Daniel Swain studies extreme floods. And droughts. And wildfires. Then he explains them to the rest of us.
February 6, 2024
By Tracie White
Illustrations by Tim O’Brien
7:00 a.m., 45 degrees F
The moment Daniel Swain wakes up, he gets whipped about by hurricane-force winds. “A Category 5, literally overnight, hits Acapulco,” says the 34-year-old climate scientist and self-described weather geek, who gets battered daily by the onslaught of catastrophic weather headlines: wildfires, megafloods, haboobs (an intense dust storm), atmospheric rivers, bomb cyclones. Everyone’s asking: Did climate change cause these disasters? And, more and more, they want Swain to answer.
Swain, PhD ’16, rolls over in bed in Boulder, Colo., and checks his cell phone for emails. Then, retainer still in his mouth, he calls back the first reporter of the day. It’s October 25, and Isabella Kwai at the New York Times wants to know whether climate change is responsible for the record-breaking speed and ferocity of Hurricane Otis, which rapidly intensified and made landfall in Acapulco as the eastern Pacific’s strongest hurricane on record. It caught everyone off guard. Swain posted on X (formerly known as Twitter) just hours before the storm hit: “A tropical cyclone undergoing explosive intensification unexpectedly on final approach to a major urban area . . . is up there on list of nightmare weather scenarios becoming more likely in a warming #climate.”
Swain is simultaneously 1,600 miles away from the tempest and at the eye of the storm. His ability to explain science to the masses—think the Carl Sagan of weather—has made him one of the media’s go-to climate experts. He’s a staff research scientist at UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability who spends more than 1,100 hours each year on public-facing climate and weather communication, explaining whether (often, yes) and how climate change is raising the number and exacerbating the viciousness of weather disasters. “I’m a physical scientist, but I not only study how the physics and thermodynamics of weather evolve but how they affect people,” says Swain. “I lead investigations into how extreme events like floods and droughts and wildfires are changing in a warming climate, and what we might do about it.”
He translates that science to everyday people, even as the number of weather-disaster headlines grows each year. “To be quite honest, it’s nerve-racking,” says Swain. “There’s such a demand. But there’s a climate emergency, and we need climate scientists to talk to the world about it.”
No bells, no whistles. No fancy clothes, makeup, or vitriolic speech. Sometimes he doesn’t even shave for the camera. Just a calm, matter-of-fact voice talking about science on the radio, online, on TV. In 2023, he gave nearly 300 media interviews—sometimes at midnight or in his car. The New York Times, CNN, and BBC keep him on speed dial. Social media is Swain’s home base. His Weather West blog reaches millions. His weekly Weather West “office hours” on YouTube are public and interactive, doubling as de facto press conferences. His tweets reach 40 million people per year. “I don’t think that he appreciates fully how influential he is of the public understanding of weather events, certainly in California but increasingly around the world,” says Stanford professor of earth system science Noah Diffenbaugh, ’96, MS ’97, Swain’s doctoral adviser and mentor. “He’s such a recognizable presence in newspapers and radio and television. Daniel’s the only climate scientist I know who’s been able to do that.”
There’s no established job description for climate communicator—what Swain calls himself—and no traditional source of funding. He’s not particularly a high-energy person, nor is he naturally gregarious; in fact, he has a chronic medical condition that often saps his energy. But his work is needed, he says. “Climate change is an increasingly big part of what’s driving weather extremes today,” Swain says. “I connect the dots between the two. There’s a lot of misunderstanding about how a warming climate affects day-to-day variations in weather, but my goal is to push public perception toward what the science actually says.” So when reporters call him, he does his best to call them back.
7:30 a.m., winds at 5 mph from the east northeast
Swain finishes the phone call with the Times reporter and schedules a Zoom interview with Reuters for noon. Then he brushes his teeth. He’s used to a barrage of requests when there’s a catastrophic weather event. Take August 2020, when, over three days, California experienced 14,000 lightning strikes from “dry” thunderstorms. More than 650 reported wildfires followed, eventually turning the skies over San Francisco a dystopian orange. “In a matter of weeks, I did more than 100 interviews with television, radio, and newspaper outlets, and walked a social media audience of millions through the disaster unfolding in their own backyards,” he wrote in a recent essay for Nature.
Swain’s desire to understand the physics of weather stretches back to his preschool years. In 1993, his family moved from San Francisco across the Golden Gate Bridge to San Rafael, and the 4-year-old found himself wondering where all that Bay City fog had gone. Two years later, Swain spent the first big storm of his life under his parents’ bed. He lay listening to screeching 100 mile-per-hour winds around his family’s home, perched on a ridge east of Mount Tamalpais. But he was more excited than scared. The huge winter storm of 1995 that blew northward from San Francisco and destroyed the historic Conservatory of Flowers just got 6-year-old Swain wired.
‘Climate change is an increasingly big part of what’s driving weather extremes today. I connect the dots between the two.’
“To this day, it’s the strongest winds I’ve ever experienced,” he says. “It sent a wind tunnel through our house.” It broke windows. Shards of glass embedded in one of his little brother’s stuffies, which was sitting in an empty bedroom. “I remember being fascinated,” he says. So naturally, when he got a little older, he put a weather station on top of that house. And then, in high school, he launched his Weather West blog. “It was read by about 10 people,” Swain says, laughing. “I was a weather geek. It didn’t exactly make me popular.” Two decades, 550 posts, and 2 million readers later, well, who’s popular now?
Swain graduated from UC Davis with a bachelor’s degree in atmospheric science. He knew then that something big was happening on the weather front, and he wanted to understand how climate change was influencing the daily forecast. So at Stanford, he studied earth system science and set about using physics to understand the causes of changing North Pacific climate extremes. “From the beginning, Daniel had a clear sense of wanting to show how climate change was affecting the weather conditions that matter for people,” says Diffenbaugh. “A lot of that is extreme weather.” Swain focused on the causes of persistent patterns in the atmosphere—long periods of drought or exceptionally rainy winters—and how climate change might be exacerbating them.
The first extreme weather event he studied was the record-setting California drought that began in 2012. He caught the attention of both the media and the scientific community after he coined the term Ridiculously Resilient Ridge, referring to a persistent ridge of high pressure caused by unusual oceanic warmth in the western tropical Pacific Ocean. That ridge was blocking weather fronts from bringing rain into California. The term was initially tongue-in-cheek. Today the Ridiculously Resilient Ridge (aka RRR or Triple R) has a Wikipedia page.
“One day, I was sitting in my car, waiting to pick up one of my kids, reading the news on my phone,” says Diffenbaugh. “And I saw this article in the Economist about the drought. It mentioned this Ridiculously Resilient Ridge. I thought, ‘Oh, wow, that’s interesting. That’s quite a branding success.’ I click on the page and there’s a picture of Daniel Swain.”
Diffenbaugh recommended that Swain write a scientific paper about the Ridiculously Resilient Ridge, and Swain did, in 2014. By then, the phrase was all over the internet. “Journalists started calling while I was still at Stanford,” says Swain. “I gave into it initially, and the demand just kept growing from there.”
11:45 a.m., precipitation 0 inches
Swain’s long, lanky frame is seated ramrod straight in front of his computer screen, scrolling for the latest updates about Hurricane Otis. At noon, he signs in to Zoom and starts answering questions again.
Reuters: “Hurricane Otis wasn’t in the forecast until about six to 10 hours before it occurred. What would you say were the factors that played into its fierce intensification?”
Swain: “Tropical cyclones, or hurricanes, require a few different ingredients. I think the most unusual one was the warmth of water temperature in the Pacific Ocean off the west coast of Mexico. It’s much higher than usual. This provided a lot of extra potential intensity to this storm. We expect to see increases in intensification of storms like this in a warming climate.”
Swain’s dog, Luna, bored by the topic, snores softly. She’s asleep just behind him, next to a bookshelf filled with weather disaster titles: The Terror by Dan Simmons; The Water Will Come by Jeff Goodell; Fire Weather by John Vaillant. And the deceptively hopeful-sounding Paradise by Lizzie Johnson, which tells the story of the 2018 Camp Fire that burned the town of Paradise, Calif., to the ground. Swain was interviewed by Johnson for the book. The day of the fire, he found himself glued to the comment section of his blog, warning anyone who asked about evacuation to get out.
“During the Camp Fire, people were commenting, ‘I’m afraid. What should we do? Do we stay or do we go?’ Literally life or death,” he says. He wrote them back: “There is a huge fire coming toward you very fast. Leave now.” As they fled, they sent him progressively more horrifying images of burning homes and trees like huge, flaming matchsticks. “This makes me extremely uncomfortable—that I was their best bet for help,” says Swain.
Swain doesn’t socialize much. He doesn’t have time. His world revolves around his home life, his work, and taking care of his health. He has posted online about his chronic health condition, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a heritable connective tissue disease that, for him, results in fatigue, gastrointestinal problems, and injuries—he can partially dislocate a wrist mopping the kitchen floor. He works to keep his health condition under control when he has down time, traveling to specialists in Utah, taking medications and supplements, and being cautious about any physical activity. When he hikes in the Colorado Rocky Mountains, he’s careful and tries to keep his wobbly ankles from giving out. Doctors don’t have a full understanding of EDS. So, Swain researches his illness himself, much like he does climate science, constantly looking for and sifting through new data, analyzing it, and sometimes sharing what he discovers online with the public. “If it’s this difficult to parse even as a professional scientist and science communicator, I can only imagine how challenging this task is for most other folks struggling with complex/chronic illnesses,” he wrote on Twitter.
‘“There is a huge fire coming toward you very fast. Leave now.” This makes me extremely uncomfortable—that I was their best bet for help. ’
It helps if he can exert some control over his own schedule to minimize fatigue. The virtual world has helped him do that. He mostly works from a small, extra bedroom in an aging rental home perched at an elevation of 5,400 feet in Boulder, where he lives with his partner, Jilmarie Stephens, a research scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder.
When Swain was hired at UCLA in 2018, Peter Kareiva, the then director of the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, supported a nontraditional career path that would allow Swain to split his time between research and climate communication, with the proviso that he find grants to fund much of his work. That same year, Swain was invited to join a group at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) located in Boulder, which has two labs located at the base of the Rocky Mountains.
“Daniel had a very clear vision about how he wanted to contribute to science and the world, using social media and his website,” says Kareiva, a research professor at UCLA. “We will not solve climate change without a movement, and communication and social media are key to that. Most science papers are never even read. What we do as scientists only matters if it has an impact on the world. We need at least 100 more Daniels.”
And yet financial support for this type of work is never assured. In a recent essay in Nature, Swain writes about what he says is a desperate need for more institutions to fund climate communication by scientists. “Having a foot firmly planted in both research and public-engagement worlds has been crucial,” he writes. “Even as I write this, it’s unclear whether there will be funding to extend my present role beyond the next six months.”
4:00 p.m., 67 degrees F
“Ready?” says the NBC reporter on the computer screen. “Can we just have you count to 10, please?”
“Walk me through in a really concise way why we saw this tropical storm, literally overnight, turn into a Category 5 hurricane, when it comes to climate change,” the reporter says.
“So, as the Earth warms, not only does the atmosphere warm or air temperatures increase, but the oceans are warming as well. And because warm tropical oceans are hurricane fuel, the maximum potential intensity of hurricanes is set by how warm the oceans are,” Swain says.
An hour later, Swain lets Luna out and prepares for the second half of his day: He’ll spend the next five hours on a paper for a science journal. It’s a review of research on weather whiplash in California—the phenomenon of rapid swings between extremes, such as the 2023 floods that came on the heels of a severe drought. Using atmospheric modeling, Swain predicted in a 2018 Nature Climate Change study that there would be a 25 percent to 100 percent increase in extreme dry-to-wet precipitation events in the years ahead. Recent weather events support that hypothesis, and Swain’s follow-up research analyzes the ways those events are seriously stressing California’s water storage and flood control infrastructure.
“What’s remarkable about this summer is that the record-shattering heat has occurred not only over land but also in the oceans,” Swain explained in an interview with Katie Couric on YouTube in August, “like the hot tub [temperature] water in certain parts of the shallow coastal regions off the Gulf of Mexico.” In a warming climate, the atmosphere acts as a kitchen sponge, he explains later. It soaks up water but also wrings it out. The more rapid the evaporation, the more intense the precipitation. When it rains, there are heavier downpours and more extreme flood events.
‘What we do as scientists only matters if it has an impact on the world. We need at least 100 more Daniels.’
“It really comes down to thermodynamics,” he says. The increasing temperatures caused by greenhouse gases lead to more droughts, but they also cause more intense precipitation. The atmosphere is thirstier, so it takes more water from the land and from plants. The sponge holds more water vapor. That’s why California is experiencing these wild alternations, he says, from extremely dry to extremely wet. “It explains the role climate change plays in turning a tropical storm overnight into hurricane forces,” he says.
October 26, expected high of 45 degrees F
In 2023, things got “ludicrously crazy” for both Swain and the world. It was the hottest year in recorded history. Summer temperatures broke records worldwide. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported 28 confirmed weather/climate disaster events with losses exceeding $1 billion—among them a drought, four flooding events, 19 severe storm events, two tropical cyclones, and a killer wildfire. Overall, catastrophic weather events resulted in the deaths of 492 people in the United States. “Next year may well be worse than that,” Swain says. “It’s mind-blowing when you think about that.”
“There have always been floods and wildfires, hurricanes and storms,” Swain continues. “It’s just that now, climate change plays a role in most weather disasters”—pumped-up storms, more intense and longer droughts and wildfire seasons, and heavier rains and flooding. It also plays a role in our ability to manage those disasters, Swain says. In a 2023 paper he published in Communications Earth & Environment, for example, he provides evidence that climate change is shifting the ideal timing of prescribed burns (which help mitigate wildfire risk) from spring and autumn to winter.
The day after Hurricane Otis strikes, Swain’s schedule has calmed down, so he takes time to make the short drive from his home up to the NCAR Mesa Lab, situated in a majestic spot where the Rocky Mountains meet the plains. Sometimes he’ll sit in his Hyundai in the parking lot, looking out his windshield at the movements of the clouds while doing media interviews on his cell phone. Today he scrolls through weather news updates on the aftermath of Hurricane Otis, keeping informed for the next interview that pops up, or his next blog post. In total, 52 people will be reported dead due to the disaster. The hurricane destroyed homes and hotels, high-rises and hospitals. Swain’s name will appear in at least a dozen stories on Hurricane Otis, including one by David Wallace-Wells, an opinion writer for the New York Times,columnist for the New York Times Magazine,and bestselling author of The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming. “It’s easy to get pulled into overly dramatic ways of looking at where the world is going,” says Wallace-Wells, who routinely listens to Swain’s office hours and considers him a key source when he needs information on weather events. “Daniel helps people know how we can better calibrate those fears with the use of scientific rigor. He’s incredibly valuable.”
From the parking lot in the mountains, Swain often watches the weather that blows across the wide-open plains that stretch for hundreds of miles, all the way to the Mississippi River. He never tires of examining weather in real time, learning from it. He studies the interplay between the weather and the clouds at this spot where storms continually roll in and roll out.
“After all these years,” he says, “I’m still a weather geek.”
We are told that 2030 is a significant year for global sustainability targets. What could we really achieve comprehensively from now until then, especially with climate change dominating so many discussions and proposals?
More sustainable transport on water and land, with many advantages beyond tackling climate change (Leeuwarden, the Netherlands). Source: Photo Taken by Ilan Kelman
Several United Nations agreements use 2030 for their timeframe, including the Sustainable Development Goals, the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, the Paris Agreement for tackling human-caused climate change, and the Addis Ababa Action Agenda on Financing for Development. Aside from the oddity of having separate agreements with separate approaches from separate agencies to achieve similar goals, climate change is often explicitly separated as a topic. Yet it brings little that is new to the overall and fundamental challenges causing our sustainability troubles.
Consider what would happen if tomorrow we magically reached exactly zero greenhouse gas emissions. Overfishing would continue unabated through what is termed illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing, often in protected areas such as Antarctic waters. Demands from faraway markets would still devastate nearshore marine habitats and undermine local practices serving local needs.
Deforestation would also continue. Examples are illegal logging in protected areas of Borneo and slashing-and-burning through the Amazon’s rainforest, often to plant products for supermarket shelves appealing to affluent populations. Environmental exploitation and ruination did not begin with, and is not confined to, climate change.
A similar ethos persists for human exploitation. No matter how awful the harm, human trafficking, organ harvesting, child marriage, child labour, female genital mutilation, and arms deals would not end with greenhouse gas emissions.
If we solved human-caused climate change, then humanity—or, more to the point, certain sectors of humanity—would nonetheless display horrible results in wrecking people and ecosystems. It comes from a value favouring immediate exploitation of any resource without worrying about long-term costs. It sits alongside the value of choosing to live out of balance with the natural environment from local to global scales.
These are exactly the same values causing the climate to change quickly and substantively due to human activity. In effect, it is about using fossil fuels as a resource as rapidly as possible, irrespective of the negative social and environmental consequences.
Changing these values represents the fundamental challenge. Doing so ties together all the international efforts and agreements.
The natural environment, though, does not exist in isolation from us. Human beings have never been separate from nature, even when we try our best to divorce society from the natural environments around us. Our problematic values are epitomised by seeing nature as being at our service, different or apart from humanity.
Human-caused climate change is one symptom among many of such unsustainable and destructive values. Referring to the “climate crisis” or “climate emergency” is misguided since similar crises and emergencies manifest for similar reasons, including overfishing, deforestation, human exploitation, and an industry selling killing devices.
The real crisis and the real emergency are certain values. These values lead to behaviour and actions which are the antithesis of what the entire 2030 agenda aims to achieve. We do a disservice to ourselves and our place in the environment by focusing on a single symptom, such as human-caused climate change.
Revisiting our values entails seeking fundaments for what we seek for 2030—and, more importantly, beyond. One of our biggest losses is in caring: caring for ourselves and for people and environments. Dominant values promote inward-looking, short-term thinking for action yielding immediate, superficial, and short-lived gains.
We ought to pivot sectors with these values toward caring about the long-term future, caring for people, caring for nature, and especially caring for ourselves—all of us—within and connected to nature. A caring pathway to 2030 is helpful, although we also need an agenda mapping out a millennium (and more) beyond this arbitrary year. Rather than using “social capital” and “natural capital” to define people and the environment, and rather than treating our skills and efforts as commodities, our values must reflect humanity, caring, integration with nature, and many other underpinning aspects.
When we fail to do so, human-caused climate change demonstrates what manifests, but it is only a single example from many. Placing climate change on a pedestal as the dominant or most important topic distracts from the depth and breadth required to identify problematic values and then morph them into constructive ones.
Focusing on the values that cause climate change and all the other ills is a baseline for reaching and maintaining sustainability. Then, we would not only solve human-caused climate change and achieve the 2030 agenda, but we would also address so much more for so much longer.
With the World Stumbling Past 1.5 Degrees of Warming, Scientists Warn Climate Shocks Could Trigger Unrest and Authoritarian Backlash
Most of the public seems unaware that global temperatures will soon push past the target to which the U.N. hoped to limit warming, but researchers see social and psychological crises brewing.
Activists march in protest on day nine of the COP28 Climate Conference on Dec. 9, 2023 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Credit: Sean Gallup/Getty Images
As Earth’s annual average temperature pushes against the 1.5 degree Celsius limit beyond which climatologists expect the impacts of global warming to intensify, social scientists warn that humanity may be about to sleepwalk into a dangerous new era in human history. Research shows the increasing climate shocks could trigger more social unrest and authoritarian, nationalist backlashes.
Established by the 2015 Paris Agreement and affirmed by a 2018 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the 1.5 degree mark has been a cliff edge that climate action has endeavored to avoid, but the latest analyses of global temperature data showed 2023 teetering on that red line.
Paris negotiators were intentionally vague about the endeavor to limit warming to 1.5 degrees, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change put the goal in the context of 30-year global averages. Earlier this month, the Berkeley Earth annual climate report showed Earth’s average temperature in 2023 at 1.54 degrees Celsius above the 1850-1900 pre-industrial average, marking the first step past the target.
“The real danger is that there are so many other crises around us that there is no effort left for the climate crisis,” he said. “We will find all kinds of reasons not to put more effort into climate protection, because we are overburdened with other things like inflation and wars all around us.”
Steurer said he doesn’t expect any official announcement from major climate institutions until long after the 1.5 degree threshold is actually crossed, when some years will probably already be edging toward 2 degrees Celsius. “I think most scientists recognize that 1.5 is gone,” he said.
“We’ll be doing this for a very long time,” he added, “not accepting facts, pretending that we are doing a good job, pretending that it’s not going to be that bad.”
In retrospect, using the 1.5 degree temperature rise as the key metric of whether climate action was working may have been a bad idea, he said.
“It’s language nobody really understands, unfortunately, outside of science,” he said. ”You always have to explain that 1.5 means a climate we can adapt to and manage the consequences, 2 degrees of heating is really dangerous, and 3 means collapse of civilization.”
Absent any formal notification of breaching the 1.5 goal, he hopes more scientists talk publicly about worst-case outcomes.
“It would really make a difference if scientists talked more about societal collapse and how to prepare for that because it would signal, now it’s getting real,” he said. “It’s much more tangible than 1.5 degrees.”
Instead, recent public climate discourse was dominated by feel-good announcements about how COP28 kept the 1.5 goal alive, he added.
“This is classic performative politics,” he said. “If the fossil fuel industry can celebrate the outcome of the COP, that’s not a good sign.”
Like many social scientists, Steurer is worried that the increasingly severe climate shocks that warming greater than 1.5 degrees brings will reverberate politically as people reach for easy answers.
“That is usually denial, in particular when it comes to right-wing parties,” he said. “That’s the easiest answer you can find.”
“Global warming will be catastrophic sooner or later, but for now, denial works,” he said. “And that’s all that matters for the next election.”
‘Fear, Terror and Anxiety’
Social policy researcher Paul Hoggett, professor emeritus at the University of the West of England in Bristol, said the scientific roots of 1.5-degree target date back to research in the early 2000s that culminated in a University of Exeter climate conference at which scientists first spelled out the risks of triggering irreversible climate tipping points above that level of warming.
“I think it’s still seen very much as that key marker of where we move from something which is incremental, perhaps to something which ceases to be incremental,” he said. “But there’s a second reality, which is the reality of politics and policymaking.”
The first reality is “profoundly disturbing,” but in the political world, 1.5 is a symbolic maker, he said.
“It’s more rhetorical; it’s a narrative of 1.5,” he said, noting the disconnect of science and policy. “You almost just shrug your shoulders. As the first reality worsens, the political and cultural response becomes more perverse.”
A major announcement about breaching the 1.5 mark in today’s political and social climate could be met with extreme denial in a political climate marked by “a remorseless rise of authoritarian forms of nationalism,” he said. “Even an announcement from the Pope himself would be taken as just another sign of a global elite trying to pull the wool over our eyes.”
An increasing number of right-wing narratives simply see this as a set of lies, he added.
“I think this is a huge issue that is going to become more and more important in the coming years,” he said. “We’re going backwards to where we were 20 years ago, when there was a real attempt to portray climate science as misinformation,” he said. “More and more right wing commentators will portray what comes out of the IPCC, for example, as just a pack of lies.”
The IPCC’s reports represent a basic tenet of modernity—the idea that there is no problem for which a solution cannot be found, he said.
“Even an announcement from the Pope himself would be taken as just another sign of a global elite trying to pull the wool over our eyes.”
“However, over the last 100 years, this assumption has periodically been put to the test and has been found wanting,” Hoggett wrote in a 2023 paper. The climate crisis is one of those situations with no obvious solution, he wrote.
“Those are crucial political and individual emotions,” he said. “And it’s those things that drive this non-rational refusal to see what’s in front of your eyes.”
“At times of such huge uncertainty, a veritable plague of toxic public feelings can be unleashed, which provide the effective underpinning for political movements such as populism, authoritarianism, and totalitarianism,” he said.
“When climate reality starts to get tough, you secure your borders, you secure your own sources of food and energy, and you keep out the rest of them. That’s the politics of the armed lifeboat.”
The Emotional Climate
“I don’t think people like facing things they can’t affect,” said psychotherapist Rebecca Weston, co-president of the Climate Psychology Alliance of North America. “And in trauma, people do everything that they possibly can to stop feeling what is unbearable to feel.”
That may be one reason why the imminent breaching of the 1.5 degree limit may not stir the public, she said.
“We protect ourselves from fear, we protect ourselves from deep grief on behalf of future generations and we protect ourselves from guilt and shame. And I think that the fossil fuel industry knows that,” she said. “We can be told something over and over and over again, but if we have an identity and a sense of ourselves tied up in something else, we will almost always refer to that, even if it’s at the cost of pretending that something that is true is not true.”
Such deep disavowal is part of an elaborate psychological system for coping with the unbearable. “It’s not something we can just snap our fingers and get ourselves out of,” she said.
People who point out the importance of the 1.5-degree warming limit are resented because they are intruding on peoples’ psychological safety, she said, and they become pariahs. “The way societies enforce this emotionally is really very striking,” she added.
But how people will react to passing the 1.5 target is hard to predict, Weston said.
“I do think it revolves around the question of agency and the question of meaning in one’s life,” she said. “And I think that’s competing with so many other things that are going on in the world at the same time, not coincidentally, like the political crises that are happening globally, the shift to the far right in Europe, the shift to the far right in the U.S. and the shift in Argentina.”
Those are not unrelated, she said, because a lack of agency produces a yearning for false, exclusionary solutions and authoritarianism.
“If there’s going to be something that keeps me up at night, it’s not the 1.5. It’s the political implications of that feeling of helplessness,” she said. “People will do an awful lot to avoid feeling helpless. That can mean they deny the problem in the first place. Or it could mean that they blame people who are easier targets, and there is plenty of that to witness happening in the world. Or it can be utter and total despair, and a turning inward and into a defeatist place.”
She said reaching the 1.5 limit will sharpen questions about addressing the problem politically and socially.
“I don’t think most people who are really tracking climate change believe it’s a question of technology or science,” she said. “The people who are in the know, know deeply that these are political and social and emotional questions. And my sense is that it will deepen a sense of cynicism and rage, and intensify the polarization.”
Unimpressed by Science
Watching the global temperature surging past the 1.5 degree mark without much reaction from the public reinforces the idea that the focus on the physical science of climate change in recent decades came at the expense of studying how people and communities will be affected and react to global warming, said sociologist and author Dana Fisher, a professor in the School of International Service at American University and director of its Center for Environment, Community, and Equity.
“It’s a fool’s errand to continue down that road right now,” she said. “It’s been an abysmal ratio of funds that are going to understand the social conflict that’s going to come from climate shocks, the climate migration and the ways that social processes will have to shift. None of that has been done.”
Passing the 1.5 degree threshold will “add fuel to the fire of the vanguard of the climate movement,” she said. “Groups that are calling for systemic change, that are railing against incremental policy making and against business as usual are going to be empowered by this information, and we’re going to see those people get more involved and be more confrontational.”
“When you see a big cycle of activism growing, you get a rise in counter-movements, particularly as activism becomes more confrontational, even if it’s nonviolent, like we saw during the Civil Rights period,” she said. “And it will lead to clashes.”
Looking at the historic record, she said, shows that repressive crackdowns on civil disobedience is often where the violence starts. There are signs that pattern will repeat, with police raids and even pre-emptive arrests of climate activists in Germany, and similar repressive measures in the United Kingdom and other countries.
“I think that’s an important story to talk about, that people are going to push back against climate action just as much as they’re going to push for it,” she said. “There are those that are going to feel like they’re losing privileged access to resources and funding and subsidies.”
“When you see a big cycle of activism growing, you get a rise in counter-movements, particularly as activism becomes more confrontational, even if it’s nonviolent, like we saw during the Civil Rights period.”
A government dealing effectively with climate change would try to deal with that by making sure there were no clear winners and losers, she said, but the climate shocks that come with passing the 1.5 degree mark will worsen and intensify social tensions.
“There will be more places where you can’t go outside during certain times of the year because of either smoke from fires, or extreme heat, or flooding, or all the other things that we know are coming,” she said. “That’s just going to empower more people to get off their couches and become activists.”
‘A Life or Death Task For Humanity’
Public ignorance of the planet’s passing the 1.5 degree mark depends on “how long the powers-that-be can get away with throwing up smokescreens and pretending that they are doing something significant,” said famed climate researcher James Hansen, who recently co-authored a paper showing that warming is accelerating at a pace that will result in 2 degrees of warming within a couple of decades.
“As long as they can maintain the 1.5C fiction, they can claim that they are doing their job,” he said. “They will keep faking it as long as the scientific community lets them get away with it.”
But even once the realization of passing 1.5 is widespread, it might not change the social and political responses much, said Peter Kalmus, a climate scientist and activist in California.
“Not enough people care,” he said. “I’ve been a climate activist since 2006. I’ve tried so many things, I’ve had so many conversations, and I still don’t know what it will take for people to care. Maybe they never will.”
Hovering on the brink of this important climate threshold has left Kalmus feeling “deep frustration, sadness, helplessness, and anger,” he said. “I’ve been feeling that for a long time. Now, though, things feel even more surreal, as we go even deeper into this irreversible place, seeming not to care.”
“No one really knows for sure, but it may still be just physically possible for Earth to stay under 1.5C,” he said, “if humanity magically stopped burning fossil fuels today. But we can’t stop fossil fuels that fast even if everyone wanted to. People would die. The transition takes preparation.”
And there are a lot of people who just don’t want to make that transition, he said.
“We have a few people with inordinate power who actively want to continue expanding fossil fuels,” he said. “They are the main beneficiaries of extractive capitalism; billionaires, politicians, CEOs, lobbyists and bankers. And the few people who want to stop those powerful people haven’t figured out how to get enough power to do so.”
Kalmus said he was not a big fan of setting a global temperature threshold to begin with.
“For me it’s excruciatingly clear that every molecule of fossil fuel CO2 or methane humanity adds to the atmosphere makes irreversible global heating that much worse, like a planet-sized ratchet turning molecule by molecule,” he said. “I think the target framing lends itself to a cycle of procrastination and failure and target moving.”
Meanwhile, climate impacts will continue to worsen into the future, he said.
“There is no upper bound, until either we choose to end fossil fuels or until we simply aren’t organized enough anymore as a civilization to burn much fossil fuel,” he said. “I think it’s time for the movement to get even more radical. Stopping fossil-fueled global heating is a life-or-death task for humanity and the planet, just most people haven’t realized it yet.”
Bob Berwyn an Austria-based reporter who has covered climate science and international climate policy for more than a decade. Previously, he reported on the environment, endangered species and public lands for several Colorado newspapers, and also worked as editor and assistant editor at community newspapers in the Colorado Rockies.
In 2017, the Brazilian journalist Eliane Brum moved from São Paulo to a small city in the Amazon. Her new book vividly uncovers how the rainforest is illegally seized and destroyed.
In August 2017 Eliane Brum, one of Brazil’s best-known journalists, moved from the great metropolis of São Paulo to Altamira, a small, violence-plagued city along the Xingu River in the Amazon. Brum worked for the country’s most respected newspaper, Folha de São Paulo, as well as other smaller news outlets, where she was known for a column called The Life No One Sees, about lives that are usually “reduced to a footnote so tiny it almost slides off the page.” She regularly embedded for long periods of time with those who had no obvious reason to appear in a newspaper: a retired school lunch lady who is slowly dying of cancer, a baggage handler who dreams of taking a flight one day.
Born to Italian immigrants in Brazil, Brum was a single, teenage mother when she began working as a journalist in Florianópolis, a midsize beach city in the south. She wrote news coverage, several nonfiction books, and a novel, and codirected three documentaries. During her time in São Paulo, after covering urban Brazil for decades, she decided that the biggest story—not just in the country, but in the world—was in the rainforest. Her new book’s subtitle is “The Amazon as the Center of the World.” The book is about her move, what pulled her to Altamira, and what she found there—her attempt to radically remake her life, which she calls “reforesting” herself.
