendeu boa parte de seus habitantes.

O valor econômico dos prejuízos ainda são desconhecidos hoje, quando a parte mais oriental do país cura suas feridas, graves de todos os ângulos. Mas existe também o impacto psicológico, do qual se fala menos e se vê nos olhos das pessoas quando contam: “perdemos nossa casa com móveis, eletrodomésticos, até as lembranças”. “Tive muito medo, me enfiei no armário quando o vento levou o telhado do meu quarto. Meus vizinhos me tiraram de casa e me ajudaram a atravessar a rua até onde haviam se refugiado outras famílias cujas casas estavam em muito mau estado”, contou à IPS Isabel da Cruz, de 70 anos, moradora de Guantânamo, outra área afetada.

Depressão, tristeza, angústia, desespero, incerteza e agressividade, todas estas são manifestações que acompanham as pessoas depois de um desastre em qualquer parte do mundo. “Imagine, nos deitamos com a bela e acordamos com a fera”, comparou um trabalhador do setor turístico cujo hotel onde é empregado foi totalmente destruído. “As pessoas estão deprimidas e desorientadas. Em muitas nota-se o desequilíbrio psíquico pelas perdas sofridas”, disse à IPS o sacerdote católico Eugenio Castellanos, reitor do Santuário da Caridad del Cobre, virgem padroeira de Cuba. O padre estima que 90% das casas do Cobre, localidade vizinha a esta cidade, sofreram o impacto do Sandy.

Juan González Pérez, por sua vez, disse à IPS que dias antes do furacão houve focos de violência em alguns lugares, especialmente na hora de comprar artigos em falta. “Ficamos muitos dias sem energia elétrica e começaram a vender ‘luz brilhante’ (querosene) para cozinhar. Embora houvesse o suficiente para todos, aconteceram discussões e brigas na fila. Quando as pessoas se desesperam, costumam ficar agressivas”, observou Pérez, mais conhecido por Madelaine, líder do espiritismo cruzado “muertero”, uma expressão de religiosidade popular nesse lugar. Segundo contou, aconselha aos seus seguidores “unirem-se, se lavar bem, dar a quem não tem e não se desesperar”.

Em Mar Verde, a praia por onde o Sandy tocou o território cubano a 15 quilômetros de Santiago, a médica Elizabeth Martínez atende mais de cem pessoas, abrigadas em cabanas de veraneio que, por estarem mais afastadas do mar, se salvaram do desastre. “O impacto psicológico é grande, mas não houve mortes e nem temos pessoas doentes”, contou. Pouco mais de uma semana depois da passagem do furacão, os esforços em matéria de saúde se concentravam fundamentalmente em conter focos epidêmicos. “Estamos dando informações sanitárias aos moradores, ensinando como cuidar de doenças transmissíveis, sobre a importância de descontaminar a água antes de beber”, informou a médica.

Segundo meios especializados, estima-se que entre um terço e metade de uma população exposta a desastres sofre algum tipo de problema psicológico, embora na maioria dos casos se deva entender como reações normais diante de eventos extremos, que sob o impacto da mudança climática ameaçam aumentar em intensidade.

“Quando encontrei meus vizinhos no abrigo, estávamos em choque. Mas alguém disse: vamos limpar a entrada que está bloqueada por essas árvores caídas. Então, começamos a trabalhar, embora no começo ninguém falasse”, contou uma mulher do setor turístico. Nos primeiros dias era possível ver muitas pessoas recolhendo escombros e varrendo as ruas de suas vizinhanças.

Diante da frequência e da maior intensidade dos ciclones tropicais, as autoridades de saúde, desde a década de 1990, começaram a se preocupar com o impacto psicológico dos desastres causados por esses e outros fenômenos naturais. Em 2008, quando o país sofreu três furacões, uma indicação ministerial fortaleceu a inclusão do tema nos planos sanitários. Em um artigo sobre o assunto, o médico cubano Alexis Lorenzo Ruiz explica que os aspectos psicossociais dos desastres são considerados tanto na capacitação do pessoal como na organização dos programas que chegam a todo o país e enfatizam a atenção a setores mais vulneráveis, como menores de idade, adolescentes e idosos.

Do ponto de vista da saúde mental, nos desastres toda a população “sofre tensões e angústias em maior ou menor medida, direta ou indiretamente”, afirmaram Katia Villamil e Orlando Fleitas, que recomendaram não se esquecer que o impacto nessas circunstâncias é mais acentuado em populações de escassos recursos. Estes profissionais afirmam que as reações mais frequentes vão desde as consideradas normais, como ansiedade controlável, depressão leve ou quadros “histeriformes”, até estresse “peritraumático”, embotamento, redução do nível de atenção, descompensação de transtornos psiquiátricos pré-existentes, bem como “reação coletiva de agitação”.

O furacão Sandy causou estragos não apenas em Santiago de Cuba, mas também nas províncias de Guantânamo e Holguín, com saldo de 11 mortos. O governo de Raúl Castro ainda não divulgou as perdas econômicas, embora dados preliminares e incompletos dos primeiros dias indicassem uma estimativa de US$ 88 milhões.

Hardtalk: Vandana Shiva, environmentalist (BBC)

Duration: 25 minutes / First broadcast: Monday 19 November 2012

Hardtalk speaks to the original tree hugger. The phrase was coined back in the 1970s when she – along with a group of women in India – hugged trees to stop them from being chopped down. In the decades since, Vandana Shiva has become known throughout the world for her environmental campaigns. She says a billion people go hungry in the world because of the way greedy international companies go about their business. So is it a naïve world view or could we really end poverty and improve everyone’s life by returning to old fashioned ways of farming?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p010d95m

We Can’t Put a Price on Nature (Huffington Post)

Wenonah Hauter, Executive Director, Food & Water Watch

Posted: 07/24/2012 6:37 pm

A group of international scientists says that the Earth is dangerously close to its tipping point of irreversible damage. Clearly, we need a way out of the mess we’ve made of the planet.

