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Title: What Is Burning the Amazon? Author: CrimethInc. Date: September 24, 2019 Language: en Topics: Brazil, resistance, ecology, fascism, environment Source: Retrieved on 17th June 2021 from https://crimethinc.com/2019/09/24/what-is-burning-the-amazon-a-plea-from-brazilian-anarchists
As the fires in the Amazon rainforest continue to burn, our comrades in
Brazil have sent us this analysis of the causes of the catastrophe and
how it should inform our vision of the future.
---
“I worry about whether the whites will resist. We have been resisting
for 500 years.”
—Ailton Krenak
The scene is gloomy. On August 19, 2019, smoke covers cities across the
state of SĂŁo Paulo, turning day into night at 3 pm. The previous day, in
Iceland, people organized the first funeral, complete with a gravestone
and a minute of silence, for a glacier declared dead. The smoke that
engulfed SĂŁo Paulo is caused by forest fires in the Amazon Forest far
away in the North of Brazil; the glacier has disappeared due to rising
temperatures related to the carbon dioxide accumulating in the
atmosphere.
These tragic scenes—almost picturesque, almost absurd—could sound
comical if they weren’t real. They are so extreme that they remind us of
fictional scenarios such as those described in the novel And Still the
Earth, a Brazilian environmental dystopia by Ignácio de Loyloa Brandão.
Written in the 1970s during the military dictatorship in Brazil, the
book describes a fictitious dictatorial regime known as “Civiltar,”
which celebrates cutting down the last tree in the Amazon with a
jingoistic declaration that it has created “a desert greater than that
of the Sahara.” In this story, all the Brazilian rivers are dead; jugs
of water from each of the extinct rivers are displayed in a hydrographic
museum. Aluminum can dunes and highways permanently blocked by the
shells of abandoned cars are the backdrop of SĂŁo Paulo. The city itself
suffers from sudden heat pockets capable of killing any unsuspecting
person; mysterious diseases consume the citizens, especially the
homeless.
The author claims that he was inspired by real events that seemed absurd
and unusual at the time. Today, these are becoming ever more ordinary.
News of the increased burning of the Amazon has sent shockwaves around
the world. Burns rose 82% in 2019 over the same period last year in
Brazil, according to the National Institute for Space Research, and new
outbreaks of fire are still being reported as we write. The catastrophic
images of destruction have fueled the indignation of people around the
world who are concerned about the future of life on earth, seeing how
important the Amazon rainforest is for climate regulation and global
biodiversity. Images of the fires compelled French President Emmanuel
Macron to bring the subject to the G7 summit and to exchange barbs with
President Jair Bolsonaro in the media after France offered millions of
dollars in funds to fight forest fires.
Since the end of 2018, half a billion bees have been found dead in four
Brazilian states. The death of these insects that are essential to
fertilizing 75% of the vegetables we eat is linked to the use of
pesticides banned in Europe but permitted in Brazil. In August 2019, the
court dismissed the charges against a farmer who used pesticides thrown
from a plane as a chemical weapon against Guyra Kambi’y indigenous
community in Mato Grosso do Sul in 2015. The same month, groups of
farmers, “land grabbers” [people who falsify documents in order to
obtain ownership of land], union members, and traders used a Whatsapp
group to coordinate setting fires in the municipality of Altamira, Pará,
the epicenter of fires consuming the Amazon rainforest. As reported in
Folha do Progresso, the “day of the fire” was organized by people
encouraged by the words of Jair Bolsonaro: “The goal, according to one
of the leaders speaking anonymously, is to show the president that they
want to work.”
The recent wave of fires linking President Jair Bolsonaro’s policies to
attacks against forests, peasant farmers, and indigenous peoples is an
intensification of a process as old as the colonization of the Americas.
While the Workers’ Party (PT) was still in power, many projects were
introduced to expand and accelerate growth, including the construction
of the Belo Monte plant, which displaced and impacted indigenous
communities and thousands of other people living in the countryside. The
approval of the Forest Code in 2012 enabled farmers to advance over
indigenous territories and nature reserves with impunity, while
suspending the demarcation of new protected lands.