About three quarters of the Amazonian population live in towns and cities. Altamira—a city in the state of Pará, nearly twice as large as Texas—is not beautiful, it is not picturesque, it is not pleasant. Though the waters of the Xingu River used to run clear, it is now not anyone’s idea of an idyllic rainforest outpost. Once a Jesuit mission, it is now a 100,000-strong city of hulking Land Rovers with tinted windows threatening to mow down those poor or reckless enough to walk in the street. It has the dubious distinction of being among Brazil’s most violent cities, worse than Rio de Janeiro, with its famous street crime, where I was scolded within an inch of my life by an elderly stranger for leaving apartment keys and cash folded into a towel on the beach while I went for a solo swim.
Altamira is territory of the grileiros—whom Brum’s translator, Diane Whitty, glosses as “land grabbers”—and their henchmen. Worth the price of admission is Brum’s detailed explanation of their particular technique of seizing and destroying the Amazon: the grileiros hire private militias to drive out Indigenous peoples, along with anyone else who lives on public preserves in the forest; chop down hardwood trees (illegally—but who is to tell in such a remote area?); and then set the rest on fire. Once that patch of the Amazon is burned, grileiros bring in cattle or plant soybeans to solidify their claim, as well as to turn a profit beyond the value of the stolen land. At the local level, corrupt officials bow to or directly work with the grileiros.The noncorrupt rightly fear them. At the national level, Brazilians have neither the resources nor the will to do much to stop them. Grileiros are, Brum writes with a flourish, “key to understanding the destruction of the rainforest, yesterday, today, always.”
The fires that spread in the Amazon in 2019 and so horrified those of us watching abroad on tiny screens were unusually large, but not unusual in any other way. The Amazon burns continuously in fires set by those working for grileiros,even now, after Jair Bolsonaro, who was elected president in 2018 on a platform of explicit support for the grileiros (his enthusiasm for murdering the rainforest earned him the nickname Captain Chainsaw), was voted out of office. The feverish pace of deforestation of the Bolsonaro years has slowed, dropping by 33.6 percent during the first six months after Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva—known to all as Lula—was inaugurated president for his third term in 2023. But less has changed than those of us rooting for the survival of planet Earth might like: the local dynamics, the destructive ways of making money from the rainforest, the permissiveness and lawlessness have remained the same.
Over the past fifty years, an estimated 17 percent of the Amazon has been turned into cropland or cattle pasture. Many scientists warn that, at around 20 or 25 percent deforestation, the Amazon could reach a tipping point, at which the poetically named “flying rivers” that recycle water vapor from the forest into rain in other areas of South America would cease to fly. Huge areas of the rainforest would turn to scrubby savanna, possibly over only a few decades, with potentially catastrophic effects, like severe droughts in places as far away as the western United States.
Heriberto Araújo, a Spanish journalist who has covered China and Latin America for Agence France-Presse and the Mexican news agency Notimex, among others, wrote in his recent book Masters of the Lost Land1 that when he traveled the Trans-Amazonian Highway past Altamira and deeper into the state of Pará, he saw not the thick vegetation of rainforest but rolling pastures and fields of soybeans:
While I had vaguely hoped to see a wild jaguar—a beast formerly so common in these forests that pioneers, unafraid, had even domesticated some specimens and treated them like pets—I was disappointed; the sole animal in sight was the humpbacked, floppy-eared, glossy white Nelore cow, the ultimate conqueror of the frontier.
Visitors in the nineteenth century described the Amazon as a wall of sound, loud with the bellows of red howler monkeys and the calls of birds and frogs. Now large areas are silent but for the rustling of cows’ tails as they slap flies—except where chainsaws grate against the remaining trees.
The subject of Brum’s book is not the rainforest itself but the human beings who live in it, logging, burning, farming, gathering, tending, replanting. An estimated 30 million people live in the Amazon. This sounds wrong to some outsiders: Apart from Indigenous groups, shouldn’t the Amazon be empty of humans, the better to leave the plants and animals in peace? (Some go so far as to argue that even the Indigenous should be displaced to cities, echoing anti-Native conservationist ideas throughout history and around the world, including in the US.)
But Brum distinguishes between the human residents of the Amazon who harm their environment, like the grileiros and big cattle, oil, and timber,and those who make a less damaging living from farming, gathering, or engaging in renewable or smaller-scale extraction. The latter group, many of whom were driven out by huge development projects like dams, mourn the trees and fish and fruit. Brum thinks that this group should have the right to stay. Her book is an attempt to be more like them, to get up close with those who have merged with the rainforest in a way that she seeks to emulate, and then to try to convey to outsiders what she has heard and felt and learned—with all its sweat and noise and discomfort. She confesses that the “book harbors the desire to make the Amazon a personal matter for those reading it.”
Brum is a useful guide to the people of the Amazon, from the Yanomami in and around Altamira and the “pioneers” who first brought in the cows to the hired guns and the workers who today clear the forest and tend cattle and soy for little or no pay. Some grileiros are small-time cattle rustlers or heads of neo-Pentecostal churches preaching the gospel of prosperity. The most powerful “don’t live in the Amazon or get their hands dirty” at all; they are members of the country’s one percent, from São Paulo, Minas Gerais, and Rio Grande do Sul. “Right now, while I’m writing and you’re reading,” she says, “they might be playing polo or listening to the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra.”
Most victims of the Amazon’s many murders are workers who demand back wages or other rights, activists who demand land for the landless, and foreign or local Yanomami environmental defenders. In 2005 an American-born nun named Dorothy Stang, who was supporting the poor in their efforts to defend land against ranchers so that they could earn a living extracting forest products without cutting down the trees, was killed on the orders of a local cattleman.
The term grileiro derives from the Portuguese word for “cricketer,” because back in the 1970s, Brum writes,
the men used to consummate their fraud by placing new sheets of paper and live crickets in boxes where the insects…produced excrement that yellowed the documents and made them look more believably like old land titles.
Grileiros worked with lawyers and corrupt civil servants who helped authenticate the fake papers: a bribe to officials registering deeds made the title official. Unlike homesteading in the United States, which was also often made possible by fraudulent claims, land grabs in the Amazon are ongoing. In Brazil, scattered notaries public, rather than a centralized registry, oversee land titles, leaving the door wide open to fraud and corruption. The researcher and journalist Maurício Torres found in 2009 that the municipality of São Félix do Xingu, in Pará, would have to be three stories high to make space for all the titles registered at the land deed offices.
This whole set of flora and fauna—cows, soybeans, grileiros—is part of the long story of what in Brazil is called “colonization.” That word, as in other Latin American countries, refers not to overseas colonies but to projects that fill out the population in valuable hinterlands. Since Brazil gained its independence from Portugal in 1822, the country has been preoccupied with keeping control over the Amazon. Brazil claims the largest portion of the rainforest, but it spills over national borders into Peru and Colombia, with smaller portions held by five other nations, as well as 3,344 separate acknowledged Indigenous territories. Beyond symbolizing natural majesty, not to mention mystery, in the world’s imagination, the Amazon represents wealth. Ten percent of all species live there, and the Amazon River, with over a thousand tributaries, holds a fifth of the planet’s fresh water.
The word “colonization” in Brazil once had the sort of positive connotation that “exploration” and “westward expansion” did to North American ears. The violent process still occupies a place among the country’s founding myths: bandeirantes (literally “flag carriers”) are honored with statues all over Brazil. During the colonial period bandeirantes cleared and settled the areas around São Paulo, then explored the interior, pushing land claims well beyond what had been allotted to the Portuguese in their 1494 treaty with the Spanish. In the eighteenth century they set off a gold rush. To grab more land for Brazil, the bandeirantes organized sneak attacks on Indigenous villages and enslaved captives. Their actual and spiritual heirs went on to slaughter Indigenous people and clear lands around the country for centuries.
After independence, government officials promoted the settlement of more remote areas in the hope of encouraging smallholding farms, not unlike the Jeffersonian ideal for early North America. Who might those farmers be? Not Indigenous peoples. Certainly not Black Brazilians, since slavery lasted for six and a half decades after independence, later than any other country in the Americas. (During the colonial period, Brazilians built an economy of sugar plantations worked by enslaved Africans—over 40 percent of all Africans forcibly brought to the New World disembarked in Brazil.) The land was for whiter Brazilians.
Europeans were shipped in, too, though mostly as workers. As in similar schemes to attract European migrants to Argentina, Venezuela, and elsewhere in Latin America, Brazilian officials in the state of São Paulo engaged in an explicit program of branqueamento,or “whitening,” just as Brazilian slaves became free. They offered free transatlantic boat passage to European immigrants, even sending agents over to impoverished northern Italian port cities to sign up the likes of Brum’s great-great-grandparents.
When Brum was still new to Altamira, she went shopping in a supermarket with an activist who worked on land conflicts, and ran into a tall white stranger. Exchanging pleasantries, she realized they were from the same part of southern Brazil, where people proudly refer to themselves as gaúchos, a kind of Brazilian cowboy. Brum had been proud of this heritage, too. After the man left, the activist told her, “He’s a grileiro.” “Still naive, I replied, ‘Gosh, a gaúcho, how disgraceful.’ Then he explained, ‘You have to understand that gaúchos are known as the Amazon’s locusts.’”
While colonization schemes “integrated” the Amazon into the rest of Brazil, the result was not sweet little farms but a thriving rubber economy. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, men from northeastern Brazil, including many recently manumitted slaves, worked throughout the Amazon as tappers on a freelance basis—affixing drains to trees to siphon off latex, the basis of wild rubber, which was at that time an important raw material for the global industrial revolution. (In 1928 Henry Ford, in an attempt to vertically integrate his car empire, briefly opened a rubber plantation and model city in the Amazon called Fordlândia.)
Escaping harsh work conditions and debts to predatory traders, many of these migrant workers vanished into the forest and settled, intermarrying with Indigenous people and quilombolas,the descendants of runaway slaves. Brum writes about the difficulty of characterizing this group, called the beiradeiros—literally, those who live on the edge of the river—to outsiders. She explains that they are the “third people” of the forest, neither quilombolas nor Indigenous. “The beiradeiros fish and hunt, crack Brazil nuts, pick açaí, plant fields, make flour, sometimes raise chickens,” she writes.
They might tap rubber if the price is good, prospect a little when there’s a new gold strike. They hunted a lot of jaguars and oncillas in the past because whites wanted the hides.
Brum opposes the conservationist groups who would oust the beiradeiros in the name of preserving the ecosystem: “Humans—this generic term invented to conceal asymmetries—are not a threat to the forest; rather, some humans are. Others interact with it, transform it, and even plant it.” Since before the “colonization” of the Amazon, even before the Portuguese disembarked in what is now Brazil, Indigenous peoples of the region have contributed to the richness of the soil and density of the forest cover by cultivating sweet potatoes, peanuts, cacao, manioc, and squash.
Brazil’s military dictatorship, in power from 1964 to 1985, oversaw a new colonization scheme in the Amazon that was much like the old one, but with more chainsaws, more funding, and more paranoia. Their colossal development plan involved displacing almost one million people—rubber tappers, farmers, Indigenous people—to exploit natural resources and build infrastructure like the Trans-Amazonian Highway, a 2,500-mile road connecting the whole basin from east to west. They also offered tax breaks, special lines of credit, and cheap land to those who would relocate to the Amazon from elsewhere in the country. On September 27, 1972, the dictator Emílio Garrastazu Médici traveled to Altamira to cut the ribbon on the project and claimed that it solved two problems: “men without land in the northeast and land without men in the Amazon.” The slogan of the project became “a land without men for men without land.” It is no accident that this sounds much like the Zionist phrase “a land without a people for a people without a land”—both draw on the concept of terra nullius (nobody’s land) that has given a legal veneer to the seizure of land around the world.
There was widespread fear in the government that foreign powers, particularly the US, had designs on the Amazon, as well as cold war concerns that guerrilla fighters might use the remote rainforest as a base. “Occupy so as not to surrender” was one not-so-subtle slogan. There were some guerrilla fighters active in Pará, but they were executed upon capture in the 1970s. After spending some time in Brazil, I was startled to learn that many people still believe that outsiders—now often the European Union and the United Nations—wish to invade, steal, or prohibit Brazilians from profiting from the Amazon, or even from entering it, by declaring it an international reserve.
As president, Bolsonaro floated the idea that international nonprofits had set the enormous 2019 blazes because they “lost money.” Later, when questioned by foreign reporters about his evidence-free assertions about international conspiracies to take over the Amazon, he said, with characteristic indelicacy, “Brazil is the virgin that every foreign pervert wants to get their hands on.” This may be a case of projection—the most successful national land grabs in the Amazon have been by Brazil, which took Acre from Bolivia and a piece of what is now Amapá from French Guiana. The historian Barbara Weinstein recalls that Itamar Franco, Brazil’s president after Fernando Collor de Mello was impeached for corruption in 1992, referred to US organizations that complained about destruction in the Amazon as “palefaces.” The implication was that North Americans slaughtered their Indigenous populations and stole and settled their land. Why shouldn’t Brazilians do the same? Bolsonaro’s views are crude but not new.
Colonization involved the massacre of whole Indigenous settlements: a truth commission report later found that over the course of the military dictatorship, government officials killed at least 8,350 Indigenous people. It also turned out to be an economic disaster for everyone other than cattle ranchers and grileiros, costing billions of dollars, and to this day the infrastructure is plagued by mudslides and flooding. Between 1978 and 1988 the Amazon was deforested by the equivalent of the whole state of Connecticut each year. Ideas of environmental protection have certainly evolved, but the destruction of the Amazon caused an outcry even at the time. The environmentalist Chico Mendes, head of the rubber tappers’ union, opposed the destruction of the Amazon, saying the government should demarcate “extractive reserves” for people to use the rainforest, but cautiously and in sustainable ways. (Dorothy Stang, the murdered nun, echoed this approach.) Mendes was assassinated by a rancher in 1988. In 1989 the prominent Kayapó leader Raoni Metuktire toured the world warning of climate collapse:
If you continue the burn-offs, the wind will increase, the Sun will grow very hot, the Earth too. All of us, not just the Indigenous, will be unable to breathe. If you destroy the forest, we will all be silenced.
In 1988, during the transition to democracy, the new Brazilian constitution granted Indigenous people “their original rights to the lands they traditionally occupy,” making it the state’s responsibility to demarcate these lands and ensure respect for property. Over the next several decades, 690 Indigenous preserves—13 percent of the national territory, much of it in the Amazon—were cordoned off. In addition to representing (insufficient) reparations for past harms, the preserves appear to be by far the best option to prevent deforestation: Indigenous peoples have proved themselves to be the world’s best protectors of the forest in study after scientific study.
Last September, Brazil’s Supreme Court blocked efforts by agribusiness-supported politicians to mandate that groups were only entitled to land they physically occupied when the 1988 constitution was signed, even though many communities had been expelled from their lands during the dictatorship. After nine of eleven judges sided with Indigenous peoples, a member of the Pitaguarí group told news outlets about the celebrations outside the courthouse:
We’re happy and we cry because we know that it’s only with demarcated territory, with protected Indigenous territory, that we’ll be able to stop climate change from happening and preserve our biome.
Then agribusiness struck back. Its allies in the National Congress quickly amended part of the legislation that the Supreme Court had found unconstitutional. Lula vetoed the new bill, but Congress overturned the veto, reinstating the absurd rule, at least until the question returns to the Supreme Court.
Though technically 13 percent of the country’s land is protected for Indigenous groups, in practice people living on these preserves—Indigenous, Black, and a combination of the two groups—are often forced out by violence or extreme poverty. The latest available numbers show 36 percent of Brazil’s Indigenous people living in cities. The Covid-19 pandemic fell hard on Indigenous Brazilians, killing many of the elders who led resistance movements or were among the last to speak their languages.
Before he was elected president, Bolsonaro’s anti-Indigenous views were already notorious. He lamented that Brazil had been less “efficient” than the North Americans, “who exterminated the Indians.” He called the demarcation of Yanomami territory “high treason” and said, “I’m not getting into this nonsense of defending land for Indians,” especially in mineral-rich areas. Brum writes that Bolsonaro “used the virus as an unexpected biological weapon in his plan to destroy original peoples” by refusing to make vaccines available or implement public health measures as it became clear that the virus’s victims were disproportionately Indigenous.
For many years Brum resisted writing directly about Indigenous groups, including the Yanomami who occupy the area nearest to Altamira. She felt she didn’t know enough, worried that she didn’t speak the language. After moving to Altamira, she got over her reticence. Some of the most intriguing quotations in her book are from the Yanomami shaman and diplomat Davi Kopenawa, who refers to outsiders to the forest as “commodities people” or “forest eaters.” He describes our books as “paper skin” where words are imprisoned, but nevertheless agreed to write one, as told in Yanomami to a French anthropologist named Bruce Albert. I followed Brum’s book into Kopenawa’s The Falling Sky (2013),2 thinking I would read just a few sections, and then tore through its six hundred pages. “I gave you my story so that you would answer those who ask themselves what the inhabitants of the forest think,” he tells Albert at the beginning of the book. Kopenawa hopes that outsiders can come to understand the following:
The Yanomami are other people than us, yet their words are right and clear…. Their forest is beautiful and silent. They were created there and have lived in it without worry since the beginning of time. Their thought follows other paths than that of merchandise.
In quoting Kopenawa extensively, Brum wants the reader to see that everyone outside the Amazon, not just gaúchos, are the locusts. Through our consumption patterns—the voracious global appetite for red meat, construction materials, new furniture, new paper created from pulped trees—most of us are preying on the Amazon and by extension on people like the Yanomami. In a place like Altamira, Brum writes, the “chain of relations is short or even nonexistent. Here it’s impossible to play innocent, or play innocent so well that we believe it ourselves, as you can do in cities like São Paulo or New York.” Brum could have included a bit more information from further up the supply chain—many of the “forest eaters” are not individual consumers but agribusiness firms unchained in Brazil, where regulations often go unenforced—but the point stands.
Brum finds plenty to criticize in Lula’s mixed record on environmental issues, and reserves her sharpest words for his support of the Belo Monte dam. The dam is a hydroelectric power plant built on the Xingu River, a project that she wrote about with rage and at length in a previous book, The Collector of Leftover Souls (2019). The fifth largest in the world, the plant was first dreamed up by the military dictatorship, but fiercely opposed by inhabitants of the Amazon because the plans required diverting rivers, destroying animal habitats, flooding huge sections of the rainforest, and displacing at least tens of thousands of people. Construction of a slightly modified plan went ahead anyway during Lula’s first term and was completed in 2019, with builders digging more earth than was moved to construct the Panama Canal. Critics say that even aside from large-scale environmental destruction, the engineering of the plant meant it would never produce the amount of energy originally promised.
Lula is of course better on Amazon policy than Bolsonaro. So is a potato, or a child. But like other Latin American leftists, he paid for extensive social spending, especially successful programs fighting malnutrition and hunger, with income from high-priced global commodities. Producing and exporting these commodities, like soybeans, takes a high environmental toll. Nonetheless, there is reason for modest optimism. His environment and climate change minister, Marina Silva, is an extraordinary woman who was born in a rubber-tapping region of the Amazon and became an environmental activist alongside Chico Mendes. But the National Congress is still dominated by agribusiness and with many earlier land grabs already laundered into legality with false paperwork, one of the most effective strategies has been not taking back stolen land, but slowing deforestation and ongoing land theft in less frequently claimed parts of the Amazon.
Though she lived a daring life even before her move to the Amazon, Brum has written a semi-memoir surprisingly low on memoir, heavy on close readings of other people, and appealingly self-deprecating. “Any journalist who makes themself out to be a great adventurer is simply foolish,” she writes.
Just live alongside the pilots and bowmen of Amazonian motor canoes and you’ll retreat into your inescapable insignificance. They can spot tracajá eggs where I see only sand, pointy rocks where I see only water, rain where I see only blue. I could barely manage to hang my hammock in a tree at bedtime.
She points out what should be obvious: that those best equipped to care for and report on the Amazon are those who are native to it and know it best.
Her projects in the Amazon now go well beyond journalism, extending into activism. She writes that her first marriage did not endure the move to Altamira, and she later married a British journalist named Jonathan Watts, who covers the environment for The Guardian.The couple, along with four other journalists, founded the Rainforest Journalism Fund in 2018 to promote reporting initially in the Amazon, and then in the Congo Basin and Southeast Asia as well. Brum and Watts have since set up an experimental 1.2-acre reforestation scheme in Altamira, on lands that had been devastated by burning for cattle grazing.
In El País in 2014, Brum interviewed the Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, who told her, “The Indigenous are experts in the end of the world.” Brum’s recommendation—really, her plea—is that as the planet warms and the Amazon turns to savanna, outsiders “listen to the people who have been called barbarians…. Listen [out of] an ultimate survival instinct.” She writes:
Perhaps, if we are fortunate, those whose lives have so often been destroyed by those who label themselves civilized will agree to teach us to live after the end of the world.
By David Marchese Photo Illustration by Bráulio Amado
With the 2021 publication of his unsettling book, “How to Blow Up a Pipeline,” Andreas Malm established himself as a leading thinker of climate radicalism. The provocatively titled manifesto, which, to be clear, does not actually provide instructions for destroying anything, functioned both as a question — why has climate activism remained so steadfastly peaceful in the face of minimal results? — and as a call for the escalation of protest tactics like sabotage. The book found an audience far beyond that of texts typically published by relatively obscure Marxist-influenced Swedish academics, earning thoughtful coverage in The New Yorker, The Economist, The Nation, The New Republicand a host of other decidedly nonradical publications, including this one. (In another sign of the book’s presumed popular appeal, it waseven adapted into a well-reviewed movie thriller.) Malm’s follow-up, “Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown,” written with Wim Carton and scheduled to be published this year, examines the all-consuming pursuit of fossil-fuel profits and what the authors identify as the highly dubious and hugely dangerous new justifications for that pursuit. But, says Malm, who is 46, “the hope is that humanity is not going to let everything go down the drain without putting up a fight.”
It’s hard for me to think of a realm outside of climate where mainstream publications would be engaging with someone, like you, who advocates political violence.1Why are people open to this conversation?
If you know something about the climate crisis, this means that you are aware of the desperation that people feel. It is quite likely that you feel it yourself.With this desperation comes an openness to the idea that what we’ve done so far isn’t enough. But the logic of the situation fundamentally drives this conversation: All attempts to rein in this problem have failed miserably. Which means that, virtually by definition, we have to try something more than we’ve tried.
How confident are you that when you open the door to political violence, it stays at the level of property and not people? You’ve written about the need to be careful, but the emotions that come with violence are not careful emotions.
Political history is replete with movements that have conducted sabotage without taking the next step. But the risk is there. One driver of that risk is that the climate crisis itself is exacerbating all the time. It’s hard-wired to get worse. So people might well get more desperate. Now, in the current situation, in every instance that I know of, climate movements that experiment with sabotage steer clear of deliberately targeting people. We might smash things, which people are doing here and there,2 but no one is seriously considering that you should get a gun and shoot people. Everyone knows that would be completely disastrous. The point that’s important to make is that the reason that people contemplate escalation is that there are no risk-free options left.
I know you’re saying historically this is not the case, but it’s hard to think that deaths don’t become inevitable if there is more sabotage.
Sure, if you have a thousand pipeline explosions per year, if it takes on that extreme scale. But we are some distance from that, unfortunately.
Don’t say “unfortunately.”
Well, I want sabotage to happen on a much larger scale than it does now. I can’t guarantee that it won’t come with accidents. But what do I know? I haven’t personally blown up a pipeline, and I can’t foretell the future.
The prospect of even accidental violence against people —
But the thing we need to keep in mind is that existing pipelines, new pipelines, new infrastructure for extracting fossil fuels are not potentially, possibly — they arekilling people as we speak. The more saturated the atmosphere is with CO2, putting more CO2 into the atmosphere causes more destruction and death. In Libya in September, in the city of Derna, you had thousands of people killed in floods in one night. Scientists could conclude that global warming made these floods 50 times as likely as if there hadn’t been such warming.3 We need to start seeing these people as victims of the violence of the climate crisis. In the light of this, the idea of attacking infrastructure and closing down new pipelines is a disarmament. It’s about taking down a machine that actually kills people.
I’m curious: How do you communicate with your kids4about climate?
I’m not sure that I’ve had any deliberate plan, but it has been inevitable, with my 9-year-old at least, that we’ve had conversations.
Do you anticipate having the conversation where you explain the radical nature of your ideas?
Well, yeah. Both of them have watched the film, “How to Blow Up a Pipeline.”5
Your 4-year-old?
Yes. There were a couple of scenes that stayed with them, particularly when people were wounded. They found this fascinating. They know that their father is a little politically crazy, if I can put it that way.
Generally we teach kids that violence or breaking people’s things is bad.Do you feel you can honestly give your kids the same message?
I hope that I communicate through my parenting that generally you shouldn’t break things. But I hope that they get the impression that I consider there to be exceptions to this rule. My 4-year-old, for instance, when we were biking around Malmo,6 where we live, he would be on the lookout for S.U.V.s. He knows these are the bad cars. I think they have an awareness of the tactic of deflating S.U.V. tires.7
Is there not a risk that smashing things would cause a backlash that would actually impede progress on climate?
I fundamentally disagree with the idea that there is progress happening and that we might ruin it by escalating. In 2022, we had the largest windfall of profits in the fossil-fuel industry8 ever. These profits are reinvested into expanded production of fossil fuels. The progress that people talk about is often cast in terms of investment in renewables and expansion in the capacity of solar and wind power around the world. However, that is not a transition. That is an addition of one kind of energy on top of another. It doesn’t matter how many solar panels we build if we also keep building more coal power plants, more oil pipelines, and on that crucial metric there simply is no progress. I struggle to see how anyone could interpret the trends as pointing in the right direction. Now, on the question of what kind of reaction would we get from society if we as a climate movement radicalized: There might be more repression of the movement. There might be more aggressive defense of fossil-fuel interests. We also see signs that radical forms of climate protest alienate popular audiences. But the kind of tactic that mostly pisses people off, and I’m talking about the European context, is random targeting of commuters by means of road blockades. Sabotage of particular installations for fossil-fuel extraction can gain more support from people because these actions make sense. The target is obviously the source of the problem, and it doesn’t necessarily hurt ordinary people in their daily lives. We have to be careful about not doing things that alienate the target audience, which is ordinary working people.
Don’t you think, with companies as wealthy as the oil giants, if activists smash their stuff, they’ll just fix it and get back to business?
Here’s a big problem that we deal with quite extensively in the “Overshoot” book: stranded assets. ExxonMobil and Aramco and these giants exude this worry that a transition would destroy their capital and that this shift could happen quickly. So in this context, the rationale of sabotage is to bring home the message to these companies: Yes, your assets are at risk of destruction. When something happens that makes the threat of stranded assets credible, investors will suddenly realize, there’s a real risk that if I invest a lot of money, I might lose everything.
Explain the term “overshoot.”
The simplest definition of “overshoot” is that you shoot past the limits that you have set for global warming. So you go over 1.5 or 2 degrees. But the term has come to mean something more in climate science and policy discourse, which is that you can go over and then go back down. So you shoot past 1.5 or 2, but then you return to 1.5 or 2, primarily by means of carbon-dioxide removal. I think this is extremely implausible. But the idea is that you can exceed a temperature limit but respect it at a later point by rolling out technologies for taking it down.
And your argument is that overshoot just provides a cover for business as usual?
Yes. What’s happening now is that you see ExxonMobil or Occidental or ADNOC9 — these companies are at the forefront of expanding DAC10 capacity. What Al Jaber11 is talking about all the time is that the problem isn’t fossil fuels; the problem is emissions. So we can continue to have fossil fuels; we’re just going to take down the CO2 that we emit by DAC. It isn’t a reality. It’s like an ideological promise that we’re going to be able to clean up the mess while continuing to create the same mess.
A few minutes ago, you said you’ve never blown up a pipeline. If that’s what you think is necessary, why haven’t you?
I have engaged in as much militant climate activism as I have had access to in my activist communities and contexts. I’ve done things that I can’t tell you or that I wouldn’t tell others publicly. I live my life in Malmo, pretty isolated from activist communities. Let’s put it this way: If I were part of a group where something like blowing up a pipeline was perceived as a tactic that could be useful for our struggle, then I would gladly participate. But this is not where I am in my life.
I don’t want to encourage you, but if people did only the activism that was congruent with where they were at in their life, hardly anybody who lives a comfortable life would do anything.
Like I said, I’ve participated in things that I can’t tell you about because they’ve been illegal and they’ve been militant. I’ve done it recently. But I can do that only as part of a collective of people who do something that they have decided on together. We shouldn’t think of activism as something that is invented out of thin air, deduced from abstract principles, and then you just shoot off and do something crazy. I can’t tell you what things I have done, but the things that I do and that any other climate activist should be doing cannot be an individual project.
Greta Thunberg went by herself and sat in front of a building instead of going to school.12
Sure, sure, sure, and she became the person she became thanks to the millions who joined her. Maybe I should do something similar.
In “Overshoot,” you write this about the very wealthy: “There is no escaping the conclusion that the worst mass killers in this rapidly warming world are the billionaires, merely by dint of their lifestyles.” That doesn’t feel like a bathetic overstatement whenwe live in a world of terrorist violence and Putin turning Ukraine into a charnel house? Why is that a useful way of framing the problem?
Precisely for the reason I tried to outline previously, which is that spewing CO2 into the atmosphere at an excessive scale — and when it comes to luxury emissions, it is completely excessive — is an act that leads to the death of people.
But by that logic, unless we live a carbon-neutral lifestyle, we should all be looking in the mirror and saying, I am a killer.
I don’t live a zero-carbon lifestyle. No one who lives in a capitalist society can do so. But the people on top, they are the ones who have power when it comes to investment. Are they going to invest the money in fossil fuels or in renewables? The overwhelming decision they make is to invest it in fossil fuels. They belong to a class that shapes the structure, and in their own private consumption habits, they engage in completely extravagant acts of combustion of fossil fuels.13 On the level of private morals:Do I practice what I preach? I try to avoid flying. I don’t have a car. I should be vegan, but I’m just a vegetarian. I’m not claiming to be any climate angel in my private consumption, and that’s problematic. But I don’t think that is the issue — that each of us in the middle strata or working class in advanced capitalist countries, through our private consumption choices, decide what’s going to happen with this society. This is not how it works.
We live in representative democracies where certain liberties are respected. We vote for the policies and the people we want to represent us. And if we don’t get the things we want, it doesn’t give us license to then say, “We’re now engaging in destructive behavior.” Right? Either we’re against political violence or not. We can’t say we’re for it when it’s something we care about and against it when it’s something we think is wrong.
Of course we can. Why not?
That is moral hypocrisy.
I disagree.
Why?
The idea that if you object to your enemy’s use of a method, you therefore also have to reject your own use of this method would lead to absurd conclusions. The far right is very good at running electoral campaigns. Should we thereby conclude that we shouldn’t run electoral campaigns? This goes for political violence too, unless you’re a pacifist and you reject every form of political violence — that’s a reasonably coherent philosophical position. Slavery was a system of violence. The Haitian revolution was the violent overthrow of that system. It is never the case that you defeat an enemy by renouncing every kind of method that enemy is using.
ButI’m specifically thinking about our liberal democracy, however debased it may be. How do you rationalize advocacy for violence within what are supposed to be the ideals of our system?
Imagine you have a Trump victory in the next election — doesn’t seem unimaginable — and you get a climate denialist back in charge of the White House and he rolls back whatever good things President Biden has done. What should the climate movement do then? Should it accept this as the outcome of a democratic election and protest in the mildest of forms? Or should it radicalize and consider something like property destruction? I admit that this is a difficult question, but I imagine that a measured response to it would need to take into account how democracy works in a country like the United States and whether allowing fossil-fuel companies to wreck the planet because they profit from it can count as a form of democracy and should therefore be respected.
Could you give me a reason to live?14
What do you mean?
Your work is crushing.But I have optimism about the human project.
I’m not an optimist about the human project.
So give me a reason to live.
Well, here’s where we enter the virgin territories of metaphysics.
Those are my favorite territories.
Wonderful.
I’m not joking.
Yeah, I’m not sure that I have the qualifications to give people advice about reasons to live. My daily affective state is one of great despair about the incredible destructive forces at work in this world — not only at the level of climate. What has been going on in the Middle East just adds to this feeling of destructive forces completely out of control. The situation in the world, as far as I can tell, is incredibly bleak. So how do we live with what we know about the climate crisis? Sometimes I think that the meaning of life is to not give up, to keep the resistance going even though the forces stacked against you are overwhelmingly strong. This often requires some kind of religious conviction, because sometimes it seems irrational.