The so-called “green economy,” which governments, business leaders, and some environmental organizations touted at last month’s United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, is actually a greenwashed economy. Its proponents ask questions such as: how can we put a price on nature so as to better manage it? Or, how can we make it financially undesirable to pollute? Those are the wrong questions, and they don’t lead us to real solutions.

Putting a price on nature — as if it were a widget to be bought and sold on the market — devalues its life-giving properties. It partitions the environment off as a commodity, leaving it for sale to the highest bidder. And pollution trading is like paying a robber not to steal from your home. Neither gets to the root causes of our environmental problems: the failure to take meaningful regulatory actions and the undemocratic means by which our natural resources are managed worldwide.

As our access to the planet’s resources that once seemed endless has become limited, corporations, multinational institutions, industry-funded non-profits, and policymakers are eagerly offering market-based solutions. They typically position private interests to profit from our increased need for shared natural resources.

Calling this dangerous trend “the green economy” just isn’t appropriate. It’s more accurate to say that these special interests are promoting the same old dirty economy under a new banner. And this failure to prevent pollution threatens our ability to pursue sustainable development.

Through clever greenwashing campaigns, huge companies have somehow created the ability to buy and trade credits that they claim will curb pollution. These cap-and-trade programs do little but encourage larger companies with deeper pockets to continue with business as usual. That ultimately leads to the continued disposal of contaminants into our waterways and our atmosphere.

Likewise, thanks to relentless lobbying and a hefty advertising campaign, the oil and gas industry has managed to convince key lawmakers and consumers alike that fracking for natural gas is the key to energy independence. However, that process — formally called hydraulic fracturing or shale-gas drilling — requires large quantities of water and a cocktail of toxic chemicals. Fracking can poison drinking water supplies, air, and farmland, endangering public health.

Meanwhile, some of us are struggling to protect the marine environment from pollution and overfishing of endangered species, while large commercial interests try to privatize access to fishor acquire permits to establish aquaculture enterprises in federal waters. These factory fish farmsthreaten the health of ocean ecosystems. What’s “green” about that?

And while we struggle to maintain that water is a human right, multinational corporations are privatizing public water utilities in communities around the world and profiting in places where safe drinking water is scarce.

Our food system is also rigged to benefit a select few companies who monopolize markets and profit from farmers who have no choice but to sell their goods cheaply. Wal-Mart, for example, says it wants to offer healthier food options at affordable prices, but until it changes its business model — which squeezes farmers and workers and drives food production to become more consolidated and industrialized — highly processed foods will remain more accessible than healthier, better quality food.

We must promote real solutions that involve communities in the decision making, not just companies. We must protect the land and our water and decrease carbon emissions for the benefit of the public — not for the profits of private interests.

This post originally appeared at Otherwords.org.

What’s wrong with putting a price on nature? (The Guardian)

Pricing the financial value of services nature provides for free – such as clean water – may be the best way to save species

Richard Conniff for Yale Environment 360, part of the Guardian Environment Network

guardian.co.uk, Thursday 18 October 2012 16.44 BST

Give a Price on Nature : A bird of prey glides through the sky

A bird of prey glides through the sky at sunrise in Bilbao, northern Spain, 14 October 2012, while the rain threatens from the distance. Photograph: Alfredo Aldai/EPA

Ecosystem services is not exactly a phrase to stir the human imagination. But over the past few years, it has managed to dazzle both diehard conservationists and bottom-line business types as the best answer to global environmental decline.

For proponents, the logic is straightforward: Old-style protection of nature for its own sake has badly failed to stop the destruction of habitats and the dwindling of species. It has failed largely because philosophical and scientific arguments rarely trump profits and the promise of jobs. And conservationists can’t usually put enough money on the table to meet commercial interests on their own terms. Pointing out the marketplace value of ecosystem services was initially just a way to remind people what was being lost in the process — benefits like flood control, water filtration, carbon sequestration, and species habitat. Then it dawned on someone that, by making it possible for people to buy and sell these services, we could save the world and turn a profit at the same time.

But the rising tide of enthusiasm for PES (or payment for ecosystem services) is now also eliciting alarm and criticism. The rhetoric is at times heated, particularly in Britain, where a government plan to sell off national forests had to be abandoned in the face of fierce public opposition. (The government’s own expert panel also found that it had “greatly undervalued” what it was proposing to sell.) Writing recently inThe Guardian, columnist and land rights activist George Monbiot denounced PES schemes as “another transfer of power to corporations and the very rich.” Also writing in The Guardian, Tony Juniper, a conservationist and corporate consultant, replied in effect that Monbiot and other critics should shut up, on the grounds that campaigning against payment for ecosystem services “could inadvertently strengthen the hand of those who believe nature has little or no value, moral, economic or otherwise.”

Not all critics reject the PES idea outright. Some say they’re merely making constructive criticisms of what they see as blind faith in new financial markets, and in global initiatives like the United Nations’ REDD mechanism (for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries).

The first mistake, says Kent H. Redford, an environmental consultant, is to assume that old-style conservation methods have failed. “They’ve worked in certain circumstances, in certain ways, for certain things.” They’re the reason, for instance, that state-sponsored protected areas now cover 25 percent of the land in Costa Rica, 27 percent in the United States (at the federal level alone), 30 percent in Tanzania and Guatemala, and 50 percent in Belize.