Both left and right governments see nature and human life chiefly as
resources with which to produce commodities and profit. The government
of Bolsonaro, a declared enemy of the common people, women, and
indigenous groups, doesn’t just threaten us with the physical violence
of police repression. In declaring that he will no longer recognize any
indigenous land, Bolsonaro is intensifying a war on the ecosystems that
make human life possible—a war that long precedes him.
For centuries, we have struggled to survive the greatest disaster of our
time, a disaster that threatens the sustainability of all the biomes and
communities on this planet. Its name is capitalism—the cruelest, most
inequitable, and destructive economic system in history. This threat is
not the result of the inevitable forces of nature. Humans created it and
humans can eliminate it.
In Brazil, we have witnessed firsthand how this system exploits people,
promotes genocide, and degrades and pollutes the earth, water, and air.
Even if we ultimately manage to abolish it, we will still have to
survive the consequences of letting it go on for so long. The
destruction of entire ecosystems, the poisons in rivers and in our own
bodies, the species that have gone extinct, the glaciers that have
disappeared, the forests that have been cut down and paved over—these
consequences will remain for many years to come. In the future, we will
have to survive by gathering what we need from the ruins and waste that
this system has left in its wake. All the material that has been torn
from the ground to be strewn across the earth’s surface and dumped into
the seas will not return overnight to the depths it came from.
Recognizing this should inform how we envision our revolutionary
prospects. It is foolish to imagine that the abolition of capitalism
will expand the consumer activities that are currently available to the
global bourgeoisie to the entire human population; we must stop
fantasizing about a regulated post-capitalist world with infinite
resources to generate the sort of commodities that capitalist propaganda
has led us to desire. Rather, we will have to experiment in ways to
share the self-management of our lives amid the recovery of our biomes,
our relationships, and our bodies after centuries of aggression and
exploitation—organizing life in regions that have become hostile to it.
The ways we organize our resistance today should be informed by the fact
that our revolutionary experiments will not be taking place in a world
of peace, stability, and balance. We will be struggling to survive in
the midst of the consequences of centuries of pollution and
environmental degradation. The best-case scenario for the future will
look like the situation in KobanĂŞ in 2015: a victorious revolution in a
bombed-out city full of mines.
No one need imagine an apocalypse when the worst of dystopias is already
part of reality. In the cities of Mariana and Brumadinho, in the state
of Minas Gerais, dams managed by the mining companies Samarco and Vale
collapsed due to lack of maintenance and neglect of human life,
wildlife, and the environment. In Mariana, 19 people were killed as a
consequence of an accident in 2015; In Brumadinho, at least 248 people
have died and dozens are still missing following a disaster in January
2019. For the sake of profit, these companies and their managers
inflicted one of the worst environmental disasters in the country,
affecting thousands of people from the relatives of the dead to the
indigenous and rural communities that depend on the rivers that were
devastated by the toxic mud that was trapped in the dams.
Such examples make it easy to see that the worst tragedy is not the end
of the capitalist order but the fact that it exists in the first place.
As Buenaventura Durruti said in an interview during the Spanish Civil
War:
“We, the workers, can build others to take their place, and better ones!
We are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the
earth; there is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie
might blast and ruin its own world before it leaves the stage of
history. We carry a new world here, in our hearts. That world is growing
in this minute.”
There is a consensus among scientific researchers, government
institutions, social movements, and rural and urban peoples regarding
the impacts and risks of global warming and increasing industrialization
and urbanization. Some of these consequences are about to become
irreversible. The deforestation of the Amazon itself may become
irreparable if it reaches 40% of its total area.
It has never worked to demand that governments solve these problems for
us—and it never will. This is especially foolish when we are talking
about the environmental disasters caused by their own policies. Land
seizures and the deforestation of the Amazon are inextricably
interlinked with the organized criminal enterprises that smuggle and
kill in the countryside. Fully 90% of the timber harvested is contraband
supported by a vast apparatus of illegal capitalism involving armed
militias and the state itself.
Populist leaders like Bolsonaro aim to benefit from the unfolding
ecological catastrophe at the same time that they deny it is occurring.