I think all you need to do is look at your children.
Yes, but I have to admit to some kind of cognitive dissonance, because, rationally, when you think about children and their future, you have to be dismal. Children are fundamentally a source of joy, and psychologically you want to keep them that way. I try to keep my children in the category of the nonapocalyptic. I’m quite happy to go and swim with my son and be in that moment and not think, Ah, 30 years from now he’s going to lie dead on some inundated beach. You know what I mean?
Which of your arguments are you most unsure of?
I cannot claim to have a good explanation for what is essentially a mystery, namely that humanity is allowing the climate catastrophe to spiral on. One of my personal intellectual journeys in recent years has been psychoanalysis. Once you start looking into the psychic dimensions of a problem like the climate crisis, you have to open yourself to the fundamental difficulty in understanding what’s happening.
Is it possible for you to summarize your psychoanalytic understanding of the climate crisis?
Not simply, because it’s so complex. On the far right, you see this aggressive defense of cars and fossil fuels that verges on a desire for destruction, which of course is part of Freud’s latent theory of the two categories of drives: eros and thanatos.15 Another fundamental category in the psychic dimension of the climate crisis is denial. Denial is as central to the development of the climate crisis as the greenhouse effect.
What about you, psychoanalytically speaking?
I have my weekly therapy on Thursday.
But what’s your deal?
You mean in my private life?
Yeah.
On a deeper level, the point for the psychoanalysis is that you go back to your childhood and try to process your relation to your parents and how they have constituted you. Do you really want me to go there?
Yes.
I have to try to figure out how this ties in with my climate activism. I guess this is some sort of a superego part of it: a strong sense of duty or obligation; that I have to try to do what I can to intervene in this situation. That’s a very strong affective mechanism. For instance, I constantly give up on an intellectual project that would be far more satisfying, a nerdy historical project,16 because I feel that I cannot with good conscience do this when the world is on fire.
But I’m asking what caused your impulses.
Now we’re into the deep psychoanalytic stuff. I had a vicious Oedipal conflict with my father. One way that this came to express itself was that in the preteen years, I clashed with my father — even more violently during my teenage years. My way to defend myself against what I perceived as his tyranny was to become as proficient as he was in arguing and beat him in his own game by rhetorically defeating him. I think I did. I think he accepted that I’m his superior when it comes to writing and arguing. Psychoanalytically, of course, the things that I’ve continued to do can be understood as an extension of my formative rebellion against my authoritarian father in a classically Oedipal setting, if you see what I mean.17
I asked why you aren’t blowing up pipelines, and you gave this answer about how action has to happen in the context of a community and “Oh, but I have done very serious stuff” — there’s something fishy. You have actually engaged in property destruction? Or are you just scared of somebody calling you a hypocrite?
There are things that I have done when it comes to militant activism recently that I, as a matter of principle and political expediency, do not reveal. Part of the whole point of it is to not reveal it. Sure, someone could accuse me of being a hypocrite because I don’t offer evidence that I have done anything militant. But those close to me know. That’s good enough for me.
I also said, “Give me a reason to live.”
I will always remember this. No one ever asked me this before.
And I said that one of the reasons to keep going is kids. But you said their future is rationally going to be terrible. If you think your children’s future is going to be terrible, why keep going?
One of the arguments in this “Overshoot” book is that the technical possibilities are all there. It’s a matter of the political trends. This feeling that my kids will face a terrible future isn’t based on the idea that it’s impossible to save us by technical means. It’s just, to quote Walter Benjamin, the enemy has never ceased to be victorious18 — and it’s more victorious than ever. That’s how it feels.
Opening illustration: Source photograph by Jeremy Chan/Getty Images
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity from two conversations.
Notes
1. Just to be explicit about this: Malm does not endorse or advocate any political violence that targets people. His aim is violence against property.
2. To cite one example, last March in western France, thousands of people arrived at a site of a “megabasin” water reservoir for agricultural use and sabotaged a pump. The action was against what the protesters believe is water hoarding. Malm has been particularly influential in France, where the authorities have questioned arrested activists about their feelings on his work.
3. To reach this conclusion, scientists working with the World Weather Attribution research group employed computer simulations to compare weather events today, including the Syrian flooding, with the weather that was most likely to have occurred if the climate had not already warmed, as it has, by 1.2 degrees Celsius above the average preindustrial temperature.
4. I knew Malm had children because in setting up our discussions, he explained that we had to talk in the evening on Swedish time, after he had put his kids to bed.
5. The film, directed by Daniel Goldhaber, uses Malm’s book as a launching pad for a story about young radicals who plan to blow up a pipeline in Texas. From The Times’s review: “A truly radical film wouldn’t go out of its way to concoct sympathetic motives, or to keep its plotting so clean.”
6. Malm teaches at Lund University, near Malmo, where he’s an associate professor of human geography.
7. Malm was among a group of activists who used this protest tactic in Stockholm in 2007. Deflating S.U.V. tires in protest has not been uncommon in Europe. In 2022, the tires of roughly 900 S.U.V.s were deflated in a single night of coordinated protest, according to the protesters.
8. For 2022, the Saudi state-controlled Aramco reported a record profit of $161.1 billion; Exxon reported a record profit of $56 billion; BP reported a record profit of nearly $28 billion. (Full 2023 profits have not been reported yet.)
9. The Abu Dhabi National Oil Company.
10. Direct air capture, a technology to remove carbon dioxide from the air.
11. Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, the chief executive of ADNOC, who somewhat counterintuitively was president of the recent COP28 climate conference. (Where, it must be said, more than 200 countries agreed to a pact that calls for “transitioning away from fossil fuels.”) Al Jaber was criticized for saying, shortly before COP28, that “there is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phaseout of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5.”
12. In 2018, rather than go to school, Greta Thunberg, then 15, sat alone in front of the Swedish Parliament with a sign announcing that she was on a school strike for the climate. The act is widely credited for kicking off a global wave of peaceful climate activism.
13. According to a 2023 report by Oxfam, The Guardian and the Stockholm Environment Institute, the richest 1 percent of humanity is responsible for more carbon emissions than the poorest two-thirds. The report drew on data from 2019.
14. I just blurted this out. I don’t even think Malm’s pessimism is wrong, but I find it suffocating. People need hope.
15. In Freud’s writings, he argued that individuals wrestle with the desire to live, eros, and the desire to die, widely known as thanatos.
16. That project is about what Malm calls a “people’s histories of wilderness,” with a focus on how some have withdrawn “into the wild to get away from oppression and potentially fight back.”
17. Malm also wanted to point out the following: “My father and I have generally been on good terms and have become quite close in our worldview — with remaining differences — over the past decade or two.”
18. This is a paraphrase of a line from the visionary German-Jewish cultural critic’s 1940 essay “On the Concept of History.” Benjamin died from suicide that same year.
David Gruber began his almost impossibly varied career studying bluestriped grunt fish off the coast of Belize. He was an undergraduate, and his job was to track the fish at night. He navigated by the stars and slept in a tent on the beach. “It was a dream,” he recalled recently. “I didn’t know what I was doing, but I was performing what I thought a marine biologist would do.”
Gruber went on to work in Guyana, mapping forest plots, and in Florida, calculating how much water it would take to restore the Everglades. He wrote a Ph.D. thesis on carbon cycling in the oceans and became a professor of biology at the City University of New York. Along the way, he got interested in green fluorescent proteins, which are naturally synthesized by jellyfish but, with a little gene editing, can be produced by almost any living thing, including humans.
While working in the Solomon Islands, northeast of Australia, Gruber discovered dozens of species of fluorescent fish, including a fluorescent shark, which opened up new questions. What would a fluorescent shark look like to another fluorescent shark? Gruber enlisted researchers in optics to help him construct a special “shark’s eye” camera. (Sharks see only in blue and green; fluorescence, it turns out, shows up to them as greater contrast.) Meanwhile, he was also studying creatures known as comb jellies at the Mystic Aquarium, in Connecticut, trying to determine how, exactly, they manufacture the molecules that make them glow. This led him to wonder about the way that jellyfish experience the world. Gruber enlisted another set of collaborators to develop robots that could handle jellyfish with jellyfish-like delicacy.
“I wanted to know: Is there a way where robots and people can be brought together that builds empathy?” he told me.
In 2017, Gruber received a fellowship to spend a year at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. While there, he came across a book by a free diver who had taken a plunge with some sperm whales. This piqued Gruber’s curiosity, so he started reading up on the animals.
The world’s largest predators, sperm whales spend most of their lives hunting. To find their prey—generally squid—in the darkness of the depths, they rely on echolocation. By means of a specialized organ in their heads, they generate streams of clicks that bounce off any solid (or semi-solid) object. Sperm whales also produce quick bursts of clicks, known as codas, which they exchange with one another. The exchanges seem to have the structure of conversation.
One day, Gruber was sitting in his office at the Radcliffe Institute, listening to a tape of sperm whales chatting, when another fellow at the institute, Shafi Goldwasser, happened by. Goldwasser, a Turing Award-winning computer scientist, was intrigued. At the time, she was organizing a seminar on machine learning, which was advancing in ways that would eventually lead to ChatGPT. Perhaps, Goldwasser mused, machine learning could be used to discover the meaning of the whales’ exchanges.
“It was not exactly a joke, but almost like a pipe dream,” Goldwasser recollected. “But David really got into it.”
Gruber and Goldwasser took the idea of decoding the codas to a third Radcliffe fellow, Michael Bronstein. Bronstein, also a computer scientist, is now the DeepMind Professor of A.I. at Oxford.
“This sounded like probably the most crazy project that I had ever heard about,” Bronstein told me. “But David has this kind of power, this ability to convince and drag people along. I thought that it would be nice to try.”
Gruber kept pushing the idea. Among the experts who found it loopy and, at the same time, irresistible were Robert Wood, a roboticist at Harvard, and Daniela Rus, who runs M.I.T.’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Thus was born the Cetacean Translation Initiative—Project ceti for short. (The acronym is pronounced “setty,” and purposefully recalls seti, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.) ceti represents the most ambitious, the most technologically sophisticated, and the most well-funded effort ever made to communicate with another species.
“I think it’s something that people get really excited about: Can we go from science fiction to science?” Rus told me. “I mean, can we talk to whales?”
Sperm whales are nomads. It is estimated that, in the course of a year, an individual whale swims at least twenty thousand miles. But scattered around the tropics, for reasons that are probably squid-related, there are a few places the whales tend to favor. One of these is a stretch of water off Dominica, a volcanic island in the Lesser Antilles.
ceti has its unofficial headquarters in a rental house above Roseau, the island’s capital. The group’s plan is to turn Dominica’s west coast into a giant whale-recording studio. This involves installing a network of underwater microphones to capture the codas of passing whales. It also involves planting recording devices on the whales themselves—cetacean bugs, as it were. The data thus collected can then be used to “train” machine-learning algorithms.
The scientist David Gruber explains the mission of Project CETI, and what his team has learned about how whales communicate.
In July, I went down to Dominica to watch the ceti team go sperm-whale bugging. My first morning on the island, I met up with Gruber just outside Roseau, on a dive-shop dock. Gruber, who is fifty, is a slight man with dark curly hair and a cheerfully anxious manner. He was carrying a waterproof case and wearing a ceti T-shirt. Soon, several more members of the team showed up, also carrying waterproof cases and wearing ceti T-shirts. We climbed aboard an oversized Zodiac called ceti 2 and set off.
The night before, a tropical storm had raked the region with gusty winds and heavy rain, and Dominica’s volcanic peaks were still wreathed in clouds. The sea was a series of white-fringed swells. ceti 2 sped along, thumping up and down, up and down. Occasionally, flying fish zipped by; these remained aloft for such a long time that I was convinced for a while they were birds.
About two miles offshore, the captain, Kevin George, killed the engines. A graduate student named Yaly Mevorach put on a set of headphones and lowered an underwater mike—a hydrophone—into the waves. She listened for a bit and then, smiling, handed the headphones to me.
The most famous whale calls are the long, melancholy “songs” issued by humpbacks. Sperm-whale codas are neither mournful nor musical. Some people compare them to the sound of bacon frying, others to popcorn popping. That morning, as I listened through the headphones, I thought of horses clomping over cobbled streets. Then I changed my mind. The clatter was more mechanical, as if somewhere deep beneath the waves someone was pecking out a memo on a manual typewriter.
Mevorach unplugged the headphones from the mike, then plugged them into a contraption that looked like a car speaker riding a broom handle. The contraption, which I later learned had been jury-rigged out of, among other elements, a metal salad bowl, was designed to locate clicking whales. After twisting it around in the water for a while, Mevorach decided that the clicks were coming from the southwest. We thumped in that direction, and soon George called out, “Blow!”
A few hundred yards in front of us was a gray ridge that looked like a misshapen log. (When whales are resting at the surface, only a fraction of their enormous bulk is visible.) The whale blew again, and a geyser-like spray erupted from the ridge’s left side.
As we were closing in, the whale blew yet again; then it raised its elegantly curved flukes into the air and dove. It was unlikely to resurface, I was told, for nearly an hour.
We thumped off in search of its kin. The farther south we travelled, the higher the swells. At one point, I felt my stomach lurch and went to the side of the boat to heave.
“I like to just throw up and get back to work,” Mevorach told me.
Trying to attach a recording device to a sperm whale is a bit like trying to joust while racing on a Jet Ski. The exercise entails using a thirty-foot pole to stick the device onto the animal’s back, which in turn entails getting within thirty feet of a creature the size of a school bus. That day, several more whales were spotted. But, for all of our thumping around, ceti 2 never got close enough to one to unhitch the tagging pole.
The next day, the sea was calmer. Once again, we spotted whales, and several times the boat’s designated pole-handler, Odel Harve, attempted to tag one. All his efforts went for naught. Either the whale dove at the last minute or the recording device slipped off the whale’s back and had to be fished out of the water. (The device, which was about a foot long and shaped like a surfboard, was supposed to adhere via suction cups.) With each new sighting, the mood on ceti 2 lifted; with each new failure, it sank.
On my third day in Dominica, I joined a slightly different subset of the team on a different boat to try out a new approach. Instead of a long pole, this boat—a forty-foot catamaran called ceti 1—was carrying an experimental drone. The drone had been specially designed at Harvard and was fitted out with a video camera and a plastic claw.
Because sperm whales are always on the move, there’s no guarantee of finding any; weeks can go by without a single sighting off Dominica. Once again, though, we got lucky, and a whale was soon spotted. Stefano Pagani, an undergraduate who had been brought along for his piloting skills, pulled on what looked like a V.R. headset, which was linked to the drone’s video camera. In this way, he could look down at the whale from the drone’s perspective and, it was hoped, plant a recording device, which had been loaded into the claw, on the whale’s back.
The drone took off and zipped toward the whale. It hovered for a few seconds, then dropped vertiginously. For the suction cups to adhere, the drone had to strike the whale at just the right angle, with just the right amount of force. Post impact, Pagani piloted the craft back to the boat with trembling hands. “The nerves get to you,” he said.
“No pressure,” Gruber joked. “It’s not like there’s a New Yorker reporter watching or anything.” Someone asked for a round of applause. A cheer went up from the boat. The whale, for its part, seemed oblivious. It lolled around with the recording device, which was painted bright orange, stuck to its dark-gray skin. Then it dove.
Sperm whales are among the world’s deepest divers. They routinely descend two thousand feet and sometimes more than a mile. (The deepest a human has ever gone with scuba gear is just shy of eleven hundred feet.) If the device stayed on, it would record any sounds the whale made on its travels. It would also log the whale’s route, its heartbeat, and its orientation in the water. The suction was supposed to last around eight hours; after that—assuming all went according to plan—the device would come loose, bob to the surface, and transmit a radio signal that would allow it to be retrieved.
I said it was too bad we couldn’t yet understand what the whales were saying, because perhaps this one, before she dove, had clicked out where she was headed.
“Come back in two years,” Gruber said.
Every sperm whale’s tail is unique. On some, the flukes are divided by a deep notch. On others, they meet almost in a straight line. Some flukes end in points; some are more rounded. Many are missing distinctive chunks, owing, presumably, to orca attacks. To I.D. a whale in the field, researchers usually rely on a photographic database called Flukebook. One of the very few scientists who can do it simply by sight is ceti’s lead field biologist, Shane Gero.
Gero, who is forty-three, is tall and broad, with an eager smile and a pronounced Canadian accent. A scientist-in-residence at Ottawa’s Carleton University, he has been studying the whales off Dominica since 2005. By now, he knows them so well that he can relate their triumphs and travails, as well as who gave birth to whom and when. A decade ago, as Gero started having children of his own, he began referring to his “human family” and his “whale family.” (His human family lives in Ontario.) Another marine biologist once described Gero as sounding “like Captain Ahab after twenty years of psychotherapy.”
When Gruber approached Gero about joining Project ceti, he was, initially, suspicious. “I get a lot of e-mails like ‘Hey, I think whales have crystals in their heads,’ and ‘Maybe we can use them to cure malaria,’ ” Gero told me. “The first e-mail David sent me was, like, ‘Hi, I think we could find some funding to translate whale.’ And I was, like, ‘Oh, boy.’ ”
A few months later, the two men met in person, in Washington, D.C., and hit it off. Two years after that, Gruber did find some funding. ceti received thirty-three million dollars from the Audacious Project, a philanthropic collaborative whose backers include Richard Branson and Ray Dalio. (The grant, which was divided into five annual payments, will run out in 2025.)
The whole time I was in Dominica, Gero was there as well, supervising graduate students and helping with the tagging effort. From him, I learned that the first whale I had seen was named Rita and that the whales that had subsequently been spotted included Raucous, Roger, and Rita’s daughter, Rema. All belonged to a group called Unit R, which Gero characterized as “tightly and actively social.” Apparently, Unit R is also warmhearted. Several years ago, when a group called Unit S got whittled down to just two members—Sally and TBB—the Rs adopted them.
Sperm whales have the biggest brains on the planet—six times the size of humans’. Their social lives are rich, complicated, and, some would say, ideal. The adult members of a unit, which may consist of anywhere from a few to a few dozen individuals, are all female. Male offspring are permitted to travel with the group until they’re around fifteen years old; then, as Gero put it, they are “socially ostracized.” Some continue to hang around their mothers and sisters, clicking away for months unanswered. Eventually, though, they get the message. Fully grown males are solitary creatures. They approach a band of females—presumably not their immediate relatives—only in order to mate. To signal their arrival, they issue deep, booming sounds known as clangs. No one knows exactly what makes a courting sperm whale attractive to a potential mate; Gero told me that he had seen some clanging males greeted with great commotion and others with the cetacean equivalent of a shrug.
Female sperm whales, meanwhile, are exceptionally close. The adults in a unit not only travel and hunt together; they also appear to confer on major decisions. If there’s a new mother in the group, the other members mind the calf while she dives for food. In some units, though not in Unit R, sperm whales even suckle one another’s young. When a family is threatened, the adults cluster together to protect their offspring, and when things are calm the calves fool around.
“It’s like my kids and their cousins,” Gero said.
The day after I watched the successful drone flight, I went out with Gero to try to recover the recording device. More than twenty-four hours had passed, and it still hadn’t been located. Gero decided to drive out along a peninsula called Scotts Head, at the southwestern tip of Dominica, where he thought he might be able to pick up the radio signal. As we wound around on the island’s treacherously narrow roads, he described to me an idea he had for a children’s book that, read in one direction, would recount a story about a human family that lives on a boat and looks down at the water and, read from the other direction, would be about a whale family that lives deep beneath the boat and looks up at the waves.
“For me, the most rewarding part about spending a lot of time in the culture of whales is finding these fundamental similarities, these fundamental patterns,” he said. “And, you know, sure, they won’t have a word for ‘tree.’ And there’s some part of the sperm-whale experience that our primate brain just won’t understand. But those things that we share must be fundamentally important to why we’re here.”
After a while, we reached, quite literally, the end of the road. Beyond that was a hill that had to be climbed on foot. Gero was carrying a portable antenna, which he unfolded when we got to the top. If the recording unit had surfaced anywhere within twenty miles, Gero calculated, we should be able to detect the signal. It occurred to me that we were now trying to listen for a listening device. Gero held the antenna aloft and put his ear to some kind of receiver. He didn’t hear anything, so, after admiring the view for a bit, we headed back down. Gero was hopeful that the device would eventually be recovered. But, as far as I know, it is still out there somewhere, adrift in the Caribbean.
The first scientific, or semi-scientific, study of sperm whales was a pamphlet published in 1835 by a Scottish ship doctor named Thomas Beale. Called “The Natural History of the Sperm Whale,” it proved so popular that Beale expanded the pamphlet into a book, which was issued under the same title four years later.
At the time, sperm-whale hunting was a major industry, both in Britain and in the United States. The animals were particularly prized for their spermaceti, the waxy oil that fills their gigantic heads. Spermaceti is an excellent lubricant, and, burned in a lamp, produces a clean, bright light; in Beale’s day, it could sell for five times as much as ordinary whale oil. (It is the resemblance between semen and spermaceti that accounts for the species’ embarrassing name.)
Beale believed sperm whales to be silent. “It is well known among the most experienced whalers that they never produce any nasal or vocal sounds whatever, except a trifling hissing at the time of the expiration of the spout,” he wrote. The whales, he said, were also gentle—“a most timid and inoffensive animal.” Melville relied heavily on Beale in composing “Moby-Dick.” (His personal copy of “The Natural History of the Sperm Whale” is now housed in Harvard’s Houghton Library.) He attributed to sperm whales a “pyramidical silence.”
“The whale has no voice,” Melville wrote. “But then again,” he went on, “what has the whale to say? Seldom have I known any profound being that had anything to say to this world, unless forced to stammer out something by way of getting a living.”
The silence of the sperm whales went unchallenged until 1957. That year, two researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution picked up sounds from a group they’d encountered off the coast of North Carolina. They detected strings of “sharp clicks,” and speculated that these were made for the purpose of echolocation. Twenty years elapsed before one of the researchers, along with a different colleague from Woods Hole, determined that some sperm-whale clicks were issued in distinctive, often repeated patterns, which the pair dubbed “codas.” Codas seemed to be exchanged between whales and so, they reasoned, must serve some communicative function.
Since then, cetologists have spent thousands of hours listening to codas, trying to figure out what that function might be. Gero, who wrote his Ph.D. thesis on vocal communication between sperm whales, told me that one of the “universal truths” about codas is their timing. There are always four seconds between the start of one coda and the beginning of the next. Roughly two of those seconds are given over to clicks; the rest is silence. Only after the pause, which may or may not be analogous to the pause a human speaker would put between words, does the clicking resume.
Codas are clearly learned or, to use the term of art, socially transmitted. Whales in the eastern Pacific exchange one set of codas, those in the eastern Caribbean another, and those in the South Atlantic yet another. Baby sperm whales pick up the codas exchanged by their relatives, and before they can click them out proficiently they “babble.”
The whales around Dominica have a repertoire of around twenty-five codas. These codas differ from one another in the number of their clicks and also in their rhythms. The coda known as three regular, or 3R, for example, consists of three clicks issued at equal intervals. The coda 7R consists of seven evenly spaced clicks. In seven increasing, or 7I, by contrast, the interval between the clicks grows longer; it’s about five-hundredths of a second between the first two clicks, and between the last two it’s twice that long. In four decreasing, or 4D, there’s a fifth of a second between the first two clicks and only a tenth of a second between the last two. Then, there are syncopated codas. The coda most frequently issued by members of Unit R, which has been dubbed 1+1+3, has a cha-cha-esque rhythm and might be rendered in English as click . . . click . . . click-click-click.
If codas are in any way comparable to words, a repertoire of twenty-five represents a pretty limited vocabulary. But, just as no one can yet say what, if anything, codas mean to sperm whales, no one can say exactly what features are significant to them. It may be that there are nuances in, say, pacing or pitch that have so far escaped human detection. Already, ceti team members have identified a new kind of signal—a single click—that may serve as some kind of punctuation mark.
When whales are resting near the surface, their exchanges can last an hour or more. Even by human standards, sperm-whale chatter is insistent and repetitive. “They’re talking on top of each other all the time,” Gero told me.
A snatch of dialogue recorded between two members of Unit R runs as follows. (Both Roger and Rita are adult females.)
Not long ago, suffering from writer’s block, I asked ChatGPT if it could rewrite “Moby-Dick” from the whale’s perspective. The chatbot began modestly. “As an A.I. language model, I can certainly attempt to rewrite a small excerpt,” it told me. Then it launched into what it titled “Moby-Dick—The White Leviathan’s Tale.”
In Moby-Dick’s “Moby-Dick,” the plot turned on an unfortunate case of mistaken identity. Some other whale had gnawed off Ahab’s leg; the white whale was as innocent as the driven snow.
“My heart was one of peace, my spirit one with the rhythm of the currents,” ChatGPT wrote:
I knew not of the vendetta forming against me, for I was but a creature of instinct, a guardian of the seas. But Captain Ahab’s thirst for vengeance loomed large, and I became the object of his undying rage. The scar he bore from a previous encounter with my kind had branded me as his ultimate adversary. In his eyes, I represented a force of nature that defied his understanding, a living enigma of the ocean’s might.
In paragraph seven, I was surprised—and excited—to see the whale/bot allude to the problem of interspecies communication:
Deep within the abyss of the sea, I pondered the futility of the captain’s quest. I longed to communicate with him, to show him that my kind, too, had emotions and families to protect. But the language barrier between our worlds remained an insurmountable chasm.
As anyone who has been conscious for the past ten months knows, ChatGPT is capable of amazing feats. It can write essays, compose sonnets, explain scientific concepts, and produce jokes (though these last are not necessarily funny). If you ask ChatGPT how it was created, it will tell you that first it was trained on a “massive corpus” of data from the Internet. This phase consisted of what’s called “unsupervised machine learning,” which was performed by an intricate array of processing nodes known as a neural network. Basically, the “learning” involved filling in the blanks; according to ChatGPT, the exercise entailed “predicting the next word in a sentence given the context of the previous words.” By digesting millions of Web pages—and calculating and recalculating the odds—ChatGPT got so good at this guessing game that, without ever understanding English, it mastered the language. (Other languages it is “fluent” in include Chinese, Spanish, and French.)
In theory at least, what goes for English (and Chinese and French) also goes for sperm whale. Provided that a computer model can be trained on enough data, it should be able to master coda prediction. It could then—once again in theory—generate sequences of codas that a sperm whale would find convincing. The model wouldn’t understand sperm whale-ese, but it could, in a manner of speaking, speak it. Call it ClickGPT.
Currently, the largest collection of sperm-whale codas is an archive assembled by Gero in his years on and off Dominica. The codas contain roughly a hundred thousand clicks. In a paper published last year, members of the ceti team estimated that, to fulfill its goals, the project would need to assemble some four billion clicks, which is to say, a collection roughly forty thousand times larger than Gero’s.
“One of the key challenges toward the analysis of sperm whale (and more broadly, animal) communication using modern deep learning techniques is the need for sizable datasets,” the team wrote.
In addition to bugging individual whales, ceti is planning to tether a series of three “listening stations” to the floor of the Caribbean Sea. The stations should be able to capture the codas of whales chatting up to twelve miles from shore. (Though inaudible above the waves, sperm-whale clicks can register up to two hundred and thirty decibels, which is louder than a gunshot or a rock concert.) The information gathered by the stations will be less detailed than what the tags can provide, but it should be much more plentiful.
One afternoon, I drove with Gruber and ceti’s station manager, Yaniv Aluma, a former Israeli Navy seal, to the port in Roseau, where pieces of the listening stations were being stored. The pieces were shaped like giant sink plugs and painted bright yellow. Gruber explained that the yellow plugs were buoys, and that the listening equipment—essentially, large collections of hydrophones—would dangle from the bottom of the buoys, on cables. The cables would be weighed down with old train wheels, which would anchor them to the seabed. A stack of wheels, rusted orange, stood nearby. Gruber suddenly turned to Aluma and, pointing to the pile, said, “You know, we’re going to need more of these.” Aluma nodded glumly.
The listening stations have been the source of nearly a year’s worth of delays for ceti. The first was installed last summer, in water six thousand feet deep. Fish were attracted to the buoy, so the spot soon became popular among fishermen. After about a month, the fishermen noticed that the buoy was gone. Members of ceti’s Dominica-based staff set out in the middle of the night on ceti 1 to try to retrieve it. By the time they reached the buoy, it had drifted almost thirty miles offshore. Meanwhile, the hydrophone array, attached to the rusty train wheels, had dropped to the bottom of the sea.
The trouble was soon traced to the cable, which had been manufactured in Texas by a company that specializes in offshore oil-rig equipment. “They deal with infrastructure that’s very solid,” Aluma explained. “But a buoy has its own life. And they didn’t calculate so well the torque or load on different motions—twisting and moving sideways.” The company spent months figuring out why the cable had failed and finally thought it had solved the problem. In June, Aluma flew to Houston to watch a new cable go through stress tests. In the middle of the tests, the new design failed. To avoid further delays, the ceti team reconfigured the stations. One of the reconfigured units was installed late last month. If it doesn’t float off, or in some other way malfunction, the plan is to get the two others in the water sometime this fall.
Asperm whale’s head takes up nearly a third of its body; its narrow lower jaw seems borrowed from a different animal entirely; and its flippers are so small as to be almost dainty. (The formal name for the species is Physeter macrocephalus, which translates roughly as “big-headed blowhole.”) “From just about any angle,” Hal Whitehead, one of the world’s leading sperm-whale experts (and Gero’s thesis adviser), has written, sperm whales appear “very strange.” I wanted to see more of these strange-looking creatures than was visible from a catamaran, and so, on my last day in Dominica, I considered going on a commercial tour that offered customers a chance to swim with whales, assuming that any could be located. In the end—partly because I sensed that Gruber disapproved of the practice—I dropped the idea.
Instead, I joined the crew on ceti 1 for what was supposed to be another round of drone tagging. After we’d been under way for about two hours, codas were picked up, to the northeast. We headed in that direction and soon came upon an extraordinary sight. There were at least ten whales right off the boat’s starboard. They were all facing the same direction, and they were bunched tightly together, in rows. Gero identified them as members of Unit A. The members of Unit A were originally named for characters in Margaret Atwood novels, and they include Lady Oracle, Aurora, and Rounder, Lady Oracle’s daughter.
Earlier that day, the crew on ceti 2 had spotted pilot whales, or blackfish, which are known to harass sperm whales. “This looks very defensive,” Gero said, referring to the formation.
Suddenly, someone yelled out, “Red!” A burst of scarlet spread through the water, like a great banner unfurling. No one knew what was going on. Had the pilot whales stealthily attacked? Was one of the whales in the group injured? The crowding increased until the whales were practically on top of one another.
Then a new head appeared among them. “Holy fucking shit!” Gruber exclaimed.
“Oh, my God!” Gero cried. He ran to the front of the boat, clutching his hair in amazement. “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” The head belonged to a newborn calf, which was about twelve feet long and weighed maybe a ton. In all his years of studying sperm whales, Gero had never watched one being born. He wasn’t sure anyone ever had.
As one, the whales made a turn toward the catamaran. They were so close I got a view of their huge, eerily faceless heads and pink lower jaws. They seemed oblivious of the boat, which was now in their way. One knocked into the hull, and the foredeck shuddered.
The adults kept pushing the calf around. Its mother and her relatives pressed in so close that the baby was almost lifted out of the water. Gero began to wonder whether something had gone wrong. By now, everyone, including the captain, had gathered on the bow. Pagani and another undergraduate, Aidan Kenny, had launched two drones and were filming the action from the air. Mevorach, meanwhile, was recording the whales through a hydrophone.
To everyone’s relief, the baby began to swim on its own. Then the pilot whales showed up—dozens of them.
“I don’t like the way they’re moving,” Gruber said.
“They’re going to attack for sure,” Gero said. The pilot whales’ distinctive, wave-shaped fins slipped in and out of the water.