Writing in Conservation Biology, Redford and co-author William M. Adams catalogued some of the ways PES transactions can go wrong, beginning with the whole question of price. Traditional conservationists sought to protect forests and other landscapes primarily for their intrinsic value, says Redford. But those values are likely to carry less weight when even conservationists think first in economic terms. Many ecosystem services are also likely to be hard to price — for instance, the arguably beneficial effects on climate and agriculture (minus the deleterious impacts on health) when atmospheric dust from the African Sahel drifts across the Atlantic. And even if you can put a price on an ecosystem service, Redford and Adams argue, figuring out who has a legitimate right to sell it means picking winners and losers. In developing countries, indigenous communities may lack the documentation or the political clout to assert their ownership.

Payment schemes also risk creating perverse incentives, Redford and Adams warn. If the system pays landowners to bank carbon, they may plant non-native species, or genetically “improved” trees, to bank carbon faster. Or they may discourage natural phenomena that happen to be good for biodiversity, but bad for people, including such ecosystemdisservices as fire, drought, disease, or flood. Finally, Redford and Adams point out, the effects of climate change, “always the joker in the pack,” could toss carefully constructed economic schemes — and natural habitats — into disarray.

Stuart H. M. Butchart, a researcher at BirdLife International, replies that embracing the ecosystem services idea doesn’t necessarily mean abandoning the argument that species and habitats have intrinsic value. But making the economic case often “has more resonance” for decision-makers.

A study published last week in Science, co-authored by Butchart, also suggests why the PES idea now seems so urgent. To determine what it would cost to meet current targets set for the year 2020 under the international Convention on Biological Diversity, the study looked at the cost of protecting and down-listing threatened bird species. Then it extrapolated that preventing further loss of species across all plant and animal groups would cost $78 billion a year. That’s an order of magnitude above current conservation spending — but the study noted that it was only between 1 and 4 percent of the value of the ecosystem services being lost through habitat destruction every year.

PES proponents can also point to early success stories: Vittel-Nestlé Waters recognized a few years ago that its aquifer in northern France was being polluted by nitrate fertilizers and pesticides from nearby farms. It devised a scheme to pay farmers to change their methods and deliver the ecosystem service of unpolluted water. Beijing undertook a similar scheme in the catchment around one of its reservoirs, ahead of the 2008 Olympics. (It had previously tried anti-growth regulations and resettlements.)

But there isn’t always a wealthy corporation or a big city nearby willing to pick up the tab (for Vittel, $31.4 million over the first seven years), and other transactions are more complex. Norway, for instance, pledged $1 billion each to Brazil and Indonesia for forest preservation efforts under the REDD mechanism, partly to compensate for failing to meet its own greenhouse gas emissions targets. But the Norwegian government recently felt compelled to issue a public warning to both countries against backsliding on their forest preservation commitments.

Monbiot adds that making nature fungible, so one asset can be substituted for another, guarantees that they will be: “If a quarry company wants to destroy a rare meadow, for example, it can buy absolution by paying someone to create another somewhere else.” When governments and PES proponents talk about employing marketplace solutions instead of traditional regulatory approaches, he says, “what they are really talking about is shrinking democracy, shrinking public involvement in decision making, shrinking transparency and accountability. By handing it over to the market you are in effect handing it over to corporations and the very rich,” and to “a very plutocratic” decision-making process.

Pavan Sukhdev, a former international banker who has pioneered efforts to highlight the economic importance of biodiversity, says none of these criticisms is especially new. He has raised many of them himself and says the marketplace is working to address them. “It’s useful to hear criticisms, but the critics must remember one basic fact. It wasn’t Christopher Columbus who discovered America, it was the Native Indians who lived there. So critics should not think that they have invented knowledge. They should be a little more humble in their attitude. And understand that the people on the ground are professionals who have been working on this and thinking about this for quite some time.”

But no amount of financial tweaking or social engineering is likely to allay the deeper discomfort voiced by many PES critics with the whole idea of nature, in the words of one recent paper, “as a service provider fit to be incorporated into the global capital markets.” Or the notion, expressed by Jean-Christophe Vié, of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, that nature is “the largest company on Earth.” When you view nature in economic terms, as a provider in a sort of “master-servant” relationship, they suggest, you make a fundamental change not just in the world around us, but in ourselves.

Sian Sullivan, a University of London anthropologist, warns that past revolutions in capital investment, like the enclosure of common lands in eighteenth-century Britain, and the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century, resulted in “the shattering of peoples’ relationships with landscapes” and the conversion of rural folk into factory workers and service-providers for capital. In the ecosystem services movement, Sullivan warns, we are seeing “a major new wave of capture and enclosure of Nature by capital.” And it will come, she says, at the cost of profound cultural and psychological upheaval.

It may be, as some argue, that we have no better way to save the world. But the danger in the process is that we may lose our souls.

País ‘concorre’ a troféu por travar negociações na COP 11 (O Estado de São Paulo)

JC e-mail 4605, de 17 de Outubro de 2012

Brasil é indicado pela segunda vez, durante a Convenção da Diversidade Biológica, a prêmio organizado por rede internacional de ONGs.

Pela segunda edição seguida da Convenção da Diversidade Biológica (CDB), o Brasil figura hoje entre os indicados para o Troféu Dodô, que “premia” os países que menos têm evoluído nas negociações durante o encontro para evitar perdas de biodiversidade. Canadá, China, Paraguai e a Grã-Bretanha são os outros indicados pela CBD Alliance, uma rede internacional de ONGs que participa da convenção.