On the one hand, they claim that there is no need for action to curb
global warming—alongside Trump, Bosonaro was the only other leader who
threatened to abandon the Paris Agreement, claiming that global warming
is a “fable for environmentalists.” This helps to mobilize the far-right
base, which admires and celebrates outright dishonesty as a
demonstration of political power. On the other hand, as the consequences
of climate chaos and environmental imbalances become obvious undeniable
facts, these leaders will opportunistically take advantage of
environmental crises, product shortages, refugee migrations, and climate
disasters such as hurricanes as pretexts to accelerate the
implementation of ever more authoritarian measures in the fields of
health, transportation and security. Using authoritarian and militarized
means to determine who can have access to the resources they need to
survive in a context of widespread scarcity is what many theorists have
called ecofascism.
The intervention of foreign states in the Amazon forests according to
their own economic interests is simply the continuation of the
colonialism that began in 1492. No government will solve the problem of
fires and deforestation. At best, they might slow the impact of the
exploitation they have always engaged in. Neoliberal capitalism demands
endless growth, mandating the transformation of forests and soil into
competitive consumer goods on the global market.
So what is burning the Amazon—and the entire planet? The answer is
clear: the pursuit of land, profit (legal or not), and private property.
None of this will be changed by any elected or imposed government. The
only truly environmental perspective is a revolutionary perspective
seeking the end of capitalism and the state itself.
The dystopian images of And Still the Earth and George Orwell’s novel
1984 were intended as warnings: exaggerated projections of the worst
that can happen if we fail to change the course of history. Today, with
cameras around every corner and our own TVs and cell phones carrying out
surveillance on us, it is as if these dystopian novels are being used as
a handbook for governments and corporations to bring our worst
nightmares into reality.
Dystopias are warnings; but utopias, by definition, represent places
that do not exist. We need other places, places that are possible. We
need to be able to imagine a different world—and to imagine ourselves,
our desires, and our relationships being different as well.
We should use the creativity that enables us to picture zombie
apocalypses and other literary or cinematic calamities to imagine a
reality beyond capitalism right now and begin building it. Today, as
reality surpasses fiction, our activities are largely characterized by
disbelief and passivity. But you cannot be neutral on a moving
train—especially not one that is accelerating on a track into the abyss.
Crossing your arms is complicity. Likewise, acting individually is
insufficient because it maintains the logic that has brought us here.
We have to rediscover revolutionary reference points for self-organized
and egalitarian collective life. We need to share examples of real
societies that have resisted the state and capitalism, such as the
anarchist experiments during the Russian and Ukrainian Revolutions of
1917 and the Spanish Revolution of 1936. We should remember, also, that
all of these were ultimately betrayed and crushed by, or with the
connivance of, the Bolshevik Party and the Stalinist dictatorship that
followed it, which carried out unprecedented industrialization and the
mass displacement of agrarian peoples. This illustrates why it is so
important to develop a way of imagining that does not simply replicate
the visions of capitalist industrialism.
We can also look to contemporary examples like the Zapatista Uprising in
Mexico since 1994 and the ongoing revolution in Rojava in northern
Syria. But in addition to the examples offered by anarchists or people
influenced by anarchist principles, we should learn from the many
indigenous nations around us: Guaranis, Mundurukus, TapajĂłs, Krenaks,
and many others who have ceaselessly resisted European and capitalist
colonial expansion for five centuries. They are all living examples from
whom anarchists can learn about life, organization, and resistance
without and against the state.
If there is any fundamental basis for solidarity in response to the
attack on the foundation of all life in the Amazon, it is the potential
that we can build connections between the social movements, the poor,
and excluded of the world and the indigenous and peasant peoples of all
Latin America. To put a halt to the deforestation underway in the Amazon
and countless similar forms of destruction that are taking place across
the planet, we must nourish grassroots movements that reject the
neoliberal resource management of soil, forests, waters, and people.
For a solidarity between all peoples and exploited classes, not between
paternalism and the colonialism of governments! The only way to address
the environmental crisis and global climate change is to abolish
capitalism!
Another end of the world is possible!