What followed was something out of a marine-mammal “Lord of the Rings.” Several of the pilot whales stole in among the sperm whales. All that could be seen from the boat was a great deal of thrashing around. Out of nowhere, more than forty Fraser’s dolphins arrived on the scene. Had they come to participate in the melee or just to rubberneck? It was impossible to tell. They were smaller and thinner than the pilot whales (which, their name notwithstanding, are also technically dolphins).
“I have no prior knowledge upon which to predict what happens next,” Gero announced. After several minutes, the pilot whales retreated. The dolphins curled through the waves. The whales remained bunched together. Calm reigned. Then the pilot whales made another run at the sperm whales. The water bubbled and churned.
“The pilot whales are just being pilot whales,” Gero observed. Clearly, though, in the great “struggle for existence,” everyone on board ceti 1 was on the side of the baby.
The skirmishing continued. The pilot whales retreated, then closed in again. The drones began to run out of power. Pagani and Kenny piloted them back to the catamaran to exchange the batteries. These were so hot they had to be put in the boat’s refrigerator. At one point, Gero thought that he spied the new calf, still alive and well. (He would later, from the drone footage, identify the baby’s mother as Rounder.) “So that’s good news,” he called out.
The pilot whales hung around for more than two hours. Then, all at once, they were gone. The dolphins, too, swam off.
“There will never be a day like this again,” Gero said as ceti 1 headed back to shore.
That evening, everyone who’d been on board ceti 1 and ceti 2 gathered at a dockside restaurant for a dinner in honor of the new calf. Gruber made a toast. He thanked the team for all its hard work. “Let’s hope we can learn the language with that baby whale,” he said.
I was sitting with Gruber and Gero at the end of a long table. In between drinks, Gruber suggested that what we had witnessed might not have been an attack. The scene, he proposed, had been more like the last act of “The Lion King,” when the beasts of the jungle gather to welcome the new cub.
“Three different marine mammals came together to celebrate and protect the birth of an animal with a sixteen-month gestation period,” he said. Perhaps, he hypothesized, this was a survival tactic that had evolved to protect mammalian young against sharks, which would have been attracted by so much blood and which, he pointed out, would have been much more numerous before humans began killing them off.
“You mean the baby whale was being protected by the pilot whales from the sharks that aren’t here?” Gero asked. He said he didn’t even know what it would mean to test such a theory. Gruber said they could look at the drone footage and see if the sperm whales had ever let the pilot whales near the newborn and, if so, how the pilot whales had responded. I couldn’t tell whether he was kidding or not.
“That’s a nice story,” Mevorach interjected.
“I just like to throw ideas out there,” Gruber said.
“My! You don’t say so!” said the Doctor. “You never talked that way to me before.”
“What would have been the good?” said Polynesia, dusting some cracker crumbs off her left wing. “You wouldn’t have understood me if I had.”
—“The Story of Doctor Dolittle.”
The Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (csail), at M.I.T., occupies a Frank Gehry-designed building that appears perpetually on the verge of collapse. Some wings tilt at odd angles; others seem about to split in two. In the lobby of the building, there’s a vending machine that sells electrical cords and another that dispenses caffeinated beverages from around the world. There’s also a yellow sign of the sort you might see in front of an elementary school. It shows a figure wearing a backpack and carrying a briefcase and says “nerd xing.”
Daniela Rus, who runs csail (pronounced “see-sale”), is a roboticist. “There’s such a crazy conversation these days about machines,” she told me. We were sitting in her office, which is dominated by a robot, named Domo, who sits in a glass case. Domo has a metal torso and oversized, goggly eyes. “It’s either machines are going to take us down or machines are going to solve all of our problems. And neither is correct.”
Along with several other researchers at csail, Rus has been thinking about how ceti might eventually push beyond coda prediction to something approaching coda comprehension. This is a formidable challenge. Whales in a unit often chatter before they dive. But what are they chattering about? How deep to go, or who should mind the calves, or something that has no analogue in human experience?
“We are trying to correlate behavior with vocalization,” Rus told me. “Then we can begin to get evidence for the meaning of some of the vocalizations they make.”
She took me down to her lab, where several graduate students were tinkering in a thicket of electronic equipment. In one corner was a transparent plastic tube loaded with circuitry, attached to two white plastic flippers. The setup, Rus explained, was the skeleton of a robotic turtle. Lying on the ground was the turtle’s plastic shell. One of the students hit a switch and the flippers made a paddling motion. Another student brought out a two-foot-long robotic fish. Both the fish and the turtle could be configured to carry all sorts of sensors, including underwater cameras.
“We need new methods for collecting data,” Rus said. “We need ways to get close to the whales, and so we’ve been talking a lot about putting the sea turtle or the fish in water next to the whales, so that we can image what we cannot see.”
csail is an enormous operation, with more than fifteen hundred staff members and students. “People here are kind of audacious,” Rus said. “They really love the wild and crazy ideas that make a difference.” She told me about a diver she had met who had swum with the sperm whales off Dominica and, by his account at least, had befriended one. The whale seemed to like to imitate the diver; for example, when he hung in the water vertically, it did, too.
“The question I’ve been asking myself is: Suppose that we set up experiments where we engage the whales in physical mimicry,” Rus said. “Can we then get them to vocalize while doing a motion? So, can we get them to say, ‘I’m going up’? Or can we get them to say, ‘I’m hovering’? I think that, if we were to find a few snippets of vocalizations that we could associate with some meaning, that would help us get deeper into their conversational structure.”
While we were talking, another csail professor and ceti collaborator, Jacob Andreas, showed up. Andreas, a computer scientist who works on language processing, said that he had been introduced to the whale project at a faculty retreat. “I gave a talk about understanding neural networks as a weird translation problem,” he recalled. “And Daniela came up to me afterwards and she said, ‘Oh, you like weird translation problems? Here’s a weird translation problem.’ ”
Andreas told me that ceti had already made significant strides, just by reanalyzing Gero’s archive. Not only had the team uncovered the new kind of signal but also it had found that codas have much more internal structure than had previously been recognized. “The amount of information that this system can carry is much bigger,” he said.
“The holy grail here—the thing that separates human language from all other animal communication systems—is what’s called ‘duality of patterning,’ ” Andreas went on. “Duality of patterning” refers to the way that meaningless units—in English, sounds like “sp” or “ot”—can be combined to form meaningful units, like “spot.” If, as is suspected, clicks are empty of significance but codas refer to something, then sperm whales, too, would have arrived at duality of patterning. “Based on what we know about how the coda inventory works, I’m optimistic—though still not sure—that this is going to be something that we find in sperm whales,” Andreas said.
The question of whether any species possesses a “communication system” comparable to that of humans is an open and much debated one. In the nineteen-fifties, the behaviorist B. F. Skinner argued that children learn language through positive reinforcement; therefore, other animals should be able to do the same. The linguist Noam Chomsky had a different view. He dismissed the notion that kids acquire language via conditioning, and also the possibility that language was available to other species.
In the early nineteen-seventies, a student of Skinner’s, Herbert Terrace, set out to confirm his mentor’s theory. Terrace, at that point a professor of psychology at Columbia, adopted a chimpanzee, whom he named, tauntingly, Nim Chimpsky. From the age of two weeks, Nim was raised by people and taught American Sign Language. Nim’s interactions with his caregivers were videotaped, so that Terrace would have an objective record of the chimp’s progress. By the time Nim was three years old, he had a repertoire of eighty signs and, significantly, often produced them in sequences, such as “banana me eat banana” or “tickle me Nim play.” Terrace set out to write a book about how Nim had crossed the language barrier and, in so doing, made a monkey of his namesake. But then Terrace double-checked some details of his account against the tapes. When he looked carefully at the videos, he was appalled. Nim hadn’t really learned A.S.L.; he had just learned to imitate the last signs his teachers had made to him.
“The very tapes I planned to use to document Nim’s ability to sign provided decisive evidence that I had vastly overestimated his linguistic competence,” Terrace wrote.
Since Nim, many further efforts have been made to prove that different species—orangutans, bonobos, parrots, dolphins—have a capacity for language. Several of the animals who were the focus of these efforts—Koko the gorilla, Alex the gray parrot—became international celebrities. But most linguists still believe that the only species that possesses language is our own.
Language is “a uniquely human faculty” that is “part of the biological nature of our species,” Stephen R. Anderson, a professor emeritus at Yale and a former president of the Linguistic Society of America, writes in his book “Doctor Dolittle’s Delusion.”
Whether sperm-whale codas could challenge this belief is an issue that just about everyone I talked to on the ceti team said they’d rather not talk about.
“Linguists like Chomsky are very opinionated,” Michael Bronstein, the Oxford professor, told me. “For a computer scientist, usually a language is some formal system, and often we talk about artificial languages.” Sperm-whale codas “might not be as expressive as human language,” he continued. “But I think whether to call it ‘language’ or not is more of a formal question.”
“Ironically, it’s a semantic debate about the meaning of language,” Gero observed.
Of course, the advent of ChatGPT further complicates the debate. Once a set of algorithms can rewrite a novel, what counts as “linguistic competence”? And who—or what—gets to decide?
“When we say that we’re going to succeed in translating whale communication, what do we mean?” Shafi Goldwasser, the Radcliffe Institute fellow who first proposed the idea that led to ceti, asked.
“Everybody’s talking these days about these generative A.I. models like ChatGPT,” Goldwasser, who now directs the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, at the University of California, Berkeley, went on. “What are they doing? You are giving them questions or prompts, and then they give you answers, and the way that they do that is by predicting how to complete sentences or what the next word would be. So you could say that’s a goal for ceti—that you don’t necessarily understand what the whales are saying, but that you could predict it with good success. And, therefore, you could maybe generate a conversation that would be understood by a whale, but maybe you don’t understand it. So that’s kind of a weird success.”
Prediction, Goldwasser said, would mean “we’ve realized what the pattern of their speech is. It’s not satisfactory, but it’s something.
“What about the goal of understanding?” she added. “Even on that, I am not a pessimist.”
There are now an estimated eight hundred and fifty thousand sperm whales diving the world’s oceans. This is down from an estimated two million in the days before the species was commercially hunted. It’s often suggested that the darkest period for P. macrocephalus was the middle of the nineteenth century, when Melville shipped out of New Bedford on the Acushnet. In fact, the bulk of the slaughter took place in the middle of the twentieth century, when sperm whales were pursued by diesel-powered ships the size of factories. In the eighteen-forties, at the height of open-boat whaling, some five thousand sperm whales were killed each year; in the nineteen-sixties, the number was six times as high. Sperm whales were boiled down to make margarine, cattle feed, and glue. As recently as the nineteen-seventies, General Motors used spermaceti in its transmission fluid.
Near the peak of industrial whaling, a biologist named Roger Payne heard a radio report that changed his life and, with it, the lives of the world’s remaining cetaceans. The report noted that a whale had washed up on a beach not far from where Payne was working, at Tufts University. Payne, who’d been researching moths, drove out to see it. He was so moved by the dead animal that he switched the focus of his research. His investigations led him to a naval engineer who, while listening for Soviet submarines, had recorded eerie underwater sounds that he attributed to humpback whales. Payne spent years studying the recordings; the sounds, he decided, were so beautiful and so intricately constructed that they deserved to be called “songs.” In 1970, he arranged to have “Songs of the Humpback Whale” released as an LP.
“I just thought: the world has to hear this,” he would later recall. The album sold briskly, was sampled by popular musicians like Judy Collins, and helped launch the “Save the Whales” movement. In 1979, National Geographic issued a “flexi disc” version of the songs, which it distributed as an insert in more than ten million copies of the magazine. Three years later, the International Whaling Commission declared a “moratorium” on commercial hunts which remains in effect today. The move is credited with having rescued several species, including humpbacks and fin whales, from extinction.
Payne, who died in June at the age of eighty-eight, was an early and ardent member of the ceti team. (This was the case, Gruber told me, even though he was disappointed that the project was focussing on sperm whales, rather than on humpbacks, which, he maintained, were more intelligent.) Just a few days before his death, Payne published an op-ed piece explaining why he thought ceti was so important.
Whales, along with just about every other creature on Earth, are now facing grave new threats, he observed, among them climate change. How to motivate “ourselves and our fellow humans” to combat these threats?
“Inspiration is the key,” Payne wrote. “If we could communicate with animals, ask them questions and receive answers—no matter how simple those questions and answers might turn out to be—the world might soon be moved enough to at least start the process of halting our runaway destruction of life.”
Several other ceti team members made a similar point. “One important thing that I hope will be an outcome of this project has to do with how we see life on land and in the oceans,” Bronstein said. “If we understand—or we have evidence, and very clear evidence in the form of language-like communication—that intelligent creatures are living there and that we are destroying them, that could change the way that we approach our Earth.”
“I always look to Roger’s work as a guiding star,” Gruber told me. “The way that he promoted the songs and did the science led to an environmental movement that saved whale species from extinction. And he thought that ceti could be much more impactful. If we could understand what they’re saying, instead of ‘save the whales’ it will be ‘saved by the whales.’
“This project is kind of an offering,” he went on. “Can technology draw us closer to nature? Can we use all this amazing tech we’ve invented for positive purposes?”
ChatGPT shares this hope. Or at least the A.I.-powered language model is shrewd enough to articulate it. In the version of “Moby-Dick” written by algorithms in the voice of a whale, the story ends with a somewhat ponderous but not unaffecting plea for mutuality:
I, the White Leviathan, could only wonder if there would ever come a day when man and whale would understand each other, finding harmony in the vastness of the ocean’s embrace. ♦
Duas semanas antes de completar 86 anos, no dia 30 de março, o diretor de teatro José Celso Martinez Corrêa recebeu a Cult em seu apartamento, no bairro do Ibirapuera, em São Paulo, para falar de seu mais novo projeto: a adaptação para o palco do livro A queda do céu: palavras de um xamã yanomami, de Davi Kopenawa e Bruce Albert. Embora sem a mesma agilidade física de antes, Zé Celso continua imbatível na forma como articula rapidez de raciocínio e destreza verbal. Depois de encenar em 2022, último ano do governo Bolsonaro, uma adaptação do Fausto, de Cristopher Marlowe, na qual o trágico herói “revirava na encruzilhada” daquele Brasil, vislumbrando como saída paródica que o país fosse de todos e Exu estivesse no través de tudo, o diretor quer, neste primeiro ano do governo Lula, falar dos Yanomami a fim de não somente denunciar o massacre que eles vêm sofrendo, como também chamar a atenção para o modo como eles fazem política – através dos sonhos. Uma atividade essencial para as culturas ancestrais.
Você está adaptando o livro A queda do céu: palavras de um xamã yanomami, de Davi Kopenawa e Bruce Albert, para o teatro. Fale um pouco de como está se dando esse processo, por favor. Há cinco pessoas reunidas no projeto: o dramaturgo Fernando de Carvalho, o arquiteto e iluminador Pedro Felizes [mestre em Antropologia Social, com dissertação sobre os Pirahã, de Roraima], o ator Roderick Himeros, o maestro Felipe Botelho e eu. Estamos trabalhando juntos, diariamente, desde o dia 1º de fevereiro. Houve outras pessoas que começaram, mas desistiram. É dificilíssimo porque o livro é enorme. Tem 729 páginas e 24 capítulos. Nós estamos na metade, no capítulo 12. Praticamente, a adaptação de cada capítulo leva de dois a três dias, porque eles são muito grandes, com coisas maravilhosas. Nós fazemos uma espécie de garimpagem… (Ao terminar de usar uma expressão tão comum, Zé tem um sobressalto e rapidamente se corrige). Não se pode falar de garimpagem em relação aos Yanomami, não é? A gente faz uma espécie de peneira e vai ficando com as coisas mais fortes. Porque não dá para fazer tudo. Aliás, a impressão é que vai ficar maior do que Os sertões. De toda maneira, não queremos dividir o trabalho em partes como eu fiz com o livro do Euclides. Queremos fazer um espetáculo só. A gente só vai poder planejar o espetáculo depois de pronta a adaptação. Pelo menos a primeira versão. É muito apaixonante o livro. Muito bem escrito. Davi Kopenawa não usa pele de papel, como ele fala, mas concordou em gravar para o Bruce Albert inúmeras conversas sobre essa nação – eu considero uma nação – de cultura riquíssima, os Yanomami. No postscriptum [“Quando eu é um outro (e vice-versa)”], o antropólogo francês relata como o livro foi feito. Primeiramente, eu pensei em adaptar essa parte também para o espetáculo, mas decidi que esse material irá para o programa.
O que o mobilizou na leitura do livro? Por que você resolveu trazê-lo para o universo do teatro? Faz tempo que eu estou querendo adaptá-lo. Desde a primeira vez que li, eu fiquei muito impressionado porque é uma obra grandiosa. É uma obra do nível de Guimarães Rosa, Euclides da Cunha. É extraordinária, e universal. Por isso, está fazendo sucesso, inclusive, no mundo inteiro. Em novembro do ano passado, eu participei da mesa de abertura da Festa Literária da Morada do Sol [FliSol], em Araraquara, ao lado de Ignácio de Loyola Brandão (nós dois somos de lá). Então, o Eryk Rocha, filho do Glauber, me disse que no dia seguinte haveria uma conversa com o Kopenawa. Eu já o tinha visto falar várias vezes. Aí, durante a conferência, eu perguntei se ele não me daria os direitos de adaptação do livro para o teatro. Ele disse que me daria. E me deu. Então, comecei a trabalhar. O processo todo deve durar mais uns dois meses. O livro é lindo, mas complexo. E muito variado também porque há vários aspectos nele. É um livro muito bem montado pelo Bruce Albert.
Você chegou a pensar no risco de apropriação cultural nesse trabalho? Não vai haver apropriação indevida. Eu vou trabalhar com os Yanomami. Eu não vou trabalhar com atores fazendo o papel dos indígenas. Quero inclusive convidar um daqueles rapazes yanomamis que foram à cerimônia do Oscar entregar a estatueta de Omama, que não é feita de ouro, às atrizes e aos atores vencedores. Ele falou em yanomami. Uma pena que não tenham filmado isso. O elenco será indígena. Serão quatro atores indígenas a fazerem o Davi nas diferentes fases da vida dele. Inclusive uma criança e um adolescente. Eu nunca trabalhei com atores indígenas. Será a primeira vez. Os atores brancos vão fazer os garimpeiros e os missionários, os antagonistas. Felipe Botelho, o maestro, já está estudando a música yanomami, e a ideia é convidarmos músicos yanomamis para fazerem parte do espetáculo. Uma banda yanomami estará no palco. Provavelmente, na dramaturgia eu terei a consultoria de alguém especializado na cultura indígena. No último dia 15 de março de manhã, a Unifesp concedeu o título de doutor honoris causa ao Kopenawa. No mesmo dia, à tarde, o Sesc Vila Mariana o homenageou, abrindo o evento “Efeito Kopenawa”, do qual participaram o Ailton Krenak e a Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, entre tantos outros ativistas importantes. A direção artística da cerimônia ficou a cargo da atriz e pesquisadora da relação entre teatro e povos indígenas Andreia Duarte. Eu participei da abertura do evento e li o primeiro capítulo do livro. O Kopenawa foi muito simpático e me disse: “Você é velhinho, e muito inteligente”. (Risos.)
Como o livro se relaciona com a poética do Oficina? Eu não penso nisso. A poética do Oficina está em nós que estamos cuidando da adaptação. Mas talvez o elenco de atores brancos não seja necessariamente do Oficina, porque a Camila [Mota] e o Marcelo [Drummond], por exemplo, estão envolvidos em outros projetos.
Para além das coisas específicas de que tratam os espetáculos dirigidos por você, eles também falam sempre das urgências do Brasil… Pois é, e os Yanomami não são brasileiros. Eles moram no Brasil, mas vieram muito antes dos portugueses.
E nós estamos acabando com eles… Mas agora com o governo Lula as coisas tendem a melhorar. É um governo muito favorável.
Você está otimista com o governo Lula? Sim. O ministério dele é luxuoso. Agora temos uma liderança indígena no Ministério dos Povos Indígenas, Sônia Guajajara, e a Anielle Franco como ministra da Igualdade Racial e o Silvio Almeida como ministro dos Direitos Humanos e da Cidadania e a Marina Silva como ministra do Meio Ambiente e Mudança do Clima. Nesse setor, o governo está maravilhoso. O “povo da mercadoria” não dá valor pra isso. Nem nota, mas isso está sendo extremamente importante. Eles trabalham para um outro Brasil. Um Brasil que não atende ao que quer o mercado nem a grande imprensa. Veja o caso da Folha de S.Paulo, que, depois de ter sido por muito tempo um jornal democrático, com a saída do Jânio de Freitas, mudou muito, endireitou. Meu projeto no Oficina era montar Heliogabalo ou O anarquista coroado, de Antonin Artaud. Eu e o Fernando de Carvalho fizemos uma adaptação da peça, publicada pela editora n-1. Mas depois eu achei que nesse momento não cabe. É o momento de trabalhar as questões mais urgentes que estamos vivendo no Brasil hoje. E a grande questão para mim é a crise dos Yanomami. E a presença dos garimpeiros na região. E de seus financiadores. Os garimpeiros ganham miseravelmente, mas o que eles produzem é comprado pela alta burguesia. É a lógica do capitalismo. Ali na terra yanomami há muito capital investido, tanto do garimpo como das missões religiosas. É a fome, a miséria. É Auschwitz. Eu quero fazer esse espetáculo para marcar as transformações tão grandes que estamos vendo surgir no Brasil neste primeiro ano do governo Lula.
A segunda parte – “A fumaça do metal” – talvez seja a mais impactante do livro porque há a denúncia do que está ocorrendo de mais terrível com eles. O capítulo que fala do massacre é impressionante, porque tem um tratamento bem brechtiano. Primeiramente, ele demonstra que os indígenas ficaram felizes com a chegada dos garimpeiros, porque ganhavam presentes deles. Até que os garimpeiros se enjoam dos yanomamis e começam as agressões, que culminam no massacre. Kopenawa evidencia muito bem o caminho da relação entre os dois grupos, que é muito clara, muito didática. Bem ao estilo de Brecht.
O que nós podemos aprender com os Yanomami? E com Davi Kopenawa? Tudo. Ele vive na floresta e toma yãkoana, que é um alucinógeno. Ele viaja com os xapiri, que são entidades que ele vê. Praticamente, tudo com o que sonha ele toma como orientação para a vida social. Ele não se baseia na economia, no planejamento. A política dos Yanomami é baseada no sonho, e isso é muito bonito. É uma coisa muito diferente da gente. Eu os entendo, porque durante muitos anos tomei substâncias alucinógenas – ayahuasca, mescalina, peyote – para criar. Eu criei muita coisa. E passei a acreditar muito mais nos sonhos surgidos dessas viagens. E eles moldaram meu trabalho. Por exemplo, um espetáculo como As três irmãs foi todo moldado em torno de alucinógenos. Eu me lembro de que nós fomos para a praia de Bangoracea, em Ubatuba, vestidos com os figurinos da peça e tomamos mescalina. Depois, ficamos nus e fomos para o mar e tivemos uma visão pontilhista. Todos nós estávamos pontilhados. Nós nos demos as mãos, enfiamos as mãos na areia e começamos a ser massageados pela areia, sendo envolvidos por uma profusão de cores. Foi uma das experiências mais fortes que eu tive na vida. Eu entendo a yãkoana, porque quando eu tomava essas substâncias todas eu sonhava muito, mas sonhava com o teatro. Os Yanomami se baseiam em todos os sonhos alucinógenos como se fossem a constituição deles. Eles partem daí e se organizam através dos sonhos. Eu conheço esse estado de criação.
Zé, você faz um teatro que podemos chamar de sapiencial. Um teatro que parte de um profundo entendimento sobre as coisas e que procura transmitir um saber ancestral à plateia. Você seria uma espécie de xamã do teatro brasileiro? Não sei… Na cultura yanomami, o xamã transforma o que sonha em realidade política. Eu fui desenvolvendo a percepção das coisas em que eu acredito. As minhas peças são a materialização dos sonhos. Se eu não sonho, eu não consigo fazer uma peça. Tenho origens indígenas e também sou muito ligado à cultura negra, ao batuque. Eu gosto muito. Eu ganhei de Mãe Stella de Oxóssi, do candomblé na Bahia, a honraria de “Exu, senhor das artes cênicas”. É um título que me enche de orgulho.
Conhecer o xamanismo pode nos levar a experimentar outros modos de subjetivação? Sim. E é bonito no livro como o próprio Kopenawa passa por vários processos de identidade. Primeiro, ele quando criança sonha muito e acorda assustado com os sonhos. O padrasto dele, então, vê nisso uma espécie de predestinação para o xamanismo. Não é qualquer indígena que se torna um xamã. O xamanismo é um processo corporal e psíquico a partir da ingestão da yãkoana, o pó da casca da árvore, que leva à viagem alucinatória na qual se veem os xapiri. No espetáculo, inclusive, a gente vai fazer aparecer os xapiri. Nós vamos materializar muitos sonhos dele. Depois, é de uma delicadeza incrível o modo como ele conta que queria ser branco. Ele conta isso com poesia, mas depois sai dessa. Ele passa por vários processos, de acreditar no deus cristão, por exemplo; de acreditar na Funai. Ele vai para a Funai porque ele tinha o desejo de ser branco. E ele não conta nada disso com rancor. É sempre por meio da subjetividade. A subjetividade nessa cultura é muito importante. E resulta na alteridade guerreira.
Como a sua adaptação vai lidar com a imagem apocalíptica: o céu haverá mesmo de cair? Os Yanomami trabalham para o céu não cair, porque na concepção deles o céu já caiu uma vez. Mas onde ele caiu nasceu a floresta. E na floresta eles trabalham para evitar que o céu novamente caia. É cíclico. Eles sonham com colunas onde moram os espíritos que são bem fincadas na terra e sustentam o céu. A criação dessa imagem no Oficina vai ser muito interessante. A cosmologia indígena está muito ligada à vida cotidiana. A gente aprende muita coisa com eles. E se identifica também. Minha avó era uma indígena que foi capturada pelos bandeirantes em Porto Ferreira. Depois, foi viver em Araraquara (arará kûara, em tupi antigo) e se casou com meu avô português. Já minha bisavó era uma índia louca, que ficava rolando na cama… Eu tenho essas questões já há muito tempo. Quando li o livro, me identifiquei. E ganhei mais experiência. Esse livro está escrito na minha vida. E no meu corpo. Mas é muito difícil. É o desafio maior da minha vida.
Maior do que O rei da vela? Não tem comparação! N’O rei da vela, o Renato Borghi leu o texto e me disse “vamos embora!”. E eu fui com ele. Os sertões foi muito trabalhoso, mas era sobre um Brasil que a minha geração estudou. Já A queda do céu fala de um outro Brasil, e de um não Brasil. É muito diferente de uma peça norte-americana, francesa, russa. É uma outra subjetividade.
Há no trabalho ecos oswaldianos? Sem dúvida. Começa que o prefácio do livro foi escrito por Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, cujo trabalho dialoga muito com o do Oswald. O Oswald deu uma importância fundamental ao “tupy or not tupy, that’s the question”. Ele entendeu a questão indígena. A queda do céu é uma peça oswaldiana. Se Oswald estivesse vivo, estaria trabalhando conosco.
Bob Sousa, fotógrafo, mestre em Artes pela Unesp e membro do júri de teatro da APCA, é autor do livro Retratos do teatro (Editora Unesp).
“O mundo está mudando: sinto-o na água, sinto-o na terra e farejo-o no ar.” Quem só assistiu aos filmes da série “O Senhor dos Anéis” se acostumou a ouvir essa frase na voz augusta de Cate Blanchett (a elfa Galadriel); nos livros, quem a pronuncia é o ent (gigante arvoresco) Barbárvore. Trata-se, no fundo, de um resumo da conclusão do romance de fantasia de J.R.R. Tolkien: o fim de uma era e o começo de outra, caracterizada pelo Domínio dos Homens. E se fosse possível detectar diretamente algo muito parecido com isso no nosso mundo do século 21? Algo que prove, para além de qualquer dúvida, que a nossa espécie passou a moldar a Terra de forma irreversível?
A resposta a essa pergunta pode ser encontrada em muitos lugares, mas tudo indica que a versão mais contundente e consolidada dela, a que entrará para os livros de geologia e de história, vem do lago Crawford, no Canadá. Os cientistas encarregados de definir formalmente o início do chamado Antropoceno –a época geológica caracterizada pela intervenção humana maciça em diversos aspectos do funcionamento do planeta– estão usando o lago como o exemplo por excelência desse fenômeno.
É por isso que convido o leitor para um mergulho naquelas águas alcalinas. Entender os detalhes que fazem do lugar um exemplo tão útil para entender o Antropoceno é, ao mesmo tempo, uma pequena aula de método científico e um retrato do poderio –frequentemente destrutivo– que desenvolvemos como espécie.
Uma das análises mais completas da lagoa canadense foi publicado na revista científica The Anthropocene Review por uma equipe da Universidade Brock, no Canadá. A primeira coisa a se ter em mente é que o lago Crawford parece um grande funil: relativamente pequeno (2,4 hectares de área) e fundo (24 m entre a superfície e o leito). Isso faz com que as camadas d’água, embora bem oxigenadas, misturem-se pouco. Por causa da salinidade e alcalinidade elevadas, há pouca vida animal no fundo.
E esse é o primeiro grande pulo do gato: tais características fazem com que camadas muito estáveis de sedimento possam se depositar anualmente no leito do lago Crawford. Todo ano é a mesma história: durante o outono, uma lâmina mais escura de matéria orgânica desce ao fundo (como estamos no Canadá, muitas árvores perdem as folhas nessa época); no verão, essa camada é recoberta por outra, mais clara, de minerais ricos em cálcio. Essa regularidade nunca é bagunçada pela chamada bioturbação (invertebrados aquáticos cavando o leito, por exemplo).
Ou seja, o fundo do lago é um reloginho, ou melhor, um calendário. Cilindros de sedimento tirados de seu fundo podem ser datados ano a ano com pouquíssima incerteza.
Isso significa que dá para identificar com precisão o aparecimento do elemento químico plutônio –resultado direto do uso de armas nucleares, principalmente em testes militares– a partir de 1948, com um pico em 1967 e uma queda nos anos 1980. Dada a natureza dos elementos radioativos, essa assinatura estará lá rigorosamente “para sempre” (ao menos do ponto de vista humano).
Algo muito parecido vale para as chamadas SCPs (partículas esferoidais carbonáceas, na sigla inglesa). Elas são produzidas pela queima industrial, em altas temperaturas, de carvão mineral e derivados do petróleo. Começam a aparecer nos sedimentos da segunda metade do século 19, mas sua presença só dispara mesmo, de novo, no começo dos anos 1950. Nada que não seja a ação humana poderia produzir esse fenômeno.
É por isso que os cientistas estão propondo o ano de 1950 como o início do Antropoceno. Ainda que a proposta não “pegue” nesse formato exato, o peso de evidências como as camadas do lago Crawford é dificílimo de contrariar. Está na água, na terra e no ar. E, para o bem ou para o mal, a responsabilidade é nossa.
Uma pesquisa inédita feita pelo Ipec (Inteligência em Pesquisa e Consultoria Estratégica) a pedido do Instituto Pólis revela que 7 em cada 10 brasileiros já vivenciaram ao menos um evento extremo ligado às mudanças climáticas.
Entre os episódios sofridos mais citados pelos entrevistados estão chuvas muito fortes (20%), seca e escassez de água (20%), alagamentos, inundações e enchentes (18%), temperaturas extremas (10%), apagão (7%), ciclones e tempestades de vento (6%) e queimadas e incêndios (5%).
O Ipec ouviu 2.000 pessoas com 16 anos ou mais entre os dias 22 e 26 de julho deste ano. A pesquisa encomendada pelo Instituto Pólis, com apoio do Instituto Clima e Sociedade, tem uma margem de erro de dois pontos percentuais, para mais ou para menos, e um índice de confiança de 95%.
O levantamento mostra que as temperaturas extremas —seja muito frio ou muito calor— são as ocorrências mais associadas pela população (44%) à crise climática. Em termos práticos, porém, a falta de água e a seca são os eventos que mais preocupam, sendo apontados por 34% dos respondentes.