O pássaro dodô é o escolhido para dar nome ao prêmio por estar extinto há cerca de quatro séculos – a espécie vivia na costa leste da África, na Ilha Maurício. Nas convenções do clima, o equivalente é o Troféu Fóssil do Dia – o País foi “agraciado” em Durban, há quase um ano.

Entre as razões para a presença do País na lista está a falta de preocupação do governo com a biodiversidade na negociação de mecanismos de Redução de Emissões por Desmatamento e Degradação Florestal (Redd+) – sistema de compensação financeira para atividades que diminuam a emissão de carbono.

Na 11ª conferência das partes (COP-11) da CBD em Hyderabad, na Índia, o Brasil quer evitar a definição de salvaguardas de biodiversidade nos textos, fazendo pressão para que haja diferenças claras entre os acordos da CBD e os estabelecidos nas Convenções sobre Mudanças Climáticas (UNFCCC).

O governo brasileiro se alinhou a outros países descontentes, como Colômbia e Argentina, para criticar o texto que está sendo trabalhado na conferência da Índia. Em nota, o bloco afirmou que o documento está atrasado e não leva em conta as resoluções alcançadas nas Conferências do Clima de Cancún e de Durban.

“Muitas das recomendações que estamos vendo na COP-11 ou são redundantes ou colocam barreiras para a implementação dessa importante ferramenta (de Redd+)”, dizem os países. Além disso, o Brasil foi indicado ao troféu pelo fato de o governo não ter, segundo a rede de ONGs, uma boa relação com comunidades locais e tribos indígenas que vivem em áreas de relevância ecológica e biológica.

Nova indicação - Há dois anos, o País havia sido indicado por outro motivo: durante o encontro na cidade japonesa de Nagoya, os representantes brasileiros promoveram de forma escancarada os biocombustíveis e foram criticados por tentar abafar os possíveis impactos sobre a biodiversidade e as populações.

Os vencedores de 2010, porém, foram o Canadá e a União Europeia. O Canadá voltou a ser indicado neste ano, também acusado de tentar evitar a discussão sobre os biocombustíveis.

De acordo com as ONGs, a China tem desencorajado o desenvolvimento de áreas marinhas em países vizinhos, enquanto o Paraguai tem bloqueado qualquer progresso em assuntos socioeconômicos nas questões de biossegurança. Já a Grã-Bretanha estaria trabalhando para evitar discussões sobre biologia sintética e geoengenharia.

 

The Anthropocene? Planet Earth in the Age of Humans (AAA)

Posted on October 16, 2012 by Joslyn O.

Today’s guest blog post is by AAA member Shirley J Fiske. Fiske is an environmental anthropologist and Research Professor at University of Maryland’s College Park campus.  She is the Chair of the American Anthropological Association ’s task force on Global Climate Change. 

The first in a series of Grand Challenges symposia organized by the Smithsonian for the public (at least the highly educated, concerned public from what I could tell)—a full day with stellar speakers and response panels.  Invigorating discussion and ideas.  Kudos!  Many well-known names Charles Mann (1491, 1493 ), Richard Alley, Andrew Revkin, Senator Tim Wirth and incredibly moving & convincing presentation by photographer Chris Jordan whose images of “the infrastructure of our mass consumption” are familiar to many – as well as his photos of the stomach contents of dead baby Albatrosses on Midway Island, showing them starved with their bellies full of plastic debris.

Environmental humanities were well-represented and exciting, but the social sciences less so – disappointingly, economist Sabine O’Hara did nothing to illuminated the human aspects of the changes in the Anthropocene but chose to talk about “internalizing the economy.”  However, two archaeologists, both at the Smithsonian, did an excellent job as panelists-rapporteurs, ensuring that the audience kept the long dimension of human evolution and development in mind.  Rick Potts, (National Museum of Natural History, Human Origins Program Director), a paleo-anthropologist, offered a tantalizing insight, roughly paraphrased as a lot of change took place during periods of high climate variability (unstable periods)—such as innovations in lithic technology and other things.  He also stated that he’s in the process of getting a long core that will show us 500,000 years of climate change in East Africa during the time period of the development of our species.  Torben C. Rick (NMNH Director of the Program in Human Ecology and Archaeobiology)  focused on the “mid-term time frame”—the last 1,000 years!  and offered that sustainability rests on reconciling the short term developments with long term cycles.  The last 10,000 years has been a series of changes, re-organizations—not collapses.

The symposium was titled as a declarative, but there was a necessary and good discussion about whether naming it the Anthropocene showed abundant human hubris in our assumed agency in changing the world and the course of the earth .  In that vein, some concluded that whatever we do at this point won’t have any effect on the ‘big picture’ of the earth’s 4-billion year existence and that the Anthropocene is wrongly named.  Highlights and some familiar assumptions, brought to the fore, were that nature can no longer be studied in isolation from humans and human systems. (check!), that ‘homogenization’ of the planet started well before the industrial revolution (Mann), that we’re the first species that recognizes who recognizes that we’re having a global impact (compared with, say, cyanobacteria);  and that we need to move away from trying to “manage” the system and focus on monitoring and adapting;  the recognition that science-based decision have inherently imbedded values within them  (Revkin).

Richard Alley has re-focused his energy onto renewables, pointing out that is the direction we need to go, that all the easy oil is gone.  His talk made abundantly clear that the argument that encouraging renewable energy means loss of jobs is a blatant red herring; that the way to start such a massive transformation is to jettison the dirtiest and most dangerous (i.e. the work of coal mining is one of the most dangerous jobs in the US) of fossil fuel resources, coal, and develop the others.  He de-bunked the ‘myth of intermittency’ (my words) with wind and solar energy quite effectively.  One of the panelists aptly said Alley is a “radical center of an environmental view of the world.”  Glad to have him there.

The culture concept was constantly invoked, as it is almost universally these days.  “How do we change culture?”   (away from consumption, from “need,” from capitalism or communism)  The most insightful answers (although not necessarily action-oriented) came from photographer Chris Jordan, who argued that we should do essentially nothing, in the short term;  we should let our human-created disaster settle in and we should grieve.  It is only by grieving fully that we will reconnect with our spiritual side and with love, the fundamental emotion of humans.  The symposium was organized to begin a dialogue around the meaning of the Anthropocene, and it accomplished those goals.  The symposium led me to conclude, similar to one of the speakers (Alley?) who said that the meaning of the Anthropocene is ethical and moral – how do we want the future to look and what can we do with the knowledge we have?

País ‘concorre’ a troféu por travar negociações na COP 11 (OESP)

JC e-mail 4605, de 17 de Outubro de 2012

Brasil é indicado pela segunda vez, durante a Convenção da Diversidade Biológica, a prêmio organizado por rede internacional de ONGs.

Pela segunda edição seguida da Convenção da Diversidade Biológica (CDB), o Brasil figura hoje entre os indicados para o Troféu Dodô, que “premia” os países que menos têm evoluído nas negociações durante o encontro para evitar perdas de biodiversidade. Canadá, China, Paraguai e a Grã-Bretanha são os outros indicados pela CBD Alliance, uma rede internacional de ONGs que participa da convenção.

O pássaro dodô é o escolhido para dar nome ao prêmio por estar extinto há cerca de quatro séculos – a espécie vivia na costa leste da África, na Ilha Maurício. Nas convenções do clima, o equivalente é o Troféu Fóssil do Dia – o País foi “agraciado” em Durban, há quase um ano.

Entre as razões para a presença do País na lista está a falta de preocupação do governo com a biodiversidade na negociação de mecanismos de Redução de Emissões por Desmatamento e Degradação Florestal (Redd+) – sistema de compensação financeira para atividades que diminuam a emissão de carbono.

Na 11ª conferência das partes (COP-11) da CBD em Hyderabad, na Índia, o Brasil quer evitar a definição de salvaguardas de biodiversidade nos textos, fazendo pressão para que haja diferenças claras entre os acordos da CBD e os estabelecidos nas Convenções sobre Mudanças Climáticas (UNFCCC).

O governo brasileiro se alinhou a outros países descontentes, como Colômbia e Argentina, para criticar o texto que está sendo trabalhado na conferência da Índia. Em nota, o bloco afirmou que o documento está atrasado e não leva em conta as resoluções alcançadas nas Conferências do Clima de Cancún e de Durban.

“Muitas das recomendações que estamos vendo na COP-11 ou são redundantes ou colocam barreiras para a implementação dessa importante ferramenta (de Redd+)”, dizem os países. Além disso, o Brasil foi indicado ao troféu pelo fato de o governo não ter, segundo a rede de ONGs, uma boa relação com comunidades locais e tribos indígenas que vivem em áreas de relevância ecológica e biológica.

Nova indicação - Há dois anos, o País havia sido indicado por outro motivo: durante o encontro na cidade japonesa de Nagoya, os representantes brasileiros promoveram de forma escancarada os biocombustíveis e foram criticados por tentar abafar os possíveis impactos sobre a biodiversidade e as populações.

Os vencedores de 2010, porém, foram o Canadá e a União Europeia. O Canadá voltou a ser indicado neste ano, também acusado de tentar evitar a discussão sobre os biocombustíveis.

De acordo com as ONGs, a China tem desencorajado o desenvolvimento de áreas marinhas em países vizinhos, enquanto o Paraguai tem bloqueado qualquer progresso em assuntos socioeconômicos nas questões de biossegurança. Já a Grã-Bretanha estaria trabalhando para evitar discussões sobre biologia sintética e geoengenharia.

(O Estado de São Paulo)

O esvaziamento da discussão ecológica atual que não questiona o modelo econômico e de desenvolvimento (EcoDebate)

Publicado em setembro 6, 2012 por 

“A pergunta passa a ser ‘o que eu devo fazer para ajudar?’ (…) enquanto a questão principal deveria ser ‘contra quem e contra o quê eu devo lutar?’”

Vladimir Safatle faz parte de uma nova leva de intelectuais de esquerda que não se intimida diante da diversidade de questões trazidas pelo mundo contemporâneo. Nessa entrevista, o professor do Departamento de Filosofia da Universidade de São Paulo (USP) mostra que a crise da democracia representativa pode ser a chave para compreender melhor fatos que à primeira vista não estão relacionados, desvelando mecanismos que ligam islandeses a pescadores brasileiros, ecologistas a jovens que voltam a reivindicar as ruas como espaço do fazer político. Um dos autores de ‘Occupy’ (Boitempo, 2012), Safatle defende que vivemos um momento em que a crítica da democracia, longe de balizar o totalitarismo, reacende a capacidade de reinvenção democrática na perspectiva da soberania popular. Com o lançamento de ‘A esquerda que não teme dizer seu nome’ (Três Estrelas, 2012), o filósofo propõe a urgência da saída do “cômodo e depressivo fatalismo”, que, desde a queda do muro de Berlim, alimenta a falsa impressão de que nenhuma ruptura radical está na pauta do campo político.

No seu livro, o senhor defende que falta à esquerda mostrar o que é inegociável. Abandonar o pragmatismo, superar os impasses da ‘governabilidade’, dentre outros elementos, seriam caminhos para isso. Em contrapartida, paira uma dúvida sobre os próprios partidos, sindicatos e estruturas semelhantes: será que serão capazes de se transformar? Os jovens que ocupam as ruas do mundo parecem não se identificar com esse tipo de organização da vida política. Por que isso acontece?