Na sequência são citados temores em relação a alagamento, inundação e enchente (23%), incêndios e queimadas (18%) e chuva forte (17%). A preocupação com o advento do calor ou do frio extremo surge em quinto lugar, sendo temido por 16% dos entrevistados.
Ainda de acordo com a pesquisa, as apreensões variam de acordo com a classe e com cor dos entrevistados. Alagamentos, inundações e enchentes preocupam mais as classes D e E, sendo indicadas por 25% dos entrevistados desses segmentos, do que as classes A e B (19%). A média nacional é de 23%.
A população negra, por sua vez, apresenta maior preocupação (25%) em relação a essas mesmas ocorrências do que a população branca (21%).
Para pesquisadores que integram o Pólis, as respostas também indicam que a população brasileira defende o investimento em fontes renováveis de energia para combater as mudanças climáticas.
Do total de entrevistados, 84% dizem se preocupar com o futuro e apoiar o investimento nessas modalidades. Para 57%, a energia solar deveria ser priorizada em termos de investimentos públicos. Fontes hídricas (14%) e a eólicas (13%) são citadas na sequência.
Por outro lado, os entrevistados afirmam que o petróleo (73%), o carvão mineral (72%) e o gás fóssil (67%) são as categorias que mais contribuem para o agravamento das mudanças climáticas.
“A pesquisa indica, de forma inédita, que há uma tendência de custo político cada vez mais elevado se o caminho das decisões governamentais continuar sendo no investimento de fontes não renováveis”, afirma o diretor-executivo do Instituto Pólis, Henrique Frota.
“Os números mostram que os brasileiros querem investimento prioritário em fontes renováveis e entendem essa decisão como fundamental para o combate às mudanças climáticas”, completa Frota.
“Todos estão loucos, neste mundo? Porque a cabeça da gente é uma só, e as coisas que há e que estão para haver são demais de muitas, muito maiores diferentes, e a gente tem de necessitar de aumentar a cabeça, para o total. Só se pode viver perto de outro, e conhecer outra pessoa, sem perigo de ódio, se a gente tem amor. Qualquer amor já é um pouquinho de saúde, um descanso na loucura. Todo caminho da gente é resvaloso. Mas, também, cair não prejudica demais —a gente levanta, a gente sobe, a gente volta!”
Reflete Riobaldo Tartarana, mistura de jagunço, miliciano, soldado e terrorista, protagonista de “Grande Sertão: Veredas”, de Guimarães Rosa. Trata-se de um sujeito atormentado com a natureza horrível do ser humano. A obra-prima decolonial do escritor brasileiro é sobre o caráter indomável e não binário do bem e do mal e a surpresa de que a virtude e o indefensável não são atributos do divino. São constituintes e condições da mente humana.
Mais um trecho do livro: “O diabo vige dentro do homem, os crespos do homem —ou é o homem arruinado, ou o homem dos avessos. Solto, por si, cidadão, é que não tem diabo nenhum”. Há um vício acadêmico em domesticar o próprio texto de Rosa, relacionando o que foi escrito à época ao país, à língua.
Não. Como “Ulysses”, do irlandês Joyce, ou “O Bebedor de Vinho de Palma”, do nigeriano Amos Tutuola, “Grande Sertão: Veredas” não pertence a um tempo ou espaço. Ou melhor, transforma, como os dois romances citados, tudo no tempo e espaço proposto na obra.
Em Guimarães Rosa, tudo é sertão. Principalmente dentro de nós —a grande contribuição ontológica e terapêutica do livro para quem, como tanta gente em 2023, anda abismado, chocado e confuso com os horrores que somos capazes de cometer. A recém-lançada adaptação de “Grande Sertão: Veredas” para o cinema, dirigida por Bia Lessa, chama-se “O Diabo na Rua, no Meio do Redemunho”. É o que nós somos, é onde estamos. Procurando nos posicionar diante fatos e narrativas, como o miliciano diletante Riobaldo.
Segue outro trecho: “Eu, quem é que eu era? De que lado eu era? Zé Bebelo ou Joca Ramiro? Hermógenes ou Reinaldo… De ninguém eu era. Eu era de mim. Eu, Riobaldo. Medo. Medo que maneia”. Tentamos nos vitimizar, procurando convencer a nós mesmos que somos consumidos pelo medo. Mas o que acontece é o contrário. Nós consumimos o medo como dependentes químicos que todos somos dele.
O medo é uma commodity que a tudo impulsiona. A mídia, a indústria de remédios, a indústria de armamentos, religiões, ideologias. É com prazer escondido que procuramos “o meio do redemunho”. Entender isso é o que Guimarães Rosa quis dizer com “aumentar a cabeça para o total”. Nós destruímos, nós apavoramos, nós construímos, nós encantamos. Somos nós. Não há culpa ou responsabilidade externa a nós. Na beleza e na feiura (como se essa visão binária de mundo fosse possível). É a nossa jornada conjunta. Não binária. Decolonial.
Como Guimarães termina seu infinito romance: “Diabo não há! É o que eu digo, se for… Existe é homem humano. Travessia.”
Pesquisa feita em UCs de uso sustentável aponta que redução do número de indivíduos é maior em até 5 km das populações humanas; porém, é possível minimizar os efeitos negativos com estratégias de manejo
Foram instaladas 720 armadilhas fotográficas em 100 comunidades locais, dentro e fora de nove áreas protegidas de uso sustentável (foto: Ricardo Sampaio)
Luciana Constantino | Agência FAPESP – A existência de comunidades ribeirinhas e tradicionais em reservas extrativistas da Amazônia Legal não configura um risco para espécies de aves e mamíferos consideradas alvos de caça para subsistência, como mostra pesquisa publicada na revista Biological Conservation.
Porém, o estudo sugere que, para diminuir os efeitos negativos da caça de subsistência, seria importante promover estratégias de manejo, entre elas reduzir o consumo local de espécies sensíveis – como anta, queixada e mutum – e coibir o comércio de carne de caça nas áreas urbanas, priorizando principalmente comunidades locais mais próximas das cidades e em regiões de florestas de terra firme, onde a pesca em água doce e outras fontes de proteína aquática são escassas ou inexistentes.
Fruto do doutorado do analista ambiental do Instituto Chico Mendes de Conservação da Biodiversidade (ICMBio) Ricardo Sampaio, o trabalho mostrou que a redução da chamada “abundância” (uma espécie de contagem do número de indivíduos das espécies) ocorre até 5 quilômetros (km) de distância a partir das comunidades humanas.
Para o trabalho, foram usadas 720 armadilhas fotográficas em 100 comunidades locais, dentro e fora de nove áreas protegidas de uso sustentável – sendo cinco reservas extrativistas (Resex), duas reservas de desenvolvimento sustentável (RDS) e duas florestas estaduais – na região centro-oeste da Amazônia brasileira.
Geraram registros de 29 espécies de mamíferos e aves, pesando mais de cinco quilos, entre elas pacas, antas, mutuns e jacus. Em áreas onde a população desenvolve ou tem acesso a manejo sustentável de pescados, como é o caso do pirarucu na região do Médio Purus e do rio Juruá, no Estado do Amazonas, a tendência é de redução da pressão de caça sobre as espécies terrestres.
“O principal resultado do trabalho é que o fator mais relevante para alterar a diversidade, a abundância e a biomassa das espécies é a distância em relação à comunidade. Mesmo assim, detectamos que as comunidades humanas têm um impacto reduzido na biodiversidade, desmistificando algumas discussões que questionam o papel de unidades de conservação de uso sustentável para a proteção da biodiversidade. O manejo de base comunitária da fauna pode ser um caminho para garantir a segurança alimentar dessas pessoas, além de proteger a biodiversidade”, diz Sampaio à Agência FAPESP.
Os resultados foram publicados em meio à retomada do protagonismo da Amazônia nas questões ambientais e do lançamento da Declaração de Belém, que estabelece entre seus pontos o “aumento das reservas de vegetação nativa mediante incentivos financeiros e não financeiros e outros instrumentos para a conservação”. O documento foi assinado em agosto pelos líderes dos países integrantes da Organização do Tratado de Cooperação Amazônica (OTCA) durante a Cúpula da Amazônia, realizada no Pará.
“Resultados práticos, como os que obtivemos na pesquisa, ajudam a criar ambientes de discussão e processos institucionais para lidar com um tema que é tabu no Brasil – a caça de subsistência. Agora o desafio é sensibilizar os gestores sobre esses resultados e trazê-los para a prática”, avalia Sampaio.
O trabalho recebeu apoio da FAPESP por meio de projeto coordenado pelo pesquisador Ronaldo Gonçalves Morato, ex-coordenador do Centro Nacional de Pesquisa e Conservação de Mamíferos Carnívoros (Cenap) do ICMBio. Morato e seu grupo já haviam publicado outro artigo mostrando que a distância de centros urbanos e a disponibilidade de proteína de origem aquática são os fatores que mais influenciam na avaliação de como moradores de Unidades de Conservação (UCs) percebem a sustentabilidade da caça nesses locais (leia mais em: agencia.fapesp.br/38547).
Também assinam o artigo publicado na Biological Conservation o professor Adriano Garcia Chiarello, do Departamento de Biologia da Faculdade de Filosofia, Ciências e Letras de Ribeirão Preto da Universidade de São Paulo (FFCLRP-USP), e Carlos Augusto Peres, da University of East Anglia (Reino Unido). Peres recebeu o prêmioFrontiers Planet, que elegeu os três melhores artigos científicos do mundo na área ambiental nos últimos três anos. O trabalho premiado foi divulgado na revista PNAS.
Pressões
Os pesquisadores destacam que o trabalho representa um dos esforços de maior escala usando armadilhas fotográficas para examinar as respostas da população de vertebrados à caça em regiões da floresta tropical com maior biodiversidade do mundo, a Amazônia.
O grupo aponta que a redução de animais é fruto da maior pressão de caça próximo às comunidades. Contudo os impactos negativos nas florestas ao redor, tais como maior incidência de fogo, extração de madeira e presença de cachorros domésticos utilizados para a caça também podem repelir os animais próximo às comunidades, conforme registrado para 13 espécies avaliadas.
Nesse sentido, o pesquisador conta que o estudo já rendeu resultado prático. Quando o grupo estava fazendo o trabalho de campo em uma comunidade da região do Rio Liberdade (Resex Riozinho da Liberdade), no Acre, os moradores locais discutiam a efetividade de um acordo local para a caça de subsistência, mas divergiam sobre o uso ou não de cachorros para a atividade.
Os cientistas instalaram então as armadilhas em ambas as margens do rio, onde o uso de cães era permitido (margem direita) e a outra (margem esquerda) sem essa técnica. Ao recolher as imagens e apresentar à comunidade, viram que havia mais animais selvagens, chamados pelos próprios moradores locais de “bichos de carne de caça” ou simplesmente “caça”, onde o cachorro não era empregado. “Na reunião havia mulheres, crianças, lideranças locais. Mesmo morando em áreas de floresta, muitos viram pela primeira vez algumas espécies animais por meio das imagens das armadilhas”, lembra Sampaio.
Ele conta que depois de alguns meses recebeu uma minuta de reunião em que as imagens subsidiaram a decisão coletiva de não usar mais os cachorros de caça na comunidade. “Posteriormente essa decisão foi adotada no plano de manejo da unidade de conservação, que tem as regras definidas pela própria comunidade. Esse foi um resultado positivo na tomada de decisão local e na conservação da biodiversidade”, comemora o pesquisador, que defende aliar o conhecimento científico ao tradicional das populações locais, especialmente ribeirinhos e indígenas.
De acordo com a legislação, as reservas extrativistas são espaços territoriais que visam assegurar a proteção dos meios de vida e a cultura de populações tradicionais, como ribeirinhos, indígenas e quilombolas, bem como assegurar o uso sustentável dos recursos naturais da área.
As populações desses locais podem ter sua fonte de renda baseada no extrativismo e, de modo complementar, na agricultura de subsistência e criação de animais de pequeno porte. As áreas das Resex são do poder público e é proibida a prática da caça amadora ou profissional.
The Artissima fair, at the Oval Lingotto in Turin, features 181 galleries from 33 countries this year, including 39 newcomers mostly from outside Italy Edoardo Piva
Artissima, Italy’s leading contemporary art fair, has often looked to the future and sometimes even anticipated it, both by identifying emerging trends, artists and galleries, and by foreshadowing developments of the art fair model. In 2007, when Andrea Bellini succeeded the fair’s founder, Roberto Casiraghi, Artissima became the first contemporary art fair to employ a director from the curatorial world—a now increasingly common practice. The fair’s current director, Luigi Fassi, who was appointed in 2022, heads up Artissima’s landmark 30th edition this month, which will see 181 galleries (58% foreign) from 33 countries exhibit at the Oval Lingotto arena on the outskirts of Turin. Longstanding participants include Jocelyn Wolff, from Paris, and Lia Rumma, from Milan. They will join 39 newcomers, including Good Weather (Little Rock, Chicago), Cristina Guerra (Lisbon), Meyer*Kainer (Vienna), Raster (Warsaw), The Sunday Painter (London) and Unit 17 (Vancouver).
The Art Newspaper: Each edition of Artissima typically has a theme. But why give a theme to an event whose primary objective is commercial?
Luigi Fassi:This year’s theme is “Relations of Care” and comes from a 2022 text by Renzo Taddei—one of the most authoritative contemporary anthropologists in Latin America and beyond. Establishing “relations of care” is what Artissima has done for almost 30 years, within several art professional communities in Turin: the gallery owners, artists of course, curators, journalists, museum directors and also the collectors and aficionados who have now, through several generations from 1994 to 2023, developed their passions into vocations. All of them have made the city’s interest in art evolve in an increasingly sophisticated way.
The theme of this year’s Artissima, which is directed by Luigi Fassi, is “Relations of Care” Alessandro Peirone
This year, the historic section, Back to the Future, looks to the 1950s but focuses only on female artists.
Back to the Future is jointly curated by Francesco Manacorda (the newly appointed director of the Castello di Rivoli contemporary art museum in Turin)—who was the director of Artissima in2010 and 2011, and who founded the this section—and Defne Ayas, a curator of Turkish origin, based in Berlin. They are focusing their attention on geographical areas that are, above all, far removed from traditional Modernism or Western Modernisms, such as the Middle East and North Africa. Manacorda and Ayas are identifying female artists who developed extremely innovative work, which has directly influenced future generations of artists in those countries. It is a section that this year, as it has been in the past, strongly demonstrates the ability of the fair to engage institutions and exhibition curators—it is a section that we could imagine being able to catapult straight into a museum.
Why do you often call Artissima an “accelerator”?
Artissima is first and foremost a market fair that has nevertheless become an institution due to its ability to create content, i.e. ideas and projectsbuilt directly with the artists. This term “accelerator” comes from the fair’s ability to respond to many needs, those of the collector who wishes to discover unknown galleries and artists, the curators and museum directors who need stimuli to compose the exhibition calendar of their institution. For this reason we have 39 galleries taking part in Artissima for the first time, most of them non-Italian. Last year there were 40. This produces novelty and continued attraction. I like to think of Artissima as an art world start-up for these types of galleries.
Artissima’s satellite shows outside the Oval Lingotto often cause concern among gallerists, who fear their customers will be distracted by the amount of things to see away from their stands.
It is essential for the fair to expand itself inside the Oval as well as outside the Oval, through thinking with the artists and the galleries. The exhibition The Human Condition by the Italo-Brazilian curator Jacopo Crivelli Visconti, at the Gallerie d’Italia, is dedicated to works by artists represented by the Artissima galleries, providing an extra opportunity for the artists and the dealers themselves.
We could give other examples in this sense. But everything is designed not to create distraction, but rather to deepen what is seen at the Oval.
In the summer of 2016, a fifty-seven-year-old Texan named Stephen McRae drove east out of the rainforests of Oregon and into the vast expanse of the Great Basin. His plan was to commit sabotage. First up was a coal-burning power plant near Carlin, Nevada, a 242-megawatt facility owned by the Newmont Corporation that existed to service two nearby gold mines, also owned by Newmont.
McRae hated coal-burning power plants with a passion, but even more he hated gold mines. Gold represented most everything frivolous, wanton, and destructive. Love of gold was for McRae a form of civilizational degeneracy, because of the pollution associated with it, the catastrophic disruption of soil, the poisoning of water and air, and because it set people against one another.
Gold mines needed to die, McRae told me years later, around a campfire in the wilderness, when he felt that he could finally share his story. “And the power plant too. I wanted it all to go down. But it was only that summer I got up the balls to finally do it.”
He was compelled at last to act because of what he had seen in the conifer forests of Washington and Oregon that summer. They were hot and dry when they should have been cool and lush, rich with rain. He saw few of the birds that he had thought of as his companions in the Pacific Northwest—the flycatchers and vireos, the hermit warbler, the Pacific wren, the varied thrush. Even the most common birds, say the dark-eyed junco with its flashing white tail and sharp trilling, were nowhere to be found. Living out of the back of his car, camping on public lands, he stomped about at night before his fire with fists clenched, enraged at the loss.
As far as authorities know, McRae had committed industrial sabotage only once before, in San Juan County, Utah, on April Fools’ Day 2015. It was an attack on an electrical substation, a crime for which, had he been caught and convicted, he could have faced imprisonment under terrorism enhancement statutes for as many as twenty years, even though no human life had been endangered by the act. This was an essential point for McRae. “They called me a terrorist with anarchist intentions,” he would later explain. “But my hatred is for machines, not people.” He referred to the complex of machines and its technocratic tenders as the “megamachine,” after the formulation of the social historian Lewis Mumford, who warned against the takeover of society by technologies that would make us its dependents and, at long last, its servants—technologies that have now deranged the climate because they are fueled by burning carbon. “Down with the megamachine” was McRae’s motto.
Now he struck as opportunity arose, on his way across northern Nevada, headed east on I-80, bound for the Newmont power plant and mines. On the evening of August 30, 2016, while driving down a dirt road to his campsite in the foothills of the Montana Mountains in Humboldt County, some hundred and fifty miles northwest of the Newmont site in Carlin, he happened upon the Quinn River substation, a 115-kilovolt node of the sort that typically serves large industrial customers.
At 8 am the next day, he pulled up near the substation in his rickety purple Isuzu truck. The long shadows of the Nevada morning stretched across the desert. McRae scanned the horizon for traffic or pedestrians. Seeing no one, he raised his .30–40 Krag, a rifle known for its power and accuracy, and fired a single round from inside the truck. The bullet pierced the cooling fins of the transformer, as intended, causing mineral oil to gush onto the sagebrush.
The noise of the shot was tremendous, and for a moment it stunned him. He looked around as though finally awake to what he was doing. It was then that he asked himself something he would end up asking a lot, which was how it had come to this, how had he stooped so low.
McRae had once been a successful entrepreneur, the head of a high-end carpentry business in Dallas that catered to wealthy clients and brought him a six-figure income. At the height of his success, he oversaw ten journeymen, but the 2008 financial crash killed the business. Now he no longer had a cell phone, credit card, or bank account. He lived hand to mouth, working odd jobs. He had been married and in love, his wife a backpacker like him, smitten with wild places. But she was long gone, like everything else that had been stable and orderly in his life.
For one at the bottom of society’s rungs, who had given up on the doomed American dream, nomadism in the wide-open West was the way to go. He relieved his anger and despair and sadness in the solace of his campsites, where at least there were trees to talk to, stars immense and cosmic, and, if he was lucky, a purling stream running down from snowmelt high in the mountains, above the burning desert. There was room to be a bum with a degree of dignity, to disappear in the enormous backcountry, beyond the eyes of the cops and the reach of what McRae called in his diary “the Corporate Police State.” Here he declared himself a “madly matriarchal, tree-hugging, godless feminist with a gun.”
He ejected a single cartridge as he shot the Quinn River substation, and he noted where it fell in the truck so that he could quickly dispose of the evidence. (Always shoot from inside the truck, he advised, so there are no ballistics or shoe prints at the site.) Satisfied that the transformer would fail within the hour, he turned east into the sun on Nevada State Route 140, bound for the Newmont power plant.
But the Newmont attack never happened, for the stupidest of reasons: he got a flat. He knew he would have to drive on a spare over many dirt roads to escape, and he didn’t dare attempt taking out the facility on three good tires alone.
I first met McRae—and first appeared in his FBI case records—not long after the aborted assault on the Newmont site. On October 7 that same year, I stopped by the home of a friend in Escalante, Utah, where I was living that fall. The friend was Mark Austin, a sixty-five-year-old contractor who built homes for wealthy transplants. He could see I was rattled, and welcomed me in for a drink. A deer—a large buck—had charged across a field as I motored slowly into town and had rammed its antlers into my driver’s side window, shattering glass in my face and hair before fleeing. McRae was at Austin’s house for dinner when I arrived, and he thought my story was funny. The beasts of the earth are coming for you, he said. “It’s your New York plates.”
I was in no mood for joking. McRae seemed to be a big, aggressive, silver-haired Southerner, above six feet in height, with enormous shoulders, hands about the size of my head, and a broad smile that revealed a hollow space of molars gone from lack of care. A steak-fed Fort Worth or Dallas specimen, I figured, who made up with body mass what’s lacking in mind. This first impression, needless to say, was all wrong.
We ended up drinking a lot of wine, then tequila. We bonded over his love of English literature and Russian despair, the Brontës and Dostoevsky. He seemed quick to hate and quick to love, his disposition a mix of mania and menace. He said he was a follower of Native American cultures, enamored especially of the Apache, their chiefs Geronimo and Cochise, the last and fiercest of indigenous leaders in the lower forty-eight to resist white invasion. He fancied himself their ally, and he soon declared with adolescent glee his intention to destroy the white man’s industrial civilization. His most important targets were fossil fuel infrastructure and the energy grid. We discussed taking down the enemy—the Fortune 500 CEOs, say—and how the world would be a better place if they were all beheaded. “Would you really have a problem with me killing the Koch brothers?” he asked.
His eyes gleamed. He shouted over us. (The other participants in the conversation were Viva Fraser, my girlfriend; Erica Walz, publisher of the local newspaper; and Mark.) We talked about animals getting vengeance on Homo sapiens, attacking our cars en masse, cars that had killed so many of them. “Organize the animals!” cried McRae. He stood up and paced and sat down and stood up again. We drank more, and I mentioned to him that I had been a writer for this magazine. He hooted and smiled a half-toothless smile and said, “Harper’s! Goddamn!”
I have a copy of the FBI’s recording of this conversation courtesy of the Department of Justice. It goes on for another four or so hours. Much of it is garbled, the sound quality so lousy it’s unintelligible. There’s a dramatic moment around hour three, when McRae and I, barely acquainted, consider heading out the next morning to target the “infrastructure that makes industrial capitalism work,” because, he said, it “is very weak at certain points.” He harangued us, saying, “I hate everything about this culture.” We listened. I tried to get a word in. He shouted me down. According to the FBI transcript, which I’ve distilled slightly, the conversation went as follows:
McRae: I’m willing to die for what I believe. I’ve committed fifty fucking felonies against the corporate state in the last sixty days.
Ketcham: Really?
McRae: Yeah, that are called terrorism. Because I hate ’em.
Austin: I hope to God that you haven’t been killing people, dude.
McRae: I don’t have to kill people.
Ketcham: If you actually have been committing such felonies, you should be quiet about it.
McRae: I don’t care.
Ketcham: In fact, I’m inclined to think that because of your bloviating about it, that you haven’t been doing any of it.
McRae: You think I’m a fuckin liar? You’re gonna call me a fuckin liar? Come on, come get in my fuckin truck! In an hour we’ll commit five felonies.
(McRae starts yelling and cursing.)
Austin: Steve, Steve, relax!
McRae: Come get in my truck with me, in one hour, we can make five felonies. I’m not fuckin scared of the Goddamn NSA, the FBI, or any of those motherfuckers.
Walz: But Steve, what’s the point?
McRae: To teach the world how to destroy industrial capitalism. I have a political agenda to destroy industrial capitalism. I don’t want to hurt people. I’ve never hurt people. And I will try to avoid that at all costs. I know how to shut down huge mining operations costing millions and millions of dollars, by myself, for weeks. I know how to shut them down. Do I need to go on? I’m serious as a fuckin heart attack. Think I’m lying?
Ketcham: Let’s go out and do it.
McRae: You think I’m full of shit. You don’t believe me. Okay, we’ll go tomorrow, okay, is that cool? I’ll do it in broad daylight, that’s when they don’t expect it . . . You question my integrity, man.
Walz: You know what, I don’t want to hear this conversation. I prefer you not have this conversation in front of me at all.
McRae: Relax, I’m a fuckin liar, okay, fuckin lies. So anyway, do you want to meet me here in the morning?—well then, just tell me when and where.
Ketcham: We’ll talk tomorrow.
McRae: I’ll be around tomorrow . . . And if you really are a journalist you could help out my political cause. I think we can beat them. Enough of us can beat them.
Tomorrow never came, of course, because I thought he was a blowhard and a liar. I figured he’d read The Monkey Wrench Gang too many times. (He had.) The 1975 novel by Edward Abbey—the literary father of ecological sabotage—features a quartet of citizen defenders of the sandstone wilderness in southern Utah, so-called monkey wrenchers, who, like their hero Ned Ludd, the mythical eighteenth-century English weaver who rebelled against the machines overtaking the textile industry, vow to throw a spanner in the works. (Ludd’s forebears in fourteenth-century Holland are said to have used wooden shoes called sabots to smash the weaving machines that were putting them out of business.) Armed with gasoline, explosives, and rifles, Abbey’s saboteurs burn bulldozers and other road-building equipment, blow up bridges, and send coal trains into canyons, all the while pursued by local authorities. McRae, it seemed to me, was playacting in some cartoonish Abbeyite pulp fiction.
After that encounter, I had no contact with McRae for several weeks. We met again at a raucous Halloween party in Escalante, where I was dressed as a terrorist. McRae sat motionless in a chair, without a costume, alone and apart. He cast me a dour look. My face was mostly hidden in a balaclava and a kaffiyeh, and I pulled away the covering and smiled at him in what I imagine now was a dismissive way. Later he told me that it hurt his feelings to be doubted by a journalist from his favorite magazine. He had been serious about taking me along to commit felonies.
Measured against the march of machine civilization, the history of ecological sabotage has been one of petty local victories, scorched-earth retreats, and, ultimately, abject failure. The movement dates to the Seventies, when Abbey’s fictional monkey wrenchers inspired a generation of young Americans to coalesce into the direct-action group Earth First! “It is time for women and men, individually and in small groups, to act heroically and admittedly illegally in defense of the wild, to put a monkeywrench into the gears of the machine,” wrote Dave Foreman, a former Wilderness Society lobbyist and co-founder of Earth First!, and Bill Haywood in their 1985 how-to book Ecodefense. “We will not make political compromises,” the group had earlier announced in a 1980 newsletter. Saboteurs using their methods, they promised, could be “effective in stopping timber cutting, road building, overgrazing, oil & gas exploration, mining, dam building, powerline construction.” Members of Earth First! organized to defend old growth forests in the Northwest, spiking trees with sixty-penny nails to ward off chainsaw crews, blockading roads to stop logging trucks, and sitting in the crowns of ancient fir and pine to prevent their felling. They were occasionally successful, but mostly not.
The Earth Liberation Front, ideological heirs to Earth First!, arrived on the scene in the Nineties with new and improved acts of ecodefense. The elves, as they called themselves, set fire to ski resorts, SUVs on dealer lots, and labs where animals were believed to be abused. Their stated intent was to harm no living being, and to their credit, they maintained that standard. The rising militancy of the ELF produced consternation in U.S. law enforcement circles, and enough financial trouble to turn the heads of a few corporate leaders. Their crowning achievement was the daring and intricate 1998 arson of the Vail Ski Resort, undertaken with the Animal Liberation Front, which caused an estimated $24 million in damage. This led the FBI to call the two groups “the most active criminal extremist elements in the United States.” By 2006, dozens of ELF members had ratted one another out under the tremendous pressure of terrorism statutes enacted in the wake of 9/11. The FBI proclaimed victory, but writ large the government’s work was much ado about very little. The sum of the damages from arson, vandalism, and animal releases over decades of activity totaled a mere $45 million.
The growing understanding of ecosabotage as a serious endeavor coincided with an era of expansive plunder and spoliation, referred to by some historians as the Great Acceleration, a period in which human enterprise under capitalism kicked into overdrive, taxing the earth in unprecedented ways. Almost every measure of ecological health suggested decline. The problem was the seeming inevitability of the juggernaut, the constancy of its forward motion, and the inefficacy of mere individuals in the face of such odds.
Given these trends, it’s unsurprising that the movement would turn to catastrophism. At the vanguard of this shift was a group called Deep Green Resistance, the brainchild of the authors Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Aric McBay, self-described ecophilosophers and activists who had published numerous books of remonstrance against industrial society. The three asserted that our civilization was untenable and would render the earth uninhabitable. Jensen in particular exhorted his readers to
put our bodies and our lives between the industrial system and life on this planet. We must start to fight back. Those who come after, who inherit whatever’s left of the world once this culture has been stopped . . . are going to judge us by the health of the landbase, by what we leave behind. They’re not going to care how you or I lived our lives. They’re not going to care how hard we tried. They’re not going to care whether we were nice people.
His was an apocalyptic vision: the longer we waited to dismantle the machine, the more its progress would undermine the planet’s carrying capacity, and the greater our ultimate suffering would be. The American public had encountered this thinking before, of course, as it was popularized in the Nineties by the homicidal maniac Theodore Kaczynski, whose manifesto inveighed against industrial society and called for its violent overthrow. “In order to get our message before the public,” Kaczynski wrote, “we’ve had to kill people.” He addressed himself to those
who will be opposed to the industrial system on a rational, thought-out basis, with full appreciation of the problems and ambiguities involved, and of the price that has to be paid for getting rid of the system.
A majority of people will appreciate, on a rational basis, that the price is too high. As unsustainable as the megamachine may be, we must maintain it because hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, of people would likely suffer without its provisioning. To his credit, Jensen, who has Crohn’s disease and depends on high-tech drug treatments, admits that he’ll be among the first to go. (“I am also aware,” he writes, “that the fact that these drugs will probably save my life is not a good enough reason to not take down civilization.”) McRae likened our state of affairs to life on the Death Star. The Death Star succors, energizes, feeds, clothes, medicates, houses, warms, and cools us with its throbbing complexity—woe to the planets in the way of its progress. There are jobs galore paying good money to make sure the Death Star is oiled and functioning. “More money for more gadgets, gizmos, gewgaws, baubles,” McRae told me in an email. “The endless fascination with more, more, more shiny objects to continue a life of tending machines.”
After abandoning the attack on the Newmont gold mine, McRae pulled off I-80 into Carlin to get his flat fixed. He was paranoid to the point of delirium. Traffic cameras might catch his truck, cops might take random notice of him. Then there was the awfulness of visiting a Nevada town, the hideous, twisted faces of the people, the heat bearing down, the sky a burning chromium white, every interaction a kind of torture.
From Carlin he headed south in a zigzag on rough dirt roads, avoiding cops and people, feeling the pit in his gut grow. He had his eye on a substation in White Pine County two hundred miles away, not far from a favorite place replete with good memories, Great Basin National Park. As a young man he had climbed the mountain meadows with his wife. They slept under whispering bristlecone pines on a midsummer night. When he shot the Baker substation in White Pine County on September 14, 2016, he had expected, naïvely he now realized, that at some point he would have experienced an affirmation similar to the feeling he got when he climbed a mountain or smelled pines in the breeze, that is, a sense of joy, purpose, a vision of truth and beauty and meaning. But this never came. And it never would.
Every lesson from his good middle-class upbringing told him there was something wrong with what he was doing. He looked for rationalizations in the perpetual muttering of troubled people on the verge of breakdown. He spoke aloud before a lonely campfire. He thought of the peace-loving water defenders in the Dakotas, the Native Americans at Standing Rock who hoped to block the Dakota Access Pipeline, and who were attacked and beaten that summer by hired thugs from the oil companies. What had the togetherness of locked hands accomplished in defense of Mother Earth?