O que aconteceu com os partidos de esquerda?

Os partidos de esquerda passaram por duas fases. A primeira, muito marcada pela polaridade entre os partidos socialdemocratas e os partidos comunistas, sustentou o desenvolvimento dos Estados de bem-estar social na Europa nos anos 1950 e 1960. O segundo momento dos partidos de esquerda é resultado das ideias libertárias de maio de 1968, que vai gerar uma miríade de partidos libertários, sendo o mais importante deles o partido verde. Os partidos verdes vão conseguir impor uma pauta ecológica fundamental no debate político, mas este movimento também se esgotou. Talvez o último relance dele esteja acontecendo na Alemanha com o Partido Pirata. Só que falta uma terceira leva de partidos que sejam capazes de processar a situação fim de linha da crise de 2008, que ainda vai se perpetuar durante muito tempo.

Como esses partidos se caracterizariam?

Falta uma geração de partidos que tenha consciência de problemas vinculados à desigualdade econômica, coisa que esses partidos de segunda geração não têm. Diga-se de passagem, o Partido Verde alemão foi responsável pela lei que desregulamentou e flexibilizou o mercado de trabalho, votada na época do Gerhard Schröder [premier alemão de 1998 a 2005]. Falta uma geração de partidos com a coragem de radicalizar os processos de institucionalização da soberania popular. Partidos que não funcionem como partidos. Isso pode parecer uma coisa estranha, mas no fundo é muito importante. Partidos que não tenham essa estrutura centralizada, estrategicamente orientada, em que as discussões se submetem às estratégias político-partidárias eleitorais do dia. Por que os jovens não querem entrar em partidos hoje? Porque não querem ter a sua capacidade crítica instrumentalizada por cálculos eleitorais. Ninguém mais quer ficar fazendo uma aliança política com fulano para garantir a eleição de sicrano. Esse tipo de raciocínio de mercador, que conseguiu monopolizar a política em todos os seus níveis – inclusive no campo das esquerdas – é o que boa parte dos jovens de hoje se recusa veementemente a seguir, com todas as razões.

O que se coloca no lugar disso?

É fundamental encontrar um modelo de participação eleitoral em que esse tipo de posição não seja rifada. Ninguém aqui está fazendo a profissão de fé que vigorou nos anos 1990 de mudar o mundo sem tomar o poder. Isso não funcionou nem funcionará, o Egito é um exemplo. O grupo que realmente mobilizou o processo revolucionário chama-se Movimento 6 de abril. Eles decidiram não entrar no jogo eleitoral e estão cada vez mais isolados. Essa coisa da força que vem das ruas e vai pressionar o regime de fora tem limite. Então, não se trata de uma crítica abstrata do processo eleitoral, mas da constatação de que é necessário saber entrar nesse processo de uma maneira diferente da que vimos até hoje. Talvez a criação de alianças flexíveis para uma eleição que depois se dissolvem, como a Frente de Esquerda na França, coisas desse tipo. É difícil saber o que vai aparecer, mas uma coisa é certa: o que temos hoje não dá mais conta. Há uma fixação muito grande na democracia representativa. Desde os anos 1970 vivemos nas Ciências Políticas uma espécie de deleite em ficar discutindo como deve ser o jogo democrático, a estrutura dos partidos, dos poderes e blá, blá, blá. Esse tipo de perspectiva bloqueia radicalmente a ideia de que uma das questões centrais da democracia é fazer a crítica da democracia. Quando a democracia perde sua capacidade de reinvenção, ela morre. É o que está acontecendo agora.

O que contribuiu para a recomposição do espaço público das ruas e por que ele foi abandonado durante tanto tempo?

Para você ter crítica social e mobilização é necessário desencanto. Vários níveis de desencanto foram necessários para que as pessoas voltassem às ruas. Quando eu tinha vinte e poucos anos, o discurso era de que nunca mais veríamos grandes mobilizações populares. Poderia haver mobilizações pontuais sobre questões pontuais, mas nunca uma mobilização que colocasse em xeque o modelo de funcionamento e gestão da vida social no interior das sociedades capitalistas avançadas. Hoje vemos que quem fez essas previsões não só errou como tinha interesses ideológicos inconfessáveis. As pessoas que saíram às ruas em 2011 queriam discutir o modelo de funcionamento da estrutura econômica e social das nossas sociedades. No momento em que isso aconteceu, muitos, principalmente da imprensa, se deleitaram em dizer que eles não tinham propostas, o que é falso. Quem foi às ruas buscou o direito de colocar os problemas em questão. Muitas vezes, a pior maneira de se pensar em um problema é “solucioná-lo” muito rapidamente. Também houve quem não tenha ido às ruas e, diante da crise financeira, apareceu com soluções prontas. Essas ‘soluções’ só pioraram os problemas.

No que diz respeito à agenda ambiental, existem muitas ‘soluções’ que, na verdade, provocam um esvaziamento deliberado do potencial político das questões ecológicas. Vemos a individualização da responsabilidade pela poluição presente no discurso das sacolas plásticas, do tempo que as pessoas devem gastar tomando banho, etc. e também um esforço em afastar a população da discussão travestindo-a como eminentemente técnica. Como vê isso?