He had tried peaceful resistance for most of his life, volunteering for conservation groups and contributing what he could. But it was nonsense, a waste of time and money and, worse, spirit. It felt like a Ponzi scheme. He supported the right candidate, he thought: the Democrats, Hillary Clinton in particular. (He told friends and family that he was “gonna support a woman, because a woman is the only person who can lead us out of this mess.”) He tried to follow the example of his father, Jack, a civics teacher who taught in Dallas public schools for thirty years. Jack had been a socialist and later an LBJ Democrat. He believed in civic discourse, civil disobedience if necessary—but never rage and riot, never violence. When McRae was five years old, in 1964, his father traveled to Mississippi to join the Freedom Summer black voter drives.
McRae spent his late forties as caretaker to his ailing father, who died in 2008, at eighty-six, of congestive heart failure. He once told his dad that to be a pacifist was to be a fool. Jack had served in World War II, in the bloody campaigns in North Africa and Italy, so he knew violence. He was a quiet man who rarely raised his voice. But he became angry with his son. They argued for hours. McRae figured his father would be ashamed at what he had become.
It took him more than a week to cross Nevada, crawling on rutted back roads in his crummy old car, through the dust and tumbleweeds and the vast scorched salt basins and over the spines of mountains. He was heading toward the high country of the Colorado Plateau, the Canyonlands, where he found some carpentry work from Mark Austin. When McRae had visited Escalante in 2015 and first met Austin, he thought he had found a friend, a rare person he could trust. Their worldviews had seemed to align.
As the two got to know each other, Austin expressed sympathy with certain small acts of sabotage, such as toppling roadside commercial billboards. This delighted McRae. Better still, Austin was a fan of Abbey’s writing and a close friend of Doug Peacock, the Vietnam War veteran on whom Abbey based his wild-eyed saboteur George Hayduke in The Monkey Wrench Gang. McRae adored Hayduke, and was impressed that Austin knew the man who’d been the inspiration for him. He confided in Austin about Deep Green Resistance and spoke vaguely of sabotage he may or may not have committed. McRae also described, in what Austin said was an obsessive manner, taking down the energy grid. “He was maniacal,” Austin recalled. “There’s a big difference between cutting down illegal billboards and taking out infrastructure.” McRae worked several months on Austin’s job sites, drew a paycheck, hit the road, and Austin, who was mildly frightened by the man’s rhetoric, expected never to hear from him again.
On September 25, 2016, the power in Escalante went out for several hours. It had gone out, in fact, across much of southwestern Utah. It was a Sunday, and I was in Escalante at the time. The townsfolk wandered into the streets with wide eyes, wondering what had happened, as power tended to fail only in big winter storms. When Austin heard that the cause was rifle fire on a substation, he immediately suspected McRae. By the time McRae showed up to ask Austin for work two days later, Austin had already called the Garfield County sheriff to share his suspicions.
Sheriffs in White Pine and Humboldt counties had been mulling the similarities of the attacks in their jurisdictions, and now they reached out to Garfield County. Perhaps this suspect was tied to the 2014 strikes on the California electrical grid, including a rifle attack in Silicon Valley described by the New York Times as “mysterious and sophisticated.” The FBI also took an interest. The bureau suggested that Austin engage with the suspect and record their conversations. Within a few weeks of taking a job with Austin, McRae was revealing details of his recent crimes. He also began hinting at a grand plan that he was hatching for the fall. It involved taking out so many substations across the Southwest that a blackout would stretch from Las Vegas to the coast.
Though Austin considered the prospect alarming, ecosabotage now appears, in some circles, a reasonable response to the mad trajectory of the carbon machine. Even the conformist bozos in Hollywood have hinted at sympathy, with the film How to Blow Up a Pipeline, which takes after a book of the same name by Andreas Malm, a human ecologist at Lund University. Malm has advocated for organized attacks on fossil fuel infrastructure and the disruption of oil supplies. He says that he is inspired by the suffragettes of England, whose militancy centered on property destruction.
The suffragettes specialized in the “argument of the broken pane,” their enraged crews of well-dressed women mobbing central London to shatter storefronts and tear down statues and paintings with hammers and axes. Following the defeat of legislation that would have given them the vote, in 1913 the women embarked on “a systematic campaign of arson,” Malm writes, burning or blowing up “villas, tea pavilions, boathouses, hotels, haystacks, churches, post offices, aqueducts, theatres.” They burned cars and sank yachts. Over the course of a year and a half, they claimed responsibility for at least 337 attacks, which resulted in several deaths. So it should be, argues Malm, with the fight against fossil fuels: we need a critical mass of saboteurs willing to move beyond non-violence.
Or consider Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2020 novel The Ministry for the Future, in which a character clubs to death a wealthy man on a beach off of Lake Maggiore, and gets away with it, his murderous rage driven by having witnessed a heat wave in India that killed more people “than in the entirety of the First World War.” The book spans decades of climatic unraveling to chronicle the rise of the Children of Kali, a cabal that kills thousands of innocent people on Crash Day, sometime in the 2030s, by flying drones into the engines of dozens of commercial airliners. It’s a ruthless act of terrorism that Robinson’s omniscient narrator celebrates for causing the end of global aviation as we know it. No literary justice here: the saboteurs live on to fight another day, unpunished.
Here’s a novelist of no small renown—Barack Obama has endorsed Robinson’s book—who envisions an effective sabotage campaign by cells that operate in large numbers, coordinate on a global scale, and act with fanatical devotion and a code of absolute secrecy. “The War for the Earth is often said to have begun on Crash Day,” he writes. Thereafter, campaigns to sink container ships, poison the meat supply, and, not least, take out power plants and substations result in electricity outages, stock market crashes, and the end of globalization. The upside of Crash Day is that the many commercial flights felled “had been mostly occupied by business travelers.”
In the twenty-two hours of recordings that Mark Austin produced for the FBI, McRae does most of the talking. He is by turns irate, preacherly, vulgar, lyrical, sanctimonious, and cynical, but always inflamed with the belief that he can change the world. He glories in the abiding solitude of the Escalante canyons, with their curvaceous walls and hanging gardens, where in his youth he wandered for days on end. He hates that his only means of income is building homes for the rich.
McCrae, who was at one time a methamphetamine addict, also reveals that he did time in jail as a young man—imprisoned in Texas on felony charges of burglary and drug possession. Mostly he goes on tirades about the things and people he hates. These include roads, cars, fences, ranchers, cities, computers, cell phones, the rich but also the ignorant poor (most of all, white-trash Trump voters), Nazis, NPR’s Kai Ryssdal, technocrats, Apple, the internet, and monotheism. Austin listens to all this with seeming sympathy, and he chimes in at strategic moments to urge him on.
Most of the recordings were made in Austin’s pickup truck while the men drove to and from work sites, hauling construction materials across the canyons and plateaus of southwest Utah. It was during these winding sojourns that McRae began to speak in code, describing the “work” and “research” he had pursued in Nevada and his more recent “activities” in Utah.
After a long drive from Escalante to Kanab, Utah, in the third week of October, he and Austin visited a company that cut sandstone for home decor, and then drove east on Highway 89, familiar to McRae as the road he had traveled when he attacked the Buckskin substation three weeks earlier. Edward Abbey had considered this highway to be holy territory: there were the deep, remote canyons of the Paria River, and its tributaries that cut through the nearby wilderness to areas that no machine could reach. McRae, too, thought it sacred.
A construction crew was laying fiberglass cable along the highway. “What the hell is this right here?” asked Austin.
“They’re working on, that’s microfiber ca—God, now I’m tell—” said McRae, catching himself. Then he let go. “I know what all this shit is and exactly what they’re doing and I’ve got my eye on it, and I really want to fuck it up. How about that?”
He and Austin muttered back and forth. “This is Abbey’s country,” McRae went on. “Is there nothing sacred, nothing, fucking nothing? I bet you could take a gallon of gasoline and put it on that cable and burn it.”
On and on their conversations go for nearly four weeks, as Austin baits McRae and McRae bites, until at last he all but admits that he shot the Buckskin substation with his rifle. Still, Austin prods. He notes that McRae issued no communiqués, which made his effort meaningless. The Earth Liberation Front, by contrast, publicized every attack with well-written and occasionally charming statements. Austin goes on to wonder about McRae’s bizarre candor with “the journalist,” McRae’s term for me. Why risk exposing himself to a relative stranger? “I thought Ketcham was an anarchist bomb thrower,” he says. “Now I see he’s a coward.”
As the FBI prepared for an arrest, McRae described his plans for “putting Las Vegas in darkness.” He gloried in the vision of the death of the Luxor Hotel & Casino (the largest single source of light pollution on the planet) and of Caesars Palace (a monument to empire), and the quieting of the noise and febrile lights of the Strip. The air-conditioned, sunless tunnels of bright malls, the sprawl and traffic and smog, the whorehouses and strip clubs, the doomed Sodom in the desert—shut off the power and it would come to an end. Las Vegas once meant “the meadows,” but that sweet oasis was long gone, dried up and pounded under concrete. Of all the cities of the West, Vegas was most deserving of destruction.
Austin listened and nudged McRae for more information. McRae described “the grandmomma” of attacks, “five substations in a row,” by which he could produce a cascading and catastrophic energy failure across the southern regions of Nevada and California. The key was a substation facility near the town of Moapa. He expected to do $20 million in damage to the transformers alone. “If I had all the money and time, I would bring the world to its knees by myself,” he told Austin.
“This is the culmination of four years for me this week,” McRae said in a recording dated November 2, 2016. “I’m going to meet my destiny.” The next day, he awoke at 7 am to load his purple Isuzu with the camping gear he had stored in the basement of Austin’s house, where he had also stored his .30–40 Krag, a testament to how much he trusted Austin. He was headed to finish the job at Newmont and then hit Moapa. It was a lovely blue-sky day. As he emerged from the basement, seven FBI agents surrounded him. A SWAT team told him to put his hands up, which he did without resistance or complaint. He thought it laughable. Why would anybody point a gun at poor empty-handed Stephen Plato McRae? They cuffed him, and as he was being hauled away he looked over to Austin, who was also being cuffed. McRae knew instantly that Austin had betrayed him.
He was held first in Iron County in Utah, then in Salt Lake City, then put on a plane and transported to a federal pretrial holding facility in North Carolina. When three separate psychiatrists working with the U.S. Bureau of Prisons examined McRae in the years following his arrest, one concluded that he was not fit to stand trial and another questioned his fitness. McRae showed “psychotic symptoms,” including “thought disorganization, and pre-occupying persecutory delusions,” along with “depressive symptoms meeting criteria for a major depressive episode.” He also displayed “symptoms of mania.” The psychiatrists believed that he may have had bipolar disorder, possibly schizoaffective disorder, and also narcissistic personality disorder—which “makes him difficult to work with.”
While he awaited trial in the two years after his arrest, McRae and I spoke often on the phone and exchanged letters. Sometimes he shouted at me, demanding that I “do the right thing” by immediately publishing an article that came to his defense. His plan was to tell the prosecutors “to go fuck themselves,” as he would never take a plea deal. Sometimes his voice was resigned and trembled with sadness and fear. As the trial date approached, McRae’s lawyer, Robert Steele, informed me that I might be called as a witness for the defense. At the last minute, at Steele’s urging, McRae pleaded guilty to one count of industrial sabotage, the attack on the Buckskin facility in Utah, and admitted to three other attacks, against the substations in Humboldt County and White Pine County, Nevada, and in San Juan County, Utah, for which he was not prosecuted.
He was sentenced to eight years and placed in one of the nastiest institutions in the federal system, a medium-security facility in Florence, Colorado, near the supermax where the Unabomber was held until his death earlier this year. McRae saw cellmates get murdered and commit suicide. He was nearly killed in a race riot. His health, poor to begin with, took a dive with the stress of incarceration. He was infected three times with COVID-19, and was chronically infected with MRSA. Given time served, McRae wasn’t expected to get out a day before his sixty-third birthday. He suddenly felt very old.
There were few people McRae felt he could call who would answer, and often he spent hours waiting in line to spend his fifteen minutes of allotted daily phone time talking with me. His calls arrived randomly. Once, when I was with my daughter Josie, who was then nine years old, I put him on speakerphone; I had told her his story and she wanted to hear his voice.
“McRae, Josie is here, so you know,” I said.
“H-hi, Josie,” he stammered.
“Hi, McRae,” said Josie.
Then a long pause—rare for this motormouth. He knew that I’d told her what he had done, why he was in prison. “Josie, I just wanna . . . I just wanna say . . . I was thinking about . . . the youth when I did what I did. About you. I want nine-year-old girls to still be able to see a grizzly when they are grown up.”
“I want to see a grizzly, too,” replied Josie. It was the natural thing to say. Then his fifteen minutes were up and the line went dead.
Psychologists have come up with a term—solastalgia—for the feeling that occurs with the disappearance of what’s perceived as the normal, stable, healthy, natural world. The Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht, who coined the term, identifies it as a suffering at the loss of solace, “a deep emotional response to the desolation of a loved home environment.” The condition of solastalgia, then, is primarily one of grief, environmental grief, mourning for the death of home, which is the place of solace. (“Stephen McRae seems to be a man who refused to ignore such emotion,” Albrecht told me.)
It may be that hypersensitivity to the ecological unraveling of the only home on earth we know, will ever know, is the necessary condition of an attuned few who can awaken the rest of us to the existential nature of the ecological crisis we face. If Steve McRae sounds to some like a madman, I’d suggest he’s ahead of the curve in feeling deeply the pain of solastalgia. Perhaps those of us who deny the seriousness of the crisis have had our senses dulled, our hearts hardened, and are not feeling enough.
I went to see McRae last December, two months after he got out of prison. An elderly Mormon couple who lived on a homestead in the remote Gila National Forest of southwestern New Mexico had taken him in. McRae worked as the caretaker of a little cabin they rented to elk hunters. In his emails to me, he was grateful that the family had welcomed him, but he was also deeply depressed. During my visit, I confronted him with the fact that his attacks on substations had not in any way altered the course of industrial civilization. He shattered a glass, stood up, and screamed at me. I thought he was ready to kill.
I stayed awhile in the cabin with him. We went camping in the Gila Wilderness. No machines are allowed in the protected area, no mechanized transport of any kind. We built a towering fire of pinyon and juniper and oak. It was the only time I saw him relax, happy that we were together in this sacred redoubt, beyond the reach of what he called Machine World. He spent most of the time talking about the forest. “When I walk these forests, I feel the trees’ antiquity and their beingness,” he said. He told me of the giant ponderosa pines in the high-elevation ciénaga wetlands unique to the region, where they mingle with pinnacles of rock and Gambel oaks and gray oaks as gray as the lichen-engulfed rocks that surround them. Fiery red blooming cactus at eight thousand feet—“Gorgeous!” he cried. He told me of cliff rose, and mountain mahogany, and wild yellow pea in green meadows with joyous miniature flowers of varied brilliance painting the broken land. And about the twisted, bleached, and sun-scorched ancient bonsai alligator juniper that cluster on steep cliffs. “No anthropo-meddling needed for those bonsai, praise Jesus! I’ll show you some really beautiful ones tomorrow,” McRae said. And in the morning he did.
Caixa reúne 11 textos teatrais de representantes de povos de várias partes do Brasil
Dirce Waltrick do Amarante
7 de outubro de 2023
[RESUMO] Pioneiros do teatro feito no Brasil, ainda que suas práticas culturais não se enquadrem nos conceitos da estética ocidental, os indígenas encenaram suas narrativas em espetáculos que fundem, sem distinções, música, dança, religião e ritos, por exemplo. Caixa recém-lançada agrupa e mostra a variedade desses textos, compondo, segundo organizadores dos livros, uma visão descolonizadora a respeito das diferenças culturais entre os povos.
Uma das primeiras perguntas que faço nas minhas aulas no curso de artes cênicas da UFSC (Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina) é: “Onde nasceu o teatro?”. A resposta, ainda que titubeante, costuma ser: “Na Grécia”.
Essa provocação me permite citar um trecho de uma aula magna ministrada em 1992 pelo escritor Ariano Suassuna: “Em qualquer manual de teatro escrito no Brasil, vão encontrar que o teatro no Brasil surgiu com os jesuítas, o teatro de Anchieta no século 16. E encontra também que o teatro, em geral, nasceu na Grécia”. Suassuna prossegue: “Ora, o que nasceu na Grécia foi o teatro grego! Acho uma coisa tão lógica, mas o pessoal bota: o teatro nasceu na Grécia. Quer dizer, o teatro brasileiro nasceu na Grécia, o início do teatro chinês foi o teatro grego? O teatro brasileiro, olhe aqui, o teatro brasileiro nasceu […] aqui”.
O teatro brasileiro, concordo com Suassuna, nasceu aqui, e, acrescento, com os indígenas, ainda que as práticas artísticas e culturas indígenas não se encaixem facilmente em conceitos da estética ocidental. A palavra teatro, de origem grega, tem sido usada, porém, para nomear a arte extraocidental.
De acordo com Patrice Pavis, em “Dicionário de Teatro”, o conceito pode ser abrangente: “O teatro é mesmo, na verdade, um ponto de vista sobre um acontecimento: um olhar, um ângulo de visão e raios ópticos o constituem. Tão somente pelo deslocamento da relação entre olhar e objeto olhado é que ocorre a construção onde tem lugar a representação” (tradução de Maria Lúcia Pereira, J. Guinsburg, Rachel Araújo de Baptista Fuser, Eudinyr Fraga e Nanci Fernandes).
Uma das características da cultura indígena seria a não separação entre música, dança, pintura, rito, religião, história, política etc. Se essas práticas são classificadas em gêneros estanques, em espetáculos, exposições e publicações de obras dos povos originários, isso não provém dos próprios autores, mas obedecem à lógica que estrutura as instituições e também o mercado.
O termo mito, assim como o termo teatro, passa atualmente por revisão. No livro “As Línguas da Tradução”, organizado pelo Programa de Pós-graduação em Estudos da Tradução da UFSC e pela Universidade de Princeton, os pesquisadores Pedro Cesariano e Jamille Pinheiro Dias propõem o conceito de arte verbal na análise das narrativas indígenas. Já Joana Mongelo, doutoranda de etnia guarani, emprega, em outras publicações, a locução história viva no lugar de mito, para enfatizar o vigor e a atualidade dos relatos dos povos originários.
Tanto a arte verbal como a história viva poderiam se encaixar no conceito abrangente de teatro, tal como foi proposto por Pavis.
Pedro Cesarino, ao descrever o processo de tradução de “yawa shõka, canto para amansar os porcos do mato”, lembra que “esses cantos acompanham eventos que não acontecem dentro do corpo-maloca do xamã que os enuncia, mas sim em posições paralelas nas quais interagem as espíritas auxiliares Shoma e os demais agentes antagonistas (espíritos agressivos, por exemplo)”.
Quando Cesarino recolheu o canto, ele havia sido entoado na forma de um rito que poderíamos chamar de teatral e religioso, durante o convalescimento de um jovem caçador: “Enquanto o jovem era rezado, Antonio [Brasil Marubo], por sua vez, cantava outro shõki sozinho sobre um pote contendo fezes, pelos e pedaços de terra com os rastros das queixadas […]. Ao final, o pote seria então pendurado na porta da maloca, a fim de atrair os porcos que, de fato, se aproximaram da aldeia em grande número no dia seguinte, rendendo uma farta caçada”.
Por isso, a tradução da arte verbal impõe grandes desafios. Na versão de certos cantos bororos, Sérgio Medeiros propôs, em um de seus livros de poesia, uma recriação pessoal do “Canto de Caça às Antas”, com a seguinte observação: “Não pude traduzir o variado vocabulário bororo, em especial a minuciosa enumeração dos diversos gaviões. Meu ponto de partida é a versão ‘rústica’ de César Albisetti e Ângelo Jayme Venturelli. Os cantos de caça e de pesca, convém lembrar, são entoados sempre na choupana central, na noite que precede uma caçada ou uma pescaria coletiva”.
“Dessa cerimônia participam as mulheres da aldeia, que são então autorizadas a entrar na casa dos homens para louvar a beleza dos animais. Cada canto tem um chefe, o qual é, segundo os autores da enciclopédia bororo, o indivíduo que inicia e guia o ritual, postando-se de pé e marcando o ritmo com um par de pequenos maracás. Outros índios reforçam o ritmo com um tamboril e instrumentos de sopro.”
A pesquisadora Jamille Pinheiro Dias aconselha ser “preciso evitar ao máximo os empobrecimentos na recepção da performance ritual pela escrita alfabética”. É preciso também, diz Pinheiro, “tomar consciência de que muitas vezes se estará lidando com ‘textos-fontes’ que só se tornaram audíveis porque houve um árduo processo de aprendizado físico e intelectual, além de negociações com seres não humanos, donos dos cantos, espíritos mestres de diferentes patamares do cosmos, como nos ensinam os especialistas indígenas da Amazônia“.
Nos palcos, os povos indígenas vão aos poucos ganhando protagonismo e canibalizando não só o conceito de teatro ocidental, como também o de dramaturgia, área em que colaboram com autores consagrados.
Zé Celso, por exemplo, trabalhava na adaptação de “A Queda do Céu”, a partir dos relatos de Davi Kopenawa, antes do acidente que o vitimou. A primeira leitura pública da peça foi apresentada em 2023 na terceira edição do TePI (Teatro e os Povos Indígenas), em São Paulo, com curadoria de Ailton Krenak e Andreia Duarte.
Na mesma ocasião foi lançada a “Caixa de Dramaturgias Indígenas“(n-1 edições), organizada por Trudruá Dorrico e Luna Rosa Recaldes. Ela contém 11 textos teatrais, assinados por indígenas de várias partes do Brasil, além de estrangeiros, oriundos do Chile e da Argentina. Algumas dessas peças trazem a colaboração de não indígenas.
Segundo as organizadoras, se trata do “primeiro compilado de dramaturgias dos povos originários publicado no Brasil, até onde sabemos”. Dorrico e Recaldes enfatizam o fato de o projeto ser político, uma vez que “o gênero teatro foi utilizado pelos jesuítas, sob o nome de auto, para moralizar e catequizar os povos indígenas. Sabemos que catequizar foi o mesmo que colonizar”.
Assim, a caixa “propõe uma descolonização acerca das diferenças culturais entre os povos, suas cosmogonias, transmutando a percepção equivocada do ser indígena como único e homogêneo”.
Reunindo pequenos livros muito diversos entre si, a caixa apresenta peças em que o português se mistura com línguas indígenas. A peça “Contra Xawara”, de Juão Nyn, é escrita em português, mas coloca o “português de ponta cabeça, transformando o Y em Oka”.
Uma boa parte das peças, para usar um conceito ocidental, poderia ser considerada pós-dramática, no sentido dado por Hans-Thies Lehmann: “O novo teatro, de acordo com o que ouvimos e lemos, não é isto, não é aquilo e nem é outra coisa: predomina a ausência de categorias e palavras para a determinação positiva e a descrição daquilo que ele é. Pretende-se aqui levar tal teatro um passo além e estimular métodos de trabalho teatrais que escapem da concepção convencional sobre o que o teatro é ou precisa ser” (tradução de Pedro Süssekind).
Ele conta que, com Davi Kopenawa Yanomami, visitou Atenas (o berço do teatro para muitos). Foram à Acrópole, ao Arco de Adriano e ao Templo de Zeus: “Chegamos lá perto do mar Egeu, numa ruína, com aquelas colunas quebradas, com pedra caída para todo lado, restos de antigos templos tombados no chão e um mar lindo à nossa vista”.
Eles contemplavam a paisagem quando lhes perguntaram o que haviam achado desse lugar. Kopenawa se adiantou e respondeu: “Eu gostei de vir aqui, porque agora eu sei de onde saíram os garimpeiros que vão destruir a minha floresta, fuçar a minha floresta como se ela fosse pó. O pensamento deles está aqui. Eles fizeram isso aqui e foram fazer o mesmo lá onde eu vivo. Eles reviram a terra, eles quebram tudo”.
Krenak então comenta que esse cenário em ruínas oferece “a completa compreensão daquele tempo mítico em que os antigos gregos viveram, quando o Olimpo era um lugar de trânsito de seres divinos, bem como da passagem daquele lugar para um lugar histórico, onde você faz monumentos, constrói templos, constrói cidades e faz guerras. É a transição do tempo do mito —tempo em que é possível tudo, em que é possível que os mundos se intercambiem— para um mundo chapado, com uma história linear”.
Talvez o rito indígena atualize o vigor das origens do teatro cada vez que um mito é encenado numa aldeia, numa praça, num palco.
The matters most in need of public discussion, the ones that most urgently need to be discussed, are those that are difficult to discuss within the frameworks now available to us. Although one wishes to go directly to the matter at hand, one bumps up against the limits of a framework that makes it nearly impossible to say what one has to say. I want to speak about the violence, the present violence, the history of violence and its many forms. But if one wishes to document violence, which means understanding the massive bombardment and killings in Israel by Hamas as part of that history, one can be accused of ‘relativising’ or ‘contextualisation’. We are to condemn or approve, and that makes sense, but is that all that is ethically required of us? In fact, I do condemn without qualification the violence committed by Hamas. This was a terrifying and revolting massacre. That was my primary reaction, and it endures. But there are other reactions as well.
Almost immediately, people want to know what ‘side’ you are on, and clearly the only possible response to such killings is unequivocal condemnation. But why is it we sometimes think that asking whether we are using the right language or if we have a good understanding of the historical situation would stand in the way of strong moral condemnation? Is it really relativising to ask what precisely we are condemning, what the reach of that condemnation should be, and how best to describe the political formation, or formations, we oppose? It would be odd to oppose something without understanding it or without describing it well. It would be especially odd to believe that condemnation requires a refusal to understand, for fear that knowledge can only serve a relativising function and undermine our capacity to judge. And what if it is morally imperative to extend our condemnation to crimes just as appalling as the ones repeatedly foregrounded by the media? When and where does our condemnation begin and end? Do we not need a critical and informed assessment of the situation to accompany moral and political condemnation, without fearing that to become knowledgeable will turn us, in the eyes of others, into moral failures complicitous in hideous crimes?
There are those who do use the history of Israeli violence in the region to exonerate Hamas, but they use a corrupt form of moral reasoning to accomplish that goal. Let’s be clear, Israeli violence against Palestinians is overwhelming: relentless bombing, the killing of people of every age in their homes and on the streets, torture in their prisons, techniques of starvation in Gaza and the dispossession of homes. And this violence, in its many forms, is waged against a people who are subject to apartheid rules, colonial rule and statelessness. When, however, the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee issues a statement claiming that ‘the apartheid regime is the only one to blame’ for the deadly attacks by Hamas on Israeli targets, it makes an error. It is wrong to apportion responsibility in that way, and nothing should exonerate Hamas from responsibility for the hideous killings they have perpetrated. At the same time, this group and its members do not deserve to be blacklisted or threatened. They are surely right to point to the history of violence in the region: ‘From systematised land seizures to routine airstrikes, arbitrary detentions to military checkpoints, and enforced family separations to targeted killings, Palestinians have been forced to live in a state of death, both slow and sudden.’
This is an accurate description, and it must be said, but it does not mean that Hamas’s violence is only Israeli violence by another name. It is true that we should develop some understanding of why groups like Hamas gained strength in light of the broken promises of Oslo and the ‘state of death, both slow and sudden’ that describes the lived existence of many Palestinians living under occupation, whether the constant surveillance and threat of administrative detention without due process, or the intensifying siege that denies Gazans medication, food and water. However, we do not gain a moral or political justification for Hamas’s actions through reference to their history. If we are asked to understand Palestinian violence as a continuation of Israeli violence, as the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee asks us to do, then there is only one source of moral culpability, and even Palestinians do not own their violent acts as their own. That is no way to recognise the autonomy of Palestinian action. The necessity of separating an understanding of the pervasive and relentless violence of the Israeli state from any justification of violence is crucial if we are to consider what other ways there are to throw off colonial rule, stop arbitrary arrest and torture in Israeli prisons, and bring an end to the siege of Gaza, where water and food is rationed by the nation-state that controls its borders. In other words, the question of what world is still possible for all the inhabitants of that region depends on ways to end settler-colonial rule. Hamas has one terrifying and appalling answer to that question, but there are many others. If, however, we are forbidden to refer to ‘the occupation’ (which is part of contemporary German Denkverbot), if we cannot even stage the debate over whether Israeli military rule of the region is racial apartheid or colonialism, then we have no hope of understanding the past, the present or the future. So many people watching the carnage via the media feel so hopeless. But one reason they are hopeless is precisely that they are watching via the media, living within the sensational and transient world of hopeless moral outrage. A different political morality takes time, a patient and courageous way of learning and naming, so that we can accompany moral condemnation with moral vision.
I oppose the violence that Hamas has inflicted and have no alibi to offer. When I say that, I am making clear a moral and political position. I do not equivocate when I reflect on what that condemnation presupposes and implies. Anyone who joins me in this condemnation might want to ask whether moral condemnation should be based on some understanding of what is being opposed. One might say, no, I don’t need to know anything about Palestine or Hamas to know that what they have done is wrong, and to condemn it. And if one stops there, relying on contemporary media representations, without ever asking whether they are actually right and useful, whether they let the histories be told, then one accepts a certain ignorance and trusts in the framework presented. After all, we are all busy, and we cannot all be historians or sociologists. That is a possible way to think and live, and well-intentioned people do live that way. But at what cost?
What if our morality and our politics did not end with the act of condemnation? What if we insisted on asking what form of life would release the region from violence such as this? What if, in addition to condemning wanton crimes, we wanted to create a future in which violence of this sort came to an end? That is a normative aspiration that goes beyond momentary condemnation. To achieve it, we have to know the history of the situation, the growth of Hamas as a militant group in the devastation of the post-Oslo moment for those in Gaza to whom promises of self-governance were never made good; the formation of other groups of Palestinians with other tactics and goals; and the history of the Palestinian people and their aspirations for freedom and the right of political self-determination, for release from colonial rule and pervasive military and carceral violence. Then we might be part of the struggle for a free Palestine in which Hamas would be dissolved, or superseded by groups with non-violent aspirations for cohabitation.
For those whose moral position is restricted to condemnation alone, understanding the situation is not the goal. Moral outrage of this sort is arguably both anti-intellectual and presentist. Yet outrage could also drive a person to the history books to find out how events such as these could happen and whether conditions might change such that a future of violence isn’t all that is possible. It should not be the case that ‘contextualisation’ is considered a morally problematic activity, even though there are forms of contextualisation that can be used to shift the blame or to exonerate. Can we distinguish between those two forms of contextualisation? Just because some think that contextualising hideous violence deflects from or, worse, rationalises the violence, that doesn’t mean we should capitulate to the claim that all forms of contextualisation are morally relativising in that way. When the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee claims that ‘the apartheid regime is the only one to blame’ for the attacks by Hamas, it is subscribing to an unacceptable version of moral accountability. It seems that to understand how an event has come about, or what meaning it has, we have to learn some history. That means we have to widen the lens beyond the appalling present moment, without denying its horror, at the same time as refusing to let that horror represent all the horror there is to represent, to know, and to oppose. The contemporary media, for the most part, does not detail the horrors that Palestinian people have lived through for decades in the form of bombings, arbitrary attacks, arrests and killings. If the horrors of the last days assume a greater moral importance for the media than the horrors of the last seventy years, then the moral response of the moment threatens to eclipse an understanding of the radical injustices endured by occupied Palestine and forcibly displaced Palestinians – as well as the humanitarian disaster and loss of life happening at this moment in Gaza.
Some people justifiably fear that any contextualisation of the violent acts committed by Hamas will be used to exonerate Hamas, or that the contextualisation will take attention away from the horror of what they did. But what if it is the horror itself that leads us to contextualise? Where does this horror begin, and where does it end? When the press talks about a ‘war’ between Hamas and Israel, it offers a framework for understanding the situation. It has, in effect, understood the situation in advance. If Gaza is understood as under occupation, or if it is referred to as an ‘open-air prison’, then a different interpretation is conveyed. It seems like a description, but the language constricts or facilitates what we can say, how we can describe and what can be known. Yes, the language can describe, but it gains the power to do so only if it conforms to the limits imposed on what is sayable. If it is decided that we don’t need to know how many Palestinian children and adolescents have been killed in both the West Bank and in Gaza this year or over the years of occupation, that this information is not important for knowing or assessing the attacks on Israel and the killings of Israelis, then we have decided that we do not want to know the history of violence, mourning and outrage as it is lived by Palestinians. We only want to know the history of violence, mourning and outrage as it is lived by Israelis. An Israeli friend, a self-described ‘anti-Zionist’, writes online that she is terrified for her family and friends, that she has lost people. And our hearts should go out to her, as mine surely does. It is unequivocally terrible. And yet, is there no moment where her own experience of horror and loss over her friends and family is imagined to be what a Palestinian might be feeling on the other side, or has felt after the years of bombardment, incarceration and military violence? I am also a Jew who lives with transgenerational trauma in the wake of atrocities committed against people like me. But they were also committed against people not like me. I do not have to identify with this face or that name in order to name the atrocity I see. Or, at least, I struggle not to.