É uma tentativa de retirar a força política da questão ecológica transformando-a em uma questão moral. A discussão gira em torno dos atos dos indivíduos, que precisam ser modificados. Você precisa gastar menos tempo no banho, comprar produtos bio e coisas desse tipo. É uma maneira muita astuta de operar um deslocamento que é mortal para o problema ecológico, porque a pergunta passa a ser “o que eu devo fazer para ajudar?” – e, a princípio, parece legal todo mundo fazer alguma coisa para ajudar –, enquanto a questão principal deveria ser “contra quem e contra o quê eu devo lutar?”. Sem isso, a tendência é esvaziar completamente a dimensão da discussão ecológica, não se questiona o modelo econômico e de desenvolvimento. E o forte potencial político dessa discussão reside justamente nesse questionamento do modelo de desenvolvimento das sociedades capitalistas avançadas, colocando em xeque o modelo de organização e gestão das cidades, dos transportes, dos resíduos, da energia… Como resultado desse deslocamento da dimensão política para a moral, nada disso é colocado em questão, por mais que todo mundo defenda com a mão no coração “as florestas”, a questão que a ecologia trouxe está fora do debate.

A retórica do discurso técnico na qual as pessoas não conseguem ter acesso aos fatos sem a mediação de especialistas é um obstáculo para a reconstrução do campo político nas bases dessa democracia direta, estreitamente ligada aos reais interesses das populações, não?

Posso dar um exemplo sobre esse tipo de problema. A Islândia foi um dos primeiros países a entrar na crise financeira de 2008. Bancos islandeses venderam fundos de investimento na Holanda e na Inglaterra e quando esses bancos quebraram, os governos holandês e inglês exigiram que o governo da Islândia bancasse a dívida dos bancos. Diante disso, o parlamento islandês resolveu votar uma lei de ajuda aos bancos falidos e a lei passou. Mas o presidente da Islândia, que era um sujeito mais esclarecido, lembrou que a Constituição do país previa a convocação de um referendo popular em casos como aquele. Resumindo, ele lembrou que o princípio central da democracia é: quem paga a orquestra, escolhe a música. Quem pagaria aquela dívida não seria o parlamento, mas a população, que teria seus recursos e salários expropriados por uma série de impostos destinados ao pagamento da dívida dos bancos. A população islandesa decidiu que não queria isso. Depois do resultado do referendo, aconteceu a coisa mais fantástica, que é a essência da democracia parlamentar atual: o parlamento votou e aprovou mais uma vez a mesma lei de ajuda aos bancos. Então, novamente, o presidente acionou o mecanismo do referendo popular e, pela segunda vez, os islandeses disseram não. O que isso significa? Alguns podem questionar “como uma questão ‘técnica’ dessas vai parar em referendo popular?”, acusar o presidente de demagogia, etc., o que é absolutamente surreal. Não é possível que parlamentares que têm suas campanhas pagas por bancos definam o que vai acontecer com o dinheiro da população em relação ao pagamento ou não da dívida destes bancos. Não faltaram economistas prevendo que a Islândia iria quebrar. No entanto, de todos os países que entraram na crise, a Islândia é um dos que está em melhor situação atualmente. A tentativa de retirar a força política da decisão era simplesmente uma construção ideológica para legitimar os “técnicos”, que, no fundo, de técnicos não têm nada porque representantes do poder financeiro que conseguiu tomar conta de todas as instituições das democracias avançadas. Esse é o limite da democracia atual. O sistema financeiro é o grande inimigo da democracia.

Existe um tipo de agenda ambiental apoiada na entrada de bens comuns para o mercado que vem sendo denunciada como a solução encontrada pelo sistema financeiro para sair da crise ao mesmo tempo em que, também apoiada na retórica da crise, Angela Merkel lidera na zona do Euro políticas de austeridade que deslegitimam a vontade soberana dos povos, como no caso grego. Como ‘a esquerda que não teme dizer seu nome’ se coloca nesse processo?

Os problemas ligados à ecologia têm um forte potencial não só mobilizador como também transformador. No entanto, nós temos hoje duas ecologias. Uma tem um potencial transformador, mas a outra é conservadora. O capitalismo vê na ecologia um dos elementos de sua renovação. Hoje, qualquer liberal, qualquer analista de Wall Street vai admitir o discurso ecológico. Há alguns autores que falam que depois da bolha imobiliária, nós temos agora a bolha verde. Uma vez escrevi um pequeno texto sobre o filme Wall Street [2010], de Oliver Stone, que me impressionou pela agudez da metáfora. Um jovem analista do mercado aposta no potencial financeiro das energias renováveis. Ele era um visionário porque, de certa maneira, pregava uma reconciliação entre o setor mais rentista da economia e algumas exigências presentes na pauta ecológica. Isso só pode ser feito rifando completamente a dimensão em que a reflexão ecológica aparece como um elemento fundamental de afirmação da soberania popular. Existe uma tendência bizarra, mas muito concreta, de articulação entre um determinado setor de lutas ecológicas e o capital financeiro. Inclusive, do ponto de vista eleitoral, acontece muita coisa complicada. Os partidos verdes europeus preferem se aliar a partidos de centro do que aos partidos de esquerda. Por exemplo, na Alemanha, o Partido Verde prefere uma aliança com a CDU [partido democrata-cristão da primeira-ministra Angela Merkel] do que uma aliança com a Die LINK, que é um partido de esquerda mais dura. Na França foi a mesma coisa. Tudo isso me parece muito preocupante. É necessário livrar a agenda ecológica dessa tendência à justificativa de um liberalismo renovado para recolocá-la no lugar onde ela sempre esteve, ou seja, como elemento fundamental da reflexão da esquerda sobre o caráter deletério dos processos de desenvolvimento do capitalismo avançado.

Como o novo pensamento de esquerda pode articular uma mirada filosófica diferente para a questão do uso produtivista da natureza, característico do neodesenvolvimentismo aqui no Brasil?