In the end, though, the problem is not simply a failure of empathy. For empathy mainly takes form within a framework that allows for identification to be accomplished, or for a translation between another’s experience and my own. And if the dominant frame considers some lives to be more grievable than others, then it follows that one set of losses is more horrifying than another set of losses. The question of whose lives are worth grieving is an integral part of the question of whose lives are worth valuing. And here racism enters in a decisive way. If Palestinians are ‘animals’, as Israel’s defence minister insists, and if Israelis now represent ‘the Jewish people’ as Biden insists (collapsing the Jewish diaspora into Israel, as reactionaries demand), then the only grievable people in the scene, the only ones who present as eligible for grief, are the Israelis, for the scene of ‘war’ is now staged between the Jewish people and the animals who seek to kill them. This is surely not the first time that a group of people seeking release from colonial shackles has been figured as animals by the coloniser. Are the Israelis ‘animals’ when they kill? This racist framing of contemporary violence recapitulates the colonial opposition between the ‘civilised ones’ and the ‘animals’ who must be routed or destroyed so as to preserve ‘civilisation’. If we adopt this framework in the course of declaring our moral opposition, we find ourselves implicated in a form of racism that extends beyond the utterance to the structure of everyday life in Palestine. And for that a radical reparation is surely in order.
If we think that moral condemnation must be a clear, punctual act without reference to any context or knowledge, then we inevitably accept the terms in which that condemnation is made, the stage on which the alternatives are orchestrated. In this most recent context, to accept those terms means recapitulating forms of colonial racism which are part of the structural problem to be solved, the abiding injustice to be overcome. Thus, we cannot afford to look away from the history of injustice in the name of moral certitude, for that is to risk committing further injustice, and at some point our certitude will falter on that less than firm ground. Why can’t we condemn morally heinous acts without losing our powers to think, to know and to judge? Surely we can, and must, do both.
The acts of violence we are witnessing in the media are horrible. And in this moment of heightened media attention, the violence that we see is the only violence we know. To repeat: we are right to deplore that violence and to express our horror. I have been sick to my stomach for days. Everyone I know lives in fear of what the Israeli military machine will do next, whether Netanyahu’s genocidal rhetoric will materialise in the mass killing of Palestinians. I ask myself whether we can mourn, without qualification, for the lives lost in Israel as well as those lost in Gaza without getting bogged down in debates about relativism and equivalence. Perhaps the wider compass of mourning serves a more substantial ideal of equality, one that acknowledges the equal grievability of lives, and gives rise to an outrage that these lives should not have been lost, that the dead deserved more life and equal recognition for their lives. How can we even imagine a future equality of the living without knowing, as the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has documented, that Israeli forces and settlers had killed nearly 3800 Palestinian civilians since 2008 in the West Bank and Gaza even before the current actions began. Where is the world’s mourning for them? Hundreds of Palestinian children have died since Israel began its ‘revenge’ military actions against Hamas, and many more will die in the days and weeks to come.
It need not threaten our moral positions to take some time to learn about the history of colonial violence and to examine the language, narratives and frameworks now operating to report and explain – and interpret in advance – what is happening in this region. That kind of knowledge is critical, but not for the purposes of rationalising existing violence or authorising further violence. Its aim is to furnish a truer understanding of the situation than an uncontested framing of the present alone can provide. Indeed, there may be further positions of moral opposition to add to the ones we have already accepted, including an opposition to military and police violence saturating Palestinian lives in the region, taking away their rights to mourn, to know and express their outrage and solidarity, and to find their own way towards a future of freedom.
Personally, I defend a politics of non-violence, in the knowledge that it cannot possibly operate as an absolute principle to be applied on all occasions. I maintain that liberation struggles that practise non-violence help to create the non-violent world in which we all want to live. I deplore the violence unequivocally at the same time as I, like so many others, want to be part of imagining and struggling for true equality and justice in the region, the kind that would compel groups like Hamas to disappear, the occupation to end, and new forms of political freedom and justice to flourish. Without equality and justice, without an end to the state violence conducted by a state, Israel, that was itself founded in violence, no future can be imagined, no future of true peace – not, that is, ‘peace’ as a euphemism for normalisation, which means keeping structures of inequality, rightlessness and racism in place. But such a future cannot come about without remaining free to name, describe and oppose all the violence, including Israeli state violence in all its forms, and to do so without fear of censorship, criminalisation, or of being maliciously accused of antisemitism. The world I want is one that would oppose the normalisation of colonial rule and support Palestinian self-determination and freedom, a world that would, in fact, realise the deepest desires of all the inhabitants of those lands to live together in freedom, non-violence, equality and justice. This hope no doubt seems naive, even impossible, to many. Nevertheless, some of us must rather wildly hold to it, refusing to believe that the structures that now exist will exist for ever. For this, we need our poets and our dreamers, the untamed fools, the kind who know how to organise.
13 October 2023
14 October: An earlier version of this piece referred to ‘lives lost in Tel Aviv’. This has now been corrected.
O pensamento de rede liga de forma inovadora a conservação e o uso dos recursos naturais
Rafael L. G. Raimundo
29 de setembro de 2023
Estudante de biologia no ano 2000, um dia eu cruzava a Unicamp rumo a uma reunião no Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas. Contrariado, pensava como um antropólogo poderia me ajudar na aplicação da ecologia teórica para a conservação da natureza. Prossegui com resignação e certa curiosidade. Afinal, quem me havia mandado ali fora Keith Brown Jr., um dos fundadores da ciência ecológica brasileira e meu professor à época. Ele sabia da minha visão sobre a falta de serventia das ciências humanas para as abordagens quantitativas em pesquisa ambiental que me interessavam. Também sabia que eu estava errado.
Ainda alheio à dimensão do caminho entre a biologia e as humanidades, cheguei à sala da reunião para, desavisadamente, encontrar outro nome lendário da ciência ambiental. O antropólogo Mauro Almeida cochilava em sua escrivaninha, mas abriu os olhos e se pôs a digitar quando entrei. Logo me encarou: “Você deve ser o rapaz da biologia que quer falar de evolução e conservação, não?”.
Uma década antes, Almeida e Brown Jr. haviam liderado o movimento científico que apoiou a criação da primeira reserva extrativista brasileira, no Alto Juruá acreano. Combinando ecologia, antropologia e ideias inovadoras sobre governança, fizeram história. A questão que os movia era: podem comunidades locais gerar dados sobre ecossistemas, produção e qualidade de vida para gerir recursos com autonomia? Essa pergunta, bem sabiam, cruzava as fronteiras da ciência.
A gestão com pesquisa participativa no Juruá era uma dentre as múltiplas respostas ao influente artigo do ecólogo norte-americano Garrett Hardin, “A tragédia dos comuns”, publicado em 1968 na revista Science. Hardin havia delimitado um problema ainda atualíssimo: como evitar que indivíduos livres ajam de forma egoísta, maximizando lucros imediatos, destruindo recursos comuns e degradando suas condições de vida?
A norte-americana Elinor Ostrom, que recebeu o Nobel de Economia em 2009, superou a dicotomia radical entre privatização e controle estatal como possíveis soluções ao mostrar que o comportamento coletivo humano pode, sim, ser compatível com a conservação em condições de autogoverno. Podemos extrair princípios de boa governança coletiva de recursos a partir de diversos exemplos.
Mas as soluções propostas para a tragédia dos comuns ainda não consideravam adequadamente os processos ecológicos e evolutivos que geram e mantêm a biodiversidade. E a aceleração do Antropoceno – a época geológica moldada pela atividade humana – intensificava uma realidade de colapso ecossistêmico crescente. A tragédia seguia seu curso.
Estimulado por Mauro Almeida, me fixei no Juruá entre 2006 e 2009. Trabalhei em gestão e delineamento de políticas públicas voltadas à sustentabilidade. Entretanto, a interface entre ciência e governança ainda parecia fragmentada. Buscando mais integração, voltei para a universidade.
Em meu doutorado na USP, revisitei minha velha conhecida ecologia teórica, agora sob um olhar de redes complexas. Contrastando com o senso comum, a palavra “complexa” aqui não significa “complicada”, mas descreve um sistema que não pode ser compreendido pela soma de seus componentes. A ciência da complexidade estuda as interações entre os componentes do sistema, como conexões entre bairros que formam a rede de mobilidade de uma metrópole, fluxos entre os setores de uma empresa ou interações entre as espécies de um ecossistema.
Na natureza, as redes ecológicas descrevem os múltiplos efeitos que as espécies geram ao interagir. Toda vez que um beija-flor visita uma flor, que uma lagarta consome uma folha ou que uma onça mata uma presa, haverá consequências diretas e indiretas para as populações de outras espécies na intrincada rede da vida. Ao desvendar a organização e as dinâmicas das interações, a ciência de redes desvenda cascatas ecológicas e outros processos que moldam o funcionamento de florestas, lagos ou recifes de coral.
Quando ingressei na UFPB como professor, publiquei um artigo sobre a aplicação de redes adaptativas para restauração ecológica na revista Trends in Ecology and Evolution. O conceito de rede adaptativa se refere às retroalimentações entre mudanças nas características dos componentes (nós) da rede e a estrutura das conexões entre esses componentes (topologia), as quais desencadeiam alterações de estado e comportamentos emergentes no sistema.
Por exemplo, se um predador de topo passa a predar um grande herbívoro ao qual antes ele não tinha acesso, pode desencadear uma cascata de efeitos ecossistêmicos, aliviando a pressão do herbívoro sobre as plantas e influenciando a produtividade primária. A maior disponibilidade de vegetais pode alavancar o crescimento das populações de outros animais que, eventualmente, servirão como novas opções de presas para predadores, gerando mais respostas comportamentais ou evolutivas e, finalmente, reconfigurando a rede de interações.
Modelos de redes adaptativas tratam matematicamente desse vai e vem de cascatas ecológicas que moldam os ecossistemas. Eles são úteis para tentar prever a propagação de efeitos da adição e remoção de espécies no contexto da restauração de ecossistemas. Por exemplo, a erradicação de uma espécie invasora pode gerar cascatas ecológicas ao alterar tamanhos populacionais, interações e características ecológicas das outras espécies.
Essas cascatas também podem surgir da reintrodução de espécies de animais que haviam sido extintas localmente e cumpriam funções ecológicas-chave — as chamadas “engenheiras do ecossistema” — como grandes felinos predadores de topo ou aves frugívoras dispersoras de sementes que faziam a biodiversidade vegetal fluir na paisagem.
Precisamos agora avançar rumo a empreendimentos que combinem modelos de redes adaptativas com experimentos de restauração ecológica em larga escala, criando uma via de mão dupla entre abordagens teóricas e empíricas para viabilizar uma “engenharia da biodiversidade“. Ousar aplicar amplamente a ciência da complexidade é urgente para fazer frente ao colapso funcional dos ecossistemas que testemunhamos de forma generalizada.
Meu próximo passo nessa interface entre ambiente e sociedade será usar modelos de redes adaptativas para entender como mudanças simples na organização socioprodutiva podem se propagar como catalisadoras de sustentabilidade ao reconstruir a biodiversidade e a funcionalidade dos ecossistemas e, ao mesmo tempo, gerar inclusão social e inovação econômica. Ou seja, sigo buscando respostas para a tragédia dos comuns que incluam a perspectiva da ecologia evolutiva para fazer frente aos desafios do Antropoceno.
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Rafael L. G. Raimundo é professor do Departamento de Engenharia e Meio Ambiente e coordenador do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Ecologia e Monitoramento Ambiental da Universidade Federal da Paraíba – Campus IV.
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The 30th edition of Artissima will be held from November 3-5, 2023. The theme will be ‘Relations of care. Here are facts and news from the contemporary art fair in Turin.
Everything is ready for the 2023 edition of Artissima, Torino’s contemporary art fair celebrating its 30th edition. Directed for the second year by Luigi Fassi and realized with the support of Main Partner Intesa Sanpaolo, the 30th edition of Artissima will be held from Friday, November 3 to Sunday, November 5, 2023, as always at theOval spaces in Turin, which will host the fair’s four established sections – Main Section, New Entries, Monologue/Dialogue and Art Spaces & Editions – and the three curated sections – Drawings, Present Future and Back to the Future – that are also hosted on the digital platform Artissima Voice Over. The 2023 edition of Artissima features a total of 181 Italian and international galleries, 68 of which are proposing monographic and curated projects to better present their artists’ work to the public.
“The 30th edition of Artissima in Turin,” explains director Fassi, “recounts the fair’s ability to draw a design vision from its three decades of activity to continue projecting into the future, deploying the strength of its Italian and international network. All of this has been made possible through intensive global research and scouting to continue to offer collectors and museum operators the excitement of meeting galleries and artists of the highest caliber from Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia. The nearly forty galleries participating in Artissima for the first time in 2023, along with countless confirmations and returns, testify to the fair’s attractiveness and its ability to be a catalyst for experimentation, research, and market investment in the arts. As made manifest by an archive of three decades of activity, again this year those who bet on Artissima – gallerists, collectors, curators and visitors – will be rewarded by the discovery that they have been able to intercept in Turin the works and artists who are the protagonists of the near future.”
Welcoming the public to Artissima will be the installation LaCittaDinAmica: a labyrinth of transparent alvelular polycarbonate panels, illuminated with polychromatic reflections born from the encounter between natural light and the colors of the panels, which will be placed at the main entrance of the pavilion thanks to the dialogue between Jacopo Foggini and the company Dott.Gallina. After being presented in Milan on the occasion of Fuorisalone 2023, the intervention conceived by Foggini lands in Turin as well, seeing its elements cut and tilted, in an allegory of plasticity toward change, with a new labyrinthine pattern rearrangement.
The theme of Artissima 2023 is Relations of Care, a concept developed in a recent essay by Brazilian anthropologist Renzo Taddei, professor at the Universidade Federal de São Paulo in Brazil, dedicated to formulating a hypothesis for overcoming the crises of our time by taking inspiration from indigenous Amazonian thought. Relations ofCare identifies and proposes care as the premise and ultimate goal of the advancement of knowledge, which must be, first and foremost, aimed at preserving the diversity and value of every form of life in the world we inhabit.
In the essay Intervention of Another Nature: Resources for thinking in (and out of) the Anthropocene, published in the collected volume Everyday Matters (Ruby Press, Berlin, 2022), Renzo Taddei reflects on the need to validate all forms of knowledge and production of new knowledge only from a radical dimension of care that opens to an unprecedented sense of responsibility toward the natural world and all the species that inhabit it. By adopting such a reversal of perspective, Western-minded thought nurtures the possibility of opening up to a new imaginary, inspired by the model of the indigenous communities of the Amazon, which have always placed at the center of their existence the care of the environment and surrounding nature as fundamental elements for survival. Taddei thus invites us to follow this model of thought, abandoning any ideology of Western man’s otherness and superiority to nature, in order to reconnect with other forms of knowledge and coexistence and thus generate new possible relationships of care. Care imagined through the insights generated by the artists’ art and thought nourishes social and individual sensibilities and becomes a matrix of all the relationships that form the fabric of our lives.
Artissima also promotes numerous awards for artists and galleries in collaboration with art institutions, partner companies and foundations, which are confirmed and renewed for the 30th edition. In fact, the 2023 edition will be enriched by two important novelties: the Diana Bracco Prize – Women Entrepreneurs in Art promoted by Fondazione Bracco in collaboration with the Roberto De Silva and Diana Bracco Foundation of Milan, and the Pista 500 Prize promoted by Pinacoteca Agnelli. In addition, the historic Fondo Acquisizioni promoted by Fondazione per l’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT is increased to 200,000 euros on the occasion of the fair’s 30th anniversary. Adding to these novelties is the IDENTITY Fund for New Entries, which supports the participation of three galleries in the section, selected by an exceptional jury composed of the fair’s four previous artistic directors. Also confirming their support are the promoters of the historic and younger awards: illycaffè with the illy Present Future Award; VANNI occhiali with the VANNI occhiali #artistroom Award; Tosetti Value – The Family office with the Tosetti Value Award for photography; Collezione La Gaia with the Matteo Viglietta Award; Fondazione Sardi per l’Arte with the Carol Rama Award; Fondazione per l’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT with the OGR Award; Fondazione Merz with the “ad occhi chiusi….”; Fondazione Oelle with the ISOLA SICILIA Award; MEF Museo Ettore Fico in Turin with the Ettore and Ines Fico Award.
The organization of Artissima is handled by Artissima srl, a company of Fondazione Torino Musei, established in 2008 to manage the artistic and commercial relations of the fair. The Artissima brand belongs to the City of Turin, the Piedmont Region, and the Metropolitan City of Turin. The 30th edition of Artissima is realized through the support of the three brand-owning entities, jointly with Fondazione CRT through Fondazione per l’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT, Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo, and the Turin Chamber of Commerce.
2022 Edition of Artissima
The Sections
The sections of Artissima 2023, as anticipated, are seven in number. Four are selected by the fair’s gallery committee: Main Section brings together a selection of the most representative galleries on the world art scene (this year 98 have been chosen, of which 46 are foreign); New Entries, a section reserved for emerging galleries on the international scene participating in the fair for the first time, will have 17 galleries this year, of which 13 are foreign; Monologue/Dialogue is reserved for emerging galleries and/or those with an experimental approach who intend to present a monographic stand or a dialogue between the works of two artists, with 38 galleries of which 24 are foreign; Art Spaces & Ed itions hosts galleries specializing in artists’ editions and multiples, bookstores, project spaces and nonprofit spaces, with 9 exhibitors.
There are three sections curated by international boards of curators: Drawings, Present Future, Back to the Future. The three curated sections of the fair will be present at the fair with monographic booths and will live on the digital platform Artissima Voice Over with dedicated insights.
The Main Section, New Entries, Monologue/Dialogue, Art Spaces & Editions Committee is formao tda Paola Capata, Monitor gallery, Rome, Lisbon, Pereto; Raffaella Cortese, Raffaella Cortese gallery, Milan; Philippe Charpentier, mor charpentier gallery, Paris, Bogota; Nikolaus Oberhuber, KOW gallery, Berlin; Antoine Levi, Ciaccia Levi gallery, Paris and Milan; Elsa Ravazzolo Botner, A Gentil Carioca gallery, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo; Guido Costa, Guido Costa Projects gallery, Turin. Curatorial advisors are: Krist Gruijthuijsen, director, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Jacopo Crivelli Visconti, independent curator, São Paulo.
The galleries at Artissima 2023 come from four continents and 33 countries: Austria, Brazil, Canada, China, Colombia, South Korea, Cuba, United Arab Emirates, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Israel, Italy, Lithuania, Mexico, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Czech Republic, United Kingdom, Romania, Slovenia, Spain, United States, South Africa, Switzerland, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkey, Hungary, Uruguay and Zimbabwe. Exhibiting for the first time at the fair are 39 galleries. These include Good Weather (North Little Rock, Little Rock, Chicago), Cristina Guerra (Lisbon), Meyer*Kainer (Vienna), Raster (Warsaw), The Sunday Painter (London), Unit 17 (Vancouver).
The Identity track.
Artissima celebrates its thirtieth anniversary by launching, with the support of the Compagnia di San Paolo Foundation, IDENTITY: a three-year path to enhance the fair’s identity traits that at each edition will offer in-depth project focuses to highlight the strategic lines that in its thirty-year history have contributed to Artissima’s current positioning in the art world.
IDENTITY 2023 is dedicated to the New Entries section that welcomes interesting emerging national and international galleries participating in the fair for the first time. IDENTITY takes concrete form in the activation of IDENTITY Fund for New Entries, an economic fund to support three galleries to participate in the section, and in the realization of New Entries BAR, a special project at the fair curated by Cripta747, aimed at offering the galleries in the section an additional showcase and opportunity to deepen their research.
Artissima 2023 in numbers
Special projects
There are several special projects also for the 30th edition of Artissima. They start with the New Entries Bar for Identity, a place, a project and a story created with the intention of enhancing the research of the galleries of the New Entries section and their artists within the conceptual platform IDENTITY, supported by the Compagnia di San Paolo Foundation. The New Entries BAR is curated by Cripta747 and will welcome the fair audience in a dedicated area of the pavilion.
Again, Artissima and Juventus continue the dialogue by renewing Artissima Junior, the project that involves young visitors to the fair, between the ages of 6 and 11, in the creation of a choral work of art under the guidance of an artist tutor, who this year will be Eugenio Tibaldi, represented by Umberto Di Marino Gallery in Naples.
Artissima and Fondazione per l’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT, will then present the third episode of the Beyond Production project platform, created in 2021 to reflect on the relationship between new technologies and art. In 2023, Beyond Production Symposium will be presented, a conference with outstanding international speakers, hosted at OGR Turin and open to the public of enthusiasts.
The digital front is also active: thanks to Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo, which has supported Artissima Digital since 2017, the commitment to amplify the fair experience through the production of digital thematic content and insights on the artissima.art and Artissima Voice Over platforms, dedicated to the three curated sections, continues. In addition to the reconfirmation of the AudioGuides to accompany the public’s visit to the fair, the 2023 edition will be enriched with two new pieces of unreleased content in collaboration with important authors from the cultural world. The in-depth multimedia cultural magazine Lucy. On Culture in dialogue with Brazilian anthropologist Renzo Taddei will explore the many nuances of the Relations of Care edition’s theme, while personalities from the world of art, theater and literature will take turns at the microphones of the new podcast Lo stereoscopio dei solitari, produced in collaboration with Il Giornale dell’Arte, which will be launched during the days of the fair.
Coming to its second edition is the AudioGuide project: Lauretana, a longtime partner of Artissima, is promoting for the second year the podcast project designed to accompany visitors on an autonomous and personal tour of the fair’s stands. The project is part of Artissima Digital powered by Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo.
Then there will be The Planetary Curator: starting from a reflection on the theme of the edition of Artissima 2023, Relations of Care, CURA. magazine has conceived and curated The Planetary Curator, a series of talks conceived as a single stream of thought and discussion on the theme of care, bringing into dialogue outstanding personalities in the contemporary art scene. The talk series will animate the Meeting Point on Saturday, Nov. 4.
Finally, the Made In project: an academy for young artists that allows them to live in the company and assimilate and incorporate, within their own research, the technological and operational knowledge with which they will come into contact. Born in 2022 thanks to the support of the Turin Chamber of Commerce, Made In announces its second edition and new partner companies-Dr.Gallina, Guido Gobino Cioccolato, Kristina Ti, Pinifarina Architecture-inviting them to discover the works produced during the first edition at the fair.
António Guterres told world leaders gathered in New York that their efforts to address the climate crisis had come up “abysmally short.”
António Guterres in India this month. “History is coming for the planet-wreckers,” he has said. Credit: Arun Sankar/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The world’s top diplomat, António Guterres, the United Nations secretary general, on Tuesday told world leaders their efforts to address the climate crisis had come up “abysmally short” and called on them to do what even climate-ambitious countries have been reluctant to do: stop expanding coal, oil and gas production.
“Every continent, every region and every country is feeling the heat, but I’m not sure all leaders are feeling that heat,” he said in his opening remarks to presidents and prime ministers assembled for their annual gathering in the General Assembly. “The fossil fuel age has failed.”
Mr. Guterres, now in his second and last term, has made climate action his centerpiece issue and has become unusually blunt in his language about the need to rein in the production of fossil fuels and not just focus on reducing greenhouse gas emissions from their use.
As always, he pointed to the world’s 20 largest economies for not moving fast enough. As always, he stopped short of calling on specific countries.
Not China, the world’s coal behemoth. Not Britain or the United States, who both have ambitious climate laws but continue to issue new oil and gas permits. Not the United Arab Emirates, a petrostate where a state-owned oil company executive is hosting the upcoming United Nations climate negotiations — a move that activists have decried as undermining the very legitimacy of the talks.
The contradictions show not only the constraints on Mr. Guterres, a 74-year-old politician from Portugal, but also the shortcomings of the diplomatic playbook on a problem as urgent as global warming.
“The rules of multilateral diplomacy and multilateral summitry are not fit for the speedy and effective response that we need,” said Richard Gowan, who decodes the rituals of the United Nations for the International Crisis Group.
The 2015 Paris climate accord asks only that countries set voluntary targets to address climate pollution. The agreements that come out of annual climate negotiations routinely get watered down, because every country, including champions of coal, oil and gas, must agree on every word and comma.
The secretary general can cajole but not command, urge but not enforce. He doesn’t name specific countries, though nothing in the United Nations Charter prevents him from doing so.
Despite his exhortations, governments have only increased their fossil fuel subsidies, to a record $7 trillion in 2022. Few nations have concrete plans to move their economies away from fossil fuels, and many depend directly or indirectly on revenues from coal, oil and gas. The human toll of climate change continues to mount.
“He has interpreted his role as a sort of truth teller,” said Rachel Kyte, a former United Nations climate diplomat and a professor at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. “The powers available to him as secretary general are awesome but limited.”
On Wednesday, he is deploying a bit of a diplomatic wink-nod. At a Climate Ambition Summit he is hosting , he is giving the mic only to those countries that have done as he has urged, and only if they send a high-level leader, to show that they take the summit seriously. “A naming and shaming device that doesn’t actually require naming and shaming anyone,” Mr. Gowan said.
Diplomatic jockeying around who will get on the list has been intense. More than 100 countries sent in requests to speak, and Mr. Guterres’s aides have in turn requested more information to prove they deserve to be on the list. What have you done on coal phaseout, some have been asked. How much climate funding have you offered? Are you still issuing new oil and gas permits? And so on.
“It’s good to see Guterres trying to hold their feet to the fire,” said Mohamed Adow, a Kenyan activist.
Mr. Guterres has waited until the last possible minute to make public the list of speakers.
The Secretary General has invited neither the United States nor China, the worlds biggest climate polluters, to speak at the summit on Wednesday. Nor has India secured a speaking invitation. Brazil, South Africa and the European Union have.
Expect the awkward.
John Kerry, the United States climate envoy, is expected to attend but not speak. (Mr. Guterres is giving the mic only to high-level national leaders.) It’s unclear whether the head of the Chinese delegation this year, Vice President Han Zheng, will have a speaking role. The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, has secured the mic. Britain’s prime minister, Rishi Sunak, isn’t coming to the General Assembly conclave at all. Sultan al-Jaber, the head of the Emirati oil company, and host of the next climate talks, is scheduled to speak.
Mr. Guterres will also invite companies with what he calls “credible” targets to reduce their climate emissions to participate. Expect to count them with the fingers of one hand.
“If fossil fuel companies want to be part of the solution, they must lead the transition to renewable energy,” he said Tuesday.
Mr. Guterres, who had led the United Nations refugee agency for 10 years before being selected for the top job, didn’t always make climate change his centerpiece issue.
In fact, he didn’t talk about it when he was chosen to head the United Nations in 2016. Climate was seen as the signature issue of his predecessor, Ban Ki-moon, who shepherded through the Paris Agreement in 2015. Mr. Guterres spoke instead about the war in Syria, terrorism, and gender parity in the United Nations. (His choice disappointed those who had pressed for a woman to lead the world body for the first time in its 70-year history.)
In 2018 came a shift. At that year’s General Assembly, he called climate change “the defining issue of our time.” In 2019, he invited the climate activist Greta Thunberg to the General Assembly, whose raw anger at world leaders (“How dare you?” she railed at world leaders) spurred a social media clash with President Donald J. Trump, who was pulling the United States out of the Paris Accord.
Mr. Guterres, for his part, studiously avoided criticism of the United States by name.
By 2022, as oil companies were raking in record profits in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he amped up his language. “We need to hold fossil fuel companies and their enablers to account,” he told world leaders at the General Assembly. He called for a windfall-profit tax, urged countries to suspend subsidies for fossil fuels and appointed a committee to issue guidelines for private companies on what counts as “greenwashing.”
This year, he stepped into the contentious debate between those who want greenhouse gas emissions from oil and gas projects captured and stored away, or “abated,” and those who want to keep oil and gas tucked in the ground altogether. “The problem is not simply fossil fuel emissions. It’s fossil fuels, period,” Mr. Guterres said in June.
The reactions from the private sector are mixed, said Paul Simpson, a founder and former head of CDP, a nongovernmental group that works with companies to address their climate pollution. Some executives privately say Mr. Guterres is right to call for a swift phaseout of fossil fuels, while others note that most national governments still lack concrete energy transition plans, no matter what he says.
“The question really is, how effective is the United Nations?” Mr. Simpson said. “It has the ability to get governments to focus and plan. But the U.N. itself doesn’t have any teeth, so national governments and companies must act.”
Somini Sengupta is The Times’s international climate correspondent. She has also covered the Middle East, West Africa and South Asia and is the author of the book, “The End of Karma: Hope and Fury Among India’s Young.”
A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 11 of the New York edition with the headline: U.N. Chief Implores Leaders to Improve on Climate.
Researchers publicly call out theory that they say is not well supported by science, but that gets undue attention.
Mariana Lenharo
20 September 2023
Some research has focused on how neurons (shown here in a false-colour scanning electron micrograph) are involved in consciousness.Credit: Ted Kinsman/Science Photo Library
A letter, signed by 124 scholars and posted online last week1, has caused an uproar in the consciousness research community. It claims that a prominent theory describing what makes someone or something conscious — called the integrated information theory (IIT) — should be labelled “pseudoscience”. Since its publication on 15 September in the preprint repository PsyArXiv, the letter has some researchers arguing over the label and others worried it will increase polarization in a field that has grappled with issues of credibility in the past.Decades-long bet on consciousness ends — and it’s philosopher 1, neuroscientist 0
“I think it’s inflammatory to describe IIT as pseudoscience,” says neuroscientist Anil Seth, director of the Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex near Brighton, UK, adding that he disagrees with the label. “IIT is a theory, of course, and therefore may be empirically wrong,” says neuroscientist Christof Koch, a meritorious investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, Washington, and a proponent of the theory. But he says that it makes its assumptions — for example, that consciousness has a physical basis and can be mathematically measured — very clear.
There are dozens of theories that seek to understand consciousness — everything that a human or non-human experiences, including what they feel, see and hear — as well as its underlying neural foundations. IIT has often been described as one of the central theories, alongside others, such as global neuronal workspace theory (GNW), higher-order thought theory and recurrent processing theory. It proposes that consciousness emerges from the way information is processed within a ‘system’ (for instance, networks of neurons or computer circuits), and that systems that are more interconnected, or integrated, have higher levels of consciousness.
A growing discomfort
Hakwan Lau, a neuroscientist at Riken Center for Brain Science in Wako, Japan, and one of the authors of the letter, says that some researchers in the consciousness field are uncomfortable with what they perceive as a discrepancy between IIT’s scientific merit and the considerable attention it receives from the popular media because of how it is promoted by advocates. “Has IIT become a leading theory because of academic acceptance first, or is it because of the popular noise that kind of forced the academics to give it acknowledgement?”, Lau asks.If AI becomes conscious: here’s how researchers will know
Negative feelings towards the theory intensified after it captured headlines in June. Media outlets, including Nature, reported the results of an ‘adversarial’ study that pitted IIT and GNW against one another. The experiments, which included brain scans, didn’t prove or completely disprove either theory, but some researchers found it problematic that IIT was highlighted as a leading theory of consciousness, prompting Lau and his co-authors to draft their letter.
But why label IIT as pseudoscience? Although the letter doesn’t clearly define pseudoscience, Lau notes that a “commonsensical definition” is that pseudoscience refers to “something that is not very scientifically supported, that masquerades as if it is already very scientifically established”. In this sense, he thinks that IIT fits the bill.