Eu reconheço que esse produtivismo em relação à natureza também esteve muito presente em certos setores da esquerda que, durante muito tempo, entenderam a natureza como fonte de recursos e só. Basta lembrar que nos países comunistas a política ambiental foi catastrófica. Isso, inclusive, tem base teórica, vem de uma leitura do pensamento marxista em que a natureza era um discurso reificado, sem realidade ontológica em si. Em última instância, a natureza era o fruto do trabalho humano então a intervenção humana na natureza já estava justificada de antemão, sem maiores contradições. Mas acredito que do ponto de vista da esquerda hoje existe uma consciência tácita a respeito da centralidade da agenda ecológica. Não foram poucos os filósofos no século 20 que nos alertaram para o impacto negativo da redução da relação com a natureza a sua dimensão eminentemente técnica. Por mais que o desenvolvimento técnico pareça nos assegurar a dominação da natureza, o fato de compreender a relação humana com a natureza sob o signo da dominação já é um problema grave. Então, essa ideia de que, sim, vivemos em um país que tem necessidades de desenvolvimento maiores porque há urgências de inclusão social não invalida o fato de estarmos no interior de um processo de reflexão sobre o que significa riqueza social. Será que riqueza social significa ter um conjunto determinado de bens de consumo, ter transporte individual, ter uma relação extrativista da energia natural? Ou significa ser capaz de criar um modelo de relação com a natureza que garanta de maneira fundamental a qualidade de vida? Essa é uma bela questão que só o debate ecológico foi capaz de colocar.

Assim como em movimentos urbanos, a exemplo do Ocuppy, a pauta ecológica delineia um horizonte onde outro modelo de sociedade é possível, fazendo cada vez mais a crítica ao poder do sistema financeiro para bloqueá-lo?

A pauta ecológica atinge o modelo na sua esfera econômica mais clara ao afirmar que nós não queremos uma situação na qual todos os agentes econômicos estejam submetidos aos interesses de uma meia dúzia de multinacionais que detém não só a estrutura de produção, mas também o desenvolvimento da técnica. Quando se fala em agricultura familiar, o que isso quer dizer? Que, enquanto modelo econômico, não é possível estabelecer uma brutal concentração de terras, de tecnologia, de insumos. Insistir na agricultura familiar é, dentre outras coisas, insistir na pulverização radical da posse não só da terra, mas dos bens e das técnicas. Porque se isso não ocorrer, você tem não só consequências demográficas muito brutais, como o inchaço das periferias urbanas, mas também uma espécie de situação na qual a criatividade inerente à pulverização das técnicas é perdida. Milhares de produtores não vão produzir as mesmas coisas, nem sob as mesmas condições.

Por exemplo?

Por exemplo, quando essas questões ecológicas se vinculam ao problema da soberania alimentar. O fato de que você tem uma política agrícola que vai eliminando completamente a diversidade alimentar não é só uma questão de garantia das tradições – eu seria o último a fazer aqui a defesa abstrata da particularidade das tradições. Dentre outras coisas, é preciso reconhecer que a tradição tem uma dimensão de experiência que será muito importante para nós quando tivermos condições de compreender como os saberes alimentares se constituíram e o que eles garantem. Há uma tendência monopolista muito forte, nós vemos nas últimas décadas algo que está na base da tradição marxista, a ideia de que vai chegar um momento em que a própria noção de concorrência começa a desaparecer. Esse processo concentracionista toma a relação com a natureza de assalto, da maneira mais brutal possível. Todos esses movimentos camponeses, como a Via Campesina, insistem que há um risco não só econômico como social em se permitir a concentração das atividades agrícolas na mão de multinacionais. As sociedades pagarão caro se não conseguirem bloquear esse processo.

Pegando carona nesse exemplo da Via Campesina, cada vez mais surgem relatos de populações tradicionais emparedadas por esse modelo de desenvolvimento, mas, ainda sim, estes relatos bastante concretos e verificáveis são deslegitimados…

Tenta-se desqualificar essas resistências como uma espécie de arcaísmo. É como se dissessem “vocês precisam entender que têm uma visão absolutamente romântica do mundo”. É um discurso que condena “a crítica às luzes”, no final das contas. Diz muito a tentativa de retirar dessas lutas uma espécie de prova maior do conservadorismo de certas populações que no fundo são as populações mais vulneráveis, pois sabem que quando essas empresas chegam eles vão para o espaço simplesmente. Quando a Petrobrás chega para fazer a exploração de petróleo nas bacias, a vida dos pescadores é a última coisa na qual ela vai pensar. “Imagina você ficar preocupado com peixe quando o país quer se transformar em uma grande potência petrolífera?”. Ou seja, eles querem vender essa perspectiva, mas uma questão fundamental da esquerda é saber defender as alas mais vulneráveis da sociedade. Existe um modelo retórico que procura nos fazer acreditar que toda resistência seja, no fundo, uma recusa do progresso. Acho importante recolocar de maneira clara o que significa ‘progresso’ no interior desse contexto. O progresso procuraria dar conta de certas exigências fundamentais de bem-estar. O progresso científico não é simplesmente um processo de dominação da natureza, mas também um processo de otimização do bem-estar humano. Mas esse dito ‘progresso’ promete uma maior qualidade de vida para as populações e acaba produzindo o inverso. Para que essa inversão não ocorra, é necessária uma reconstituição brutal dos modelos de relação com a natureza. E, nesse processo, o interessante é que nasce outra consciência da organização social.

* Entrevista realizada por Maíra Mathias para a revista Poli n° 24, de julho e agosto de 2012

** Entrevista socializada pela Escola Politécnica de Saúde Joaquim Venâncio(EPSJV/Fiocruz), publicada pelo EcoDebate, 06/09/2012

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