Is it testable?
Additionally, Lau says, some of his co-authors think that it’s not possible to empirically test IIT’s core assumptions, which they argue contributes to the theory’s status as pseudoscience.Decoding the neuroscience of consciousness
Seth, who is not a proponent of IIT, although he has worked on related ideas in the past, disagrees. “The core claims are harder to test than other theories because it’s a more ambitious theory,” he says. But there are some predictions stemming from the theory, about neural activity associated with consciousness, for instance, that can be tested, he adds. A 2022 review found 101 empirical studies involving IIT2.
Liad Mudrik, a neuroscientist at Tel Aviv University, in Israel, who co-led the adversarial study of IIT versus GNW, also defends IIT’s testability at the neural level. “Not only did we test it, we managed to falsify one of its predictions,” she says. “I think many people in the field don’t like IIT, and this is completely fine. Yet it is not clear to me what is the basis for claiming that it is not one of the leading theories.”
The same criticism about a lack of meaningful empirical tests could be made about other theories of consciousness, says Erik Hoel, a neuroscientist and writer who lives on Cape Cod, in Massachusetts, and who is a former student of Giulio Tononi, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who is a proponent of IIT. “Everyone who works in the field has to acknowledge that we don’t have perfect brain scans,” he says. “And yet, somehow, IIT is singled out in the letter as this being a problem that’s unique to it.”
Damaging effect
Lau says he doesn’t expect a consensus on the topic. “But I think if it is known that, let’s say, a significant minority of us are willing to [sign our names] that we think it is pseudoscience, knowing that some people may disagree, that’s still a good message.” He hopes that the letter reaches young researchers, policymakers, journal editors and funders. “All of them right now are very easily swayed by the media narrative.”
Mudrik, who emphasizes that she deeply respects the people who signed the letter, some of whom are close collaborators and friends, says that she worries about the effect it will have on the way the consciousness field is perceived. “Consciousness research has been struggling with scepticism from its inception, trying to establish itself as a legitimate scientific field,” she says. “In my opinion, the way to fight such scepticism is by conducting excellent and rigorous research”, rather than by publicly calling out certain people and ideas.
Hoel fears that the letter might discourage the development of other ambitious theories. “The most important thing for me is that we don’t make our hypotheses small and banal in order to avoid being tarred with the pseudoscience label.”
Los organizadores de eventos como el Carnaval o Rock in Río recurren a la fundación Cobra Cacique Cobra para evitar que llueva en fechas clave
Joan Royo Gual
20 de septiembre de 2023
Un hombre reza durante una ceremonia para Yemanjá, que forma parte de las tradiciones en Río de Janeiro (Brasil). Leo Correa (AP)
Recientemente se celebró en São Paulo el festival de música The Town, de los mismos organizadores del Rock in Río. La noche de la puesta de largo, con cerca de 100.000 personas ansiosas por ver a Iggy Azalea, Post Malone o Demi Lovato, quedó deslucida por una persistente lluvia que provocó colas y aglomeraciones. Rápidamente surgieron algunas voces que achacaron el caos a la falta de un acuerdo de colaboración con la Fundación Cacique Cobra Coral, que representa a un espíritu a través del que promete controlar la meteorología. Es uno de los ejemplos de realismo mágico más conocidos entre los brasileños: si quieres que tu evento sea un éxito hay que contactar con Cobra Coral para garantizar que no llueva. Y no se trata de una curiosa superstición para parejas ansiosas porque luzca el sol el día de su boda. Detrás de esta creencia popular hay contratos, algo opacos, con empresas, Ayuntamientos y hasta ministerios.
El cacique Cobra Coral es un espíritu de la umbanda, una religión brasileña que mezcla elementos religiosos de tradición africana, indígena y católica. Quien la incorpora en sus carnes es Adelaide Scritori, que actúa como médium desde niña. Su marido y mano derecha, Osmar Santos, recibe peticiones de Gobiernos o empresas para promover cambios meteorológicos.
Una vez se firma el acuerdo, la médium recibe en su cuerpo a este indígena que, a pesar de ser norteamericano, se expresa en perfecto portugués. “Habla poco, va al grano. Cuando termina, ella [Scritori] no sabe nada de lo que ha dicho, no está consciente cuando habla”, explica su marido por teléfono. El también portavoz de la fundación resalta que el espíritu puede cambiar el tiempo, pero siempre que perciba que se debe a “un bien mayor”, no a un capricho. Si evita que llueva durante un festival, tendrá que desviar esas precipitaciones hacia algún lugar relativamente cercano que las necesite, por ejemplo.
El Ayuntamiento de Río está entre sus clientes más conocidos, sobre todo para asegurar el cielo limpio en las dos fechas marcadas en rojo en el calendario local: el fin de año, que congrega a cientos de miles de personas en la playa de Copacabana, y el aún más masivo Carnaval.
La colaboración entre el Ayuntamiento y la fundación Cobra Coral es pública y notoria, y de vez en cuando aparece en el Diario Oficial del municipio. El Ministerio de Minas y Energía recurrió hace dos años al cacique en medio de una grave sequía que llegó a poner en riesgo el suministro eléctrico en todo el país.
La mayoría de acuerdos se dan entre bambalinas y no queda muy claro cómo funcionan ni cuánto cuestan. Santos asegura tajantemente que no aceptan un céntimo de dinero público. Lo que se exige como contrapartida, dice, son obras de prevención de inundaciones, recuperación de manantiales, reforestación de la ribera de los ríos, etc. “El [espíritu del] cacique suele decir que no podemos ayudar a los hombres de manera permanente si hacemos por ellos lo que pueden hacer por sí mismos”, recalca. El espíritu tiene mucha conciencia ambiental y lleva décadas alertando, sin éxito, de los peligros del calentamiento global, lamenta Santos.
Con las empresas privadas los acuerdos funcionan de otra forma. La fundación se mantiene a través de Tunikito, un conglomerado familiar de seguros. Santos suele ofrecer asegurar a las empresas que buscan la actuación del cacique. En Río es conocida la fe que tiene en sus poderes Roberto Medina, el magnate creador del festival Rock in Río, aunque en los últimos años, con la empresa en manos de su hija Roberta, la colaboración espiritual parece haber quedado en un segundo plano.
Aun así, la fama del cacique permanece imbatible entre los organizadores de eventos al aire libre. Desde una de las principales productoras de la ciudad afirman de forma anónima: “Todos protegen a la entidad. Son muchos años de acuerdos. Los grandes productores de eventos no renuncian a su ayuda, es casi omnipresente”.
Santos confirma que prácticamente tiene el don de la ubicuidad. Explica que él, como interlocutor con el espíritu del cacique, se desplaza por Brasil y por medio mundo al encuentro de quienes requieren de su actuación. Con perfil discreto y escondido tras unas gafas oscuras, se posiciona en el lugar del evento y mira al cielo. Identifica las condiciones meteorológicas (presión atmosférica, humedad, viento, etc) y dialoga con los asesores científicos de la fundación para elaborar un informe para el espíritu, para que sepa cuál es el panorama y decida cómo actuar.
Los asesores de Cobra Coral incluyen a un técnico del estatal Instituto Nacional de Investigaciones Espaciales (INPE) y Rubens Villela, meteorólogo y profesor de la Universidad de São Paulo (USP). Esta colaboración entre la ciencia y una supuesta entidad sobrenatural, que quizá pondría los pelos de punta a muchos académicos del norte global, se vive en Brasil sin estridencias, más allá de alguna polémica puntual.
Hace 30 años, la Sociedad Brasileña de Meteorología procesó a la fundación por ejercicio ilegal de la profesión, pero la causa fue archivada. Al final, para evitar más problemas, Santos y Scritori crearon la agencia La Niña, inscrita en el consejo profesional y con permiso para firmar contratos.
Para Renzo Taddei, antropólogo de la Universidad Federal de São Paulo (Unifesp) y autor del libro Meteorólogos y profetas de la lluvia, en estas latitudes la dicotomía ciencia versus religión se queda pequeña. “A Brasil le gusta imaginarse y pensarse a sí mismo de una forma que no refleja mucho la realidad, sobre todo en eso de verse como un país occidental”, dice.
Taddei recuerda la huella que dejaron millones de africanos esclavizados y la fusión o convivencia de sus prácticas con creencias chamánicas, católicas, kardecistas o espíritas. “La espiritualidad brasileña no tiene nada que ver con la manera en que el mundo europeo imagina la religión. La pelea entre religión y ciencia de la época de Darwin en Inglaterra no se replica en Brasil. Quizá ahora está empezando un poco porque los evangélicos están creciendo muy rápido”, señala por teléfono.
El trabajo del cacique Cobra Coral es el caso más conocido por haber dado el salto al mundo empresarial e institucional, pero este especialista resalta que en la cosmovisión indígena, por ejemplo, es común dialogar con los espíritus para dominar las fuerzas de la naturaleza. En 1998 un incendio devastador devoraba la selva amazónica en el estado de Roraima. Brasil incluso recibió ayuda internacional, pero al final, las autoridades, desesperadas, recurrieron a dos chamanes de la etnia Kayapó. Tras dos días de rituales, casualidad o no, una lluvia torrencial logró frenar las llamas.
JAMES WATSON, the 1962 Nobel laureate, recently asserted that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” and its citizens because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours whereas all the testing says not really.”
Dr. Watson’s remarks created a huge stir because they implied that blacks were genetically inferior to whites, and the controversy resulted in his resignation as chancellor of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. But was he right? Is there a genetic difference between blacks and whites that condemns blacks in perpetuity to be less intelligent?
The first notable public airing of the scientific question came in a 1969 article in The Harvard Educational Review by Arthur Jensen, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Jensen maintained that a 15-point difference in I.Q. between blacks and whites was mostly due to a genetic difference between the races that could never be erased. But his argument gave a misleading account of the evidence. And others who later made the same argument Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray in “The Bell Curve,” in 1994, for example, and just recently, William Saletan in a series of articles on Slate have made the same mistake.
In fact, the evidence heavily favors the view that race differences in I.Q. are environmental in origin, not genetic.
The hereditarians begin with the assertion that 60 percent to 80 percent of variation in I.Q. is genetically determined. However, most estimates of heritability have been based almost exclusively on studies of middle-class groups. For the poor, a group that includes a substantial proportion of minorities, heritability of I.Q. is very low, in the range of 10 percent to 20 percent, according to recent research by Eric Turkheimer at the University of Virginia. This means that for the poor, improvements in environment have great potential to bring about increases in I.Q.
In any case, the degree of heritability of a characteristic tells us nothing about how much the environment can affect it. Even when a trait is highly heritable (think of the height of corn plants), modifiability can also be great (think of the difference growing conditions can make).
Nearly all the evidence suggesting a genetic basis for the I.Q. differential is indirect. There is, for example, the evidence that brain size is correlated with intelligence, and that blacks have smaller brains than whites. But the brain size difference between men and women is substantially greater than that between blacks and whites, yet men and women score the same, on average, on I.Q. tests. Likewise, a group of people in a community in Ecuador have a genetic anomaly that produces extremely small head sizes and hence brain sizes. Yet their intelligence is as high as that of their unaffected relatives.
Why rely on such misleading and indirect findings when we have much more direct evidence about the basis for the I.Q. gap? About 25 percent of the genes in the American black population are European, meaning that the genes of any individual can range from 100 percent African to mostly European. If European intelligence genes are superior, then blacks who have relatively more European genes ought to have higher I.Q.’s than those who have more African genes. But it turns out that skin color and “negroidness” of features both measures of the degree of a black person’s European ancestry are only weakly associated with I.Q. (even though we might well expect a moderately high association due to the social advantages of such features).
Credit: Balint Zsako
During World War II, both black and white American soldiers fathered children with German women. Thus some of these children had 100 percent European heritage and some had substantial African heritage. Tested in later childhood, the German children of the white fathers were found to have an average I.Q. of 97, and those of the black fathers had an average of 96.5, a trivial difference.
If European genes conferred an advantage, we would expect that the smartest blacks would have substantial European heritage. But when a group of investigators sought out the very brightest black children in the Chicago school system and asked them about the race of their parents and grandparents, these children were found to have no greater degree of European ancestry than blacks in the population at large.
Most tellingly, blood-typing tests have been used to assess the degree to which black individuals have European genes. The blood group assays show no association between degree of European heritage and I.Q. Similarly, the blood groups most closely associated with high intellectual performance among blacks are no more European in origin than other blood groups.
The closest thing to direct evidence that the hereditarians have is a study from the 1970s showing that black children who had been adopted by white parents had lower I.Q.’s than those of mixed-race children adopted by white parents. But, as the researchers acknowledged, the study had many flaws; for instance, the black children had been adopted at a substantially later age than the mixed-race children, and later age at adoption is associated with lower I.Q.
A superior adoption study and one not discussed by the hereditarians was carried out at Arizona State University by the psychologist Elsie Moore, who looked at black and mixed-race children adopted by middle-class families, either black or white, and found no difference in I.Q. between the black and mixed-race children. Most telling is Dr. Moore’s finding that children adopted by white families had I.Q.’s 13 points higher than those of children adopted by black families. The environments that even middle-class black children grow up in are not as favorable for the development of I.Q. as those of middle-class whites.
Important recent psychological research helps to pinpoint just what factors shape differences in I.Q. scores. Joseph Fagan of Case Western Reserve University and Cynthia Holland of Cuyahoga Community College tested blacks and whites on their knowledge of, and their ability to learn and reason with, words and concepts. The whites had substantially more knowledge of the various words and concepts, but when participants were tested on their ability to learn new words, either from dictionary definitions or by learning their meaning in context, the blacks did just as well as the whites.
Whites showed better comprehension of sayings, better ability to recognize similarities and better facility with analogies when solutions required knowledge of words and concepts that were more likely to be known to whites than to blacks. But when these kinds of reasoning were tested with words and concepts known equally well to blacks and whites, there were no differences. Within each race, prior knowledge predicted learning and reasoning, but between the races it was prior knowledge only that differed.
What do we know about the effects of environment?
That environment can markedly influence I.Q. is demonstrated by the so-called Flynn Effect. James Flynn, a philosopher and I.Q. researcher in New Zealand, has established that in the Western world as a whole, I.Q. increased markedly from 1947 to 2002. In the United States alone, it went up by 18 points. Our genes could not have changed enough over such a brief period to account for the shift; it must have been the result of powerful social factors. And if such factors could produce changes over time for the population as a whole, they could also produce big differences between subpopulations at any given time.
In fact, we know that the I.Q. difference between black and white 12-year-olds has dropped to 9.5 points from 15 points in the last 30 years a period that was more favorable for blacks in many ways than the preceding era. Black progress on the National Assessment of Educational Progress shows equivalent gains. Reading and math improvement has been modest for whites but substantial for blacks.
Most important, we know that interventions at every age from infancy to college can reduce racial gaps in both I.Q. and academic achievement, sometimes by substantial amounts in surprisingly little time. This mutability is further evidence that the I.Q. difference has environmental, not genetic, causes. And it should encourage us, as a society, to see that all children receive ample opportunity to develop their minds.
Richard E. Nisbett, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, is the author of “The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently and Why.”
Nem mesmo a física mais avançada pode revelar tudo o que queremos saber sobre a história e o futuro do cosmos, ou sobre nós mesmos
Para que servem as leis da física, se não podemos resolver as equações que as descrevem?
Essa foi a pergunta que me ocorreu ao ler um artigo no The Guardian escrito por Andrew Pontzen, um cosmólogo do University College London que passa os dias realizando simulações computacionais de buracos negros, estrelas, galáxias e do nascimento e crescimento do universo. O que ele queria dizer era que ele e todos nós estamos fadados ao fracasso.
“Mesmo que imaginemos que a humanidade acabará descobrindo uma ‘teoria de tudo’ que abrange todas as partículas e forças individuais, o valor explicativo dessa teoria para o universo como um todo será provavelmente marginal”, escreveu Pontzen.
Não importa o quanto pensemos conhecer as leis básicas da física e a lista cada vez maior de partículas elementares, não há poder computacional suficiente no universo para acompanhar todas elas. E nunca poderemos saber o bastante para prever com segurança o que acontece quando todas essas partículas colidem ou interagem de outra forma. Um ponto decimal adicionado a uma estimativa da localização ou velocidade de uma partícula, digamos, pode repercutir ao longo da história e alterar o resultado bilhões de anos depois, por meio do chamado “efeito borboleta” da teoria do caos.
Considere algo tão simples quanto, por exemplo, a órbita da Terra em torno do sol, diz Pontzen. Deixado à sua própria conta, nosso mundo, ou seu fóssil crocante, continuaria para sempre na mesma órbita. Mas na amplidão do tempo cósmico os empurrões gravitacionais de outros planetas do sistema solar podem alterar seu curso. Dependendo da precisão com que caracterizamos esses empurrões e do material que está sendo empurrado, os cálculos gravitacionais podem produzir previsões extremamente divergentes sobre onde a Terra e seus irmãos estarão daqui a centenas de milhões de anos.
Como resultado, na prática, não podemos prever o futuro nem o passado. Cosmólogos como Pontzen podem proteger suas apostas diminuindo o zoom e considerando o panorama geral —grandes aglomerações de materiais, como nuvens de gás, ou sistemas cujo comportamento coletivo é previsível e não depende de variações individuais. Podemos ferver macarrão sem monitorar cada molécula de água.
Mas existe o risco de se presumir muita ordem. Veja um formigueiro, sugere Pontzen. Os movimentos de qualquer formiga parecem aleatórios. Mas se você olhar o todo, o formigueiro parece fervilhar com propósito e organização. É tentador ver uma consciência coletiva em ação, escreve Pontzen, mas “são apenas formigas solitárias” que seguem regras simples. “A sofisticação emerge do grande número de indivíduos que seguem essas regras”, observa ele, citando o físico Philip W. Anderson, de Princeton: “Mais é diferente”.
Na cosmologia, formou-se uma explicação plausível da história do universo através de suposições simples sobre coisas sobre as quais nada sabemos —matéria escura e energia escura—, mas que, no entanto, constituem 95% do universo. Supostamente, esse “lado negro” do universo interage com 5% da matéria conhecida —átomos— apenas através da gravidade. Depois do Big Bang, conta a história, formaram-se poças de matéria escura, que puxaram a matéria atômica, que se condensou em nuvens, que se aqueceram e se transformaram em estrelas e galáxias. À medida que o universo se expandiu, a energia escura que o permeia também se expandiu e começou a afastar as galáxias cada vez mais rapidamente.
Mas essa narrativa falha logo no início, nas primeiras centenas de milhões de anos, quando estrelas, galáxias e buracos negros se formavam num processo confuso e pouco compreendido que os investigadores chamam de “gastrofísica”.
Sua mecânica é espantosamente difícil de prever, envolvendo campos magnéticos, a natureza e composição das primeiras estrelas e outros efeitos desconhecidos. “Certamente ninguém pode fazer isso agora, partindo simplesmente das leis confiáveis da física, independentemente da quantidade de potência de computação oferecida”, disse Pontzen por e-mail.
Dados recentes do Telescópio Espacial James Webb, revelando galáxias e buracos negros que parecem demasiado maciços e demasiado precoces no universo para serem explicados pelo “modelo padrão” da cosmologia, parecem ampliar o problema. Isso é suficiente para fazer os cosmólogos voltarem às suas pranchetas?
Pontzen não está convencido de que chegou a hora de os cosmólogos abandonarem seu modelo de universo duramente conquistado. A história cósmica é complexa demais para ser simulada em detalhes. Só o nosso sol, salienta ele, contém 1057 átomos, e existem trilhões e trilhões dessas estrelas por aí.
Há meio século, astrônomos descobriram que o universo, com suas estrelas e galáxias, estava repleto de radiação de micro-ondas que sobrou do Big Bang. O mapeamento dessa radiação permitiu que eles criassem uma imagem do cosmos bebê, como existia apenas 380 mil anos após o início dos tempos.
Em princípio, toda a história poderia estar incorporada ali nos caracóis sutis da energia primordial. Na prática, é impossível ler o desdobrar do tempo nessas micro-ondas suficientemente bem para discernir a ascensão e a queda dos dinossauros, o alvorecer da era atômica ou o aparecimento de um ponto de interrogação no céu bilhões de anos mais tarde. Quase 14 bilhões de anos de incerteza quântica, acidentes e detritos cósmicos permanecem entre então e agora.
Na última contagem, os físicos identificaram cerca de 17 tipos de partículas elementares que constituem o universo físico e pelo menos quatro formas de interação —através da gravidade, do eletromagnetismo e das chamadas forças nucleares fortes e fracas.
A aposta cósmica que a ciência ocidental empreendeu é mostrar que essas quatro forças, e talvez outras ainda não descobertas, agindo sobre um vasto conjunto de átomos e seus constituintes, são suficientes para explicar as estrelas, o arco-íris, as flores, nós mesmos e, de fato, a existência do universo como um todo. É uma enorme montanha intelectual e filosófica para escalar.
Na verdade, apesar de toda a nossa fé no materialismo, diz Pontzen, talvez nunca saibamos se tivemos sucesso. “Nossas origens estão escritas no céu”, disse ele, “e estamos apenas aprendendo a lê-las.”
Gastos com energia limpa representaram 4% do investimento do país em estruturas, equipamentos e bens duráveis
O investimento privado em projetos de energia limpa, como painéis solares, energia de hidrogênio e veículos elétricos, aumentou depois que o presidente Joe Biden sancionou uma lei abrangente sobre o clima, no ano passado, um desdobramento que mostra de que maneira os incentivos fiscais e os subsídios federais ajudaram a redirecionar alguns gastos dos consumidores e empresas dos Estados Unidos.
Novos dados divulgados nesta quarta-feira (13) sugerem que a lei do clima e outras partes da agenda econômica de Biden ajudaram a acelerar o desenvolvimento de cadeias de suprimentos automotivas no sudoeste dos Estados Unidos, gerando sustentação adicional para os centros tradicionais de fabricação de automóveis nas regiões industrias do centro-oeste e do sudeste.
A lei de 2022, que foi aprovada com apoio apenas do Partido Democrata, ajudou o investimento em fábricas em bastiões conservadores como o Tennessee e nos estados de Michigan e Nevada, que serão alvo de forte disputa na eleição presidencial do ano que vem. A lei também ajudou a sustentar uma onda de gastos com carros elétricos e painéis solares residenciais na Califórnia, Arizona e Flórida.
Os dados mostram que, no ano seguinte à aprovação da lei do clima, os gastos com tecnologias de energia limpa representaram 4% do investimento total do país em estruturas, equipamentos e bens de consumo duráveis —mais do que o dobro da participação registrada quatro anos atrás.
A lei não teve sucesso em estimular um setor importante na transição para além dos combustíveis fósseis que Biden está tentando acelerar: a energia eólica. O investimento americano em produção eólica diminuiu no ano passado, apesar dos grandes incentivos da lei do clima aos produtores. E a lei não alterou a trajetória dos gastos dos consumidores com determinadas tecnologias de economia de energia, como bombas de aquecimento de alta eficiência.
Mas o relatório, que avalia a situação até o nível estadual, fornece a primeira visão detalhada de como as políticas industriais de Biden estão afetando as decisões de investimento em energia limpa do setor privado.
Os dados são do Clean Investment Monitor, uma nova iniciativa da consultoria Rhodium Group e do Centro para a Pesquisa de Energia e Política Ambiental do Instituto de Tecnologia de Massachusetts (MIT). Suas constatações vão além de estimativas mais simples, da Casa Branca e de outras fontes, e oferecem a visão mais abrangente até o momento sobre os efeitos da agenda econômica de Biden sobre a emergente economia de energia limpa dos Estados Unidos.
Os pesquisadores que lideram essa primeira análise de dados incluem Trevor Houser, ex-funcionário do governo Obama, que é sócio da Rhodium; e Brian Deese, ex-diretor do Conselho Econômico Nacional de Biden, que pesquisa sobre inovação no MIT.
A Lei de Redução da Inflação, que Biden assinou em agosto de 2022, inclui uma ampla gama de incentivos para encorajar a fabricação nacional e acelerar a transição do país para longe dos combustíveis fósseis.
Isso inclui incentivos fiscais ampliados para a produção de baterias avançadas, instalação de painéis solares, compra de veículos elétricos e outras iniciativas. Muitas dessas isenções fiscais são ilimitadas, para todos os fins práticos, o que significa que podem acabar custando centenas de bilhões de dólares aos contribuintes —ou até mesmo mais de US$ 1 trilhão— se tiverem sucesso em gerar nível suficiente de novos investimentos.
Os funcionários do governo Biden tentaram quantificar os efeitos dessa lei, e da legislação bipartidária sobre infraestrutura e semicondutores assinada pelo presidente no início de seu mandato, por meio da contabilização dos anúncios empresariais de novos gastos vinculados à legislação.
Um site da Casa Branca estima que empresas tenham anunciado até agora US$ 511 bilhões em compromissos de gastos novos vinculados a essas leis, incluindo US$ 240 bilhões para veículos elétricos e tecnologia de energia limpa.
A análise da Rhodium e do MIT se baseia em dados de agências federais, organizações setoriais, anúncios de empresas e registros financeiros, reportagens e outras fontes, para tentar construir uma estimativa em tempo real de quanto investimento já foi realizado nas tecnologias de redução de emissões visadas pela agenda de Biden. Para fins de comparação, os dados remontam a 2018, quando o presidente Donald Trump ainda estava no poder.
Os números mostram que o investimento real —e não o anunciado— de empresas e consumidores em tecnologias de energia limpa atingiu US$ 213 bilhões no segundo semestre de 2022 e no primeiro semestre de 2023, depois que Biden assinou a lei do clima. Esse valor foi superior aos US$ 155 bilhões do ano anterior e aos US$ 81 bilhões do primeiro ano dos dados, sob Trump.
As tendências nos dados sugerem que o impacto da agenda de Biden sobre o investimento em energia limpa variou dependendo das condições econômicas existentes para cada tecnologia visada.
Os maiores sucessos de Biden ocorreram ao estimular o aumento do investimento industrial nos Estados Unidos e ao catalisar o investimento em tecnologias que permanecem relativamente novas no mercado.
Alimentado em parte por investimentos estrangeiros, por exemplo em fábricas de baterias na Geórgia, o investimento real na fabricação de energia limpa mais do que dobrou no ano passado, em relação ao ano anterior, mostram os dados, totalizando US$ 39 bilhões. Esse investimento foi quase inexistente em 2018.
A maior parte dos gastos se concentrou na cadeia de suprimentos de veículos elétricos, o que inclui o novo polo de atividades automotivas do sudoeste da Califórnia, Nevada e Arizona. A Lei de Redução da Inflação inclui vários incentivos fiscais para esse tipo de investimento, com requisitos de conteúdo nacional destinados a incentivar a produção de minerais essenciais e baterias, e a montagem de automóveis nos Estados Unidos.
No entanto, os grandes beneficiários em termos de investimentos em produção, como porcentagem das economias estaduais, continuam a ser os estados automotivos tradicionais: Tennessee, Kentucky, Michigan e Carolina do Sul.
A lei do clima também parece ter impulsionado o investimento no chamado hidrogênio verde, que divide átomos de água para criar um combustível industrial. O mesmo se aplica ao gerenciamento de carbono – que busca capturar e armazenar as emissões de gases causadores do efeito estufa pelas usinas de energia existentes, ou retirar o carbono da atmosfera. Todas essas tecnologias tiveram dificuldades para ganhar força nos Estados Unidos antes de a lei lhes conceder incentivos fiscais.
O hidrogênio e grande parte dos investimentos em captura de carbono estão concentrados ao longo da costa do Golfo do México, uma região repleta de empresas de combustíveis fósseis que começaram a se dedicar a essas tecnologias. Outro polo de investimentos em captura de carbono está concentrado em estados da região centro-oeste, como Illinois e Iowa, onde as empresas que produzem etanol de milho e outros biocombustíveis estão começando a investir em esforços para capturar suas emissões.
Os incentivos para essas tecnologias na Lei de Redução da Inflação, juntamente com outras medidas de apoio contidas na lei de infraestrutura bipartidária, “mudam fundamentalmente a economia dessas duas tecnologias, e pela primeira vez as tornam amplamente competitivas em termos de custos”, disse Houser em uma entrevista.
Outros incentivos ainda não alteraram a situação econômica de tecnologias essenciais, principalmente a energia eólica, que cresceu muito nos últimos anos mas agora está enfrentando retrocessos globais, pois o financiamento dos projetos está cada vez mais caro.
O investimento em energia eólica foi menor no primeiro semestre deste ano do que em qualquer outro momento desde que o banco de dados foi iniciado.
Nos Estados Unidos, os projetos eólicos estão enfrentando dificuldades para passar pelos processos governamentais de licenciamento, transmissão de energia e seleção de locais, incluindo a oposição de alguns legisladores estaduais e municipais.
Os projetos solares e os investimentos relacionados em armazenagem para energia solar, observou Houser, podem ser construídos mais perto dos consumidores de energia e têm menos obstáculos a superar, e o investimento neles cresceu 50% no segundo trimestre de 2023, com relação ao ano anterior.
Alguns mercados consumidores ainda não se deixaram influenciar pela promessa de incentivos fiscais para novas tecnologias de energia. Os americanos não aumentaram seus gastos com bombas de aquecimento, embora a lei cubra gastos de até US$ 2 mil para a compra de uma nova bomba. E, no ano passado, os estados com os maiores gastos em bombas de aquecimento, em proporção às dimensões de suas economias, estavam todos concentrados no sudeste —onde, segundo Houser, é mais provável que os consumidores já disponham de bombas desse tipo, e precisem substitui-las.
Mundo já ultrapassou 6 das 9 fronteiras planetárias, como são chamados os limites seguros para a existência no planeta
Os sistemas de suporte à vida na Terra enfrentam riscos e incertezas maiores do que nunca, e a maioria dos principais limites de segurança já foram ultrapassados como resultado de intervenções humanas em todo o planeta, apontou estudo científico divulgado nesta quarta-feira (13).
Em uma espécie de “check-up de saúde” do planeta publicado na revista Science Advances, uma equipe internacional de 29 especialistas concluiu que a Terra atualmente está “bem fora do espaço operacional seguro para a humanidade” devido à atividade humana.
Ao todo, afirma o estudo, 8 das 9 fronteiras estão sob pressão maior do que a verificada na avaliação de 2015, aumentando o risco de mudanças dramáticas nas condições de vida da Terra. A camada de ozônio é o único dos quesitos a melhorar.
“Não sabemos se podemos prosperar sob grandes e dramáticas alterações das nossas condições”, disse a principal autora do estudo, Katherine Richardson, da Universidade de Copenhague.
Os autores afirmam que cruzar as fronteiras não representa um ponto de inflexão no qual a civilização humana simplesmente entrará em colapso, mas pode trazer mudanças irreversíveis nos sistemas de suporte à vida na Terra.
“Podemos pensar na Terra como um corpo humano e nos limites planetários como a pressão sanguínea. Acima de 120/80 [na medição da pressão sanguínea] não necessariamente indica um ataque cardíaco, mas aumenta o risco”, disse Richardson.
Os cientistas soaram o alarme sobre o aumento do desmatamento, o consumo excessivo de plantas como combustível, a proliferação de produtos como o plástico, organismos geneticamente modificados e produtos químicos sintéticos.
Dos nove limites avaliados, apenas a acidificação dos oceanos, a destruição da camada de ozônio e a poluição atmosférica —principalmente com partículas semelhantes à fuligem— foram consideradas ainda dentro de limites seguros. O teto da acidificação dos oceanos, no entanto, está perto de ser ultrapassado.
A concentração atmosférica de dióxido de carbono, o principal gás causador do efeito estufa, aumentou para cerca de 417 ppm (partes por milhão), significativamente superior ao nível seguro de 350 ppm.
Estima-se também que a atual taxa de extinção de espécies seja pelo menos dezenas de vezes mais rápida do que a taxa média dos últimos 10 milhões de anos, o que significa que o planeta já ultrapassou a fronteira segura para a diversidade genética.
“Na minha carreira nunca me baseei em tantas evidências como hoje”, disse Johan Rockström, coautor do estudo e diretor do Instituto Potsdam para Pesquisa de Impacto Climático.
Uma (in)certa antropologia 
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