Month: August 2019

The Amazon is burning. Once more, as in the 1990s, an ‘arc of fire’ threatens planetary sustainability. Food production and consumption take their place at the centre of the climate change emergency, as tropical forest is logged, burned and turned into agricultural cultivation.

In its recent report, the UN and the International Panel of Climate Change estimates that global food production is responsible for 21-37% of ‘anthropogenic emissions’. What lies behind this Anthropogen that treats humankind in general as responsible for the climate change emergency? The destruction of the Amazon is in fact the consequence of a geopolitical conflict, connecting Brazil to China, China to the US – and Brazil, as a member of the Mercosur, to the EU.

When it comes to the climate change crisis, the humble soyabean has a lot to answer for. Not the bean itself, of course, but the human production and consumption related to it, and more particularly the national politics surrounding it. When President Trump declared trade war on China, one of the direct impacts was a Chinese response placing 25% tariffs on soya imports from the USA. At the same time, after the election of President Bolsonaro in Brazil, previous legal limitations on deforestation of the Amazon and expansion into the Cerrado, in significant part for soy production, were relaxed. As the deceptively named Environment Minister, Ricardo Salles, said in a recent interview for the Financial Times (23.08.2019), laws were too restrictive, and commercial development must instead ‘monetize’ the Amazon. Turn fires into dollars.

The result is a perfect climate-change storm. Brazil had already overtaken the USA as the main exporter of soya in the second decade of the twenty first century. This trade war has stimulated a great leap forward in exports to China, already by far the largest importer of soya from Brazil – over 85% of Brazil’s exports by 2018. Two climate-change denying Presidents, plus growing demand for soya as animal feed for China’s growing meat consumption, plus deforestation and land conversion in Brazil. Result? An explosive climate change acceleration event.

While this event is significant in its own right, it also challenges how we need to think about the nature of the climate change crisis. Two highly influential recent publications in Nature (October, 1918) and The Lancet (January, 2019) identifying the greatest risks of transgressing planetary boundaries for the sustainability of human (and non-human) life affirmed strikingly that ‘food production is the largest cause of global environmental change’. It accounts for up to 37% of total global greenhouse gases, two and a half times more that total global transport. The urgency of addressing land use and food production and consumption has just been highlighted by the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change report, Climate Change and Land. It appeared only days before the news of the burning Amazon hit the headlines.

Moreover, world population is set to rise from nearly 7 billion to 9 billion. At least as significant, there are dramatic shifts in the food people consume, particularly transitions to greater meat consumption. So, food perhaps presents the biggest but also the most intractable threat of the climate change crisis. In all the National Plans for climate change mitigation and underpinning the 2016 Paris Agreement, food production and consumption was marginalised, or even in many cases omitted. This potato was politically too hot to handle in many national contexts.

So, is this a crisis brought about by the human species in aggregate: The Anthropogen of the IPCC? Or, as many on the left have also argued, is this crisis a product of global capitalism, a general economic engine of limitless expansion and appropriation of nature: The Capitalogen of climate change crisis? Present profit before future planet. The Trump-Bolsonaro, Brazil-USA-China, climate change crisis event illustrates why we need better social science than either of these globalist accounts, and certainly why we need to pay more attention to national politics in any analysis.

Food production and consumption are especially useful for forcing us to think directly of how different societies are endowed with different environmental resources, as an almost taken for granted, but nonetheless formative background for economic development, and for the national politics of that development. Societies, and different political economies, differ enormously in how they generate greenhouse gases, how they consume energy, food, water, and how they trade internationally, with different climate change impacts. They also face different political challenges in confronting the climate change emergency. Not every country has the Amazon in its back garden.

Before I started my research into food production and consumption in China, I had not fully appreciated the scarcity of its agricultural land, in spite of its extensive national territory. It has less quality agricultural land per capita than even the UK, and a fraction of that of the USA or Brazil. Its water resources for food production are even scarcer, a quarter of the world average. Within this environmental context, and following a long history of famines, the politics of food production was dominated by the twin imperative of food security and food self-sufficiency.

Following the death of Mao Tse Tung and the market socialist reforms of Deng Xiaoping, agricultural intensification was combined with a major fragmentation of land ownership under the Household Responsibility System. Egalitarian distribution of leasehold land to 250 million peasant farmers, market incentives, and huge increase in the use of chemical fertilisers aimed to satisfy the twin imperative. As a consequence, from being a net importer of nitrogen phosphate fertilizer to a net exporter, China now uses more than 30% of the world total, more than the whole of Northern Europe and the USA put together. With peasants given subsidies to use fertilizers, the amount of fertilizer per hectare is many times that of Europe.

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Both Chinese experts and the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation recognise the result: an ecological catastrophe. Overuse of nitrogen fertilizer is a major source of nitrogen oxide, a powerful greenhouse gas. So, apart from acidification of the soil and eutrophication of surface water, rice production in particular contributes significantly to China’s greenhouse gas emissions. And now, as agricultural productivity itself was threatened, China recognises the problem, and has come up with its distinctive political solutions, a limitation of the use of nitrogen phosphates to a 1% increase until 2020, and a cap on total use thereafter.

This brief account exemplifies the need for the concept of sociogenesis of climate change. A distinctive political economy, operating within its specific land and water resource environment, generates a climate change crisis and then its own characteristic mitigation policies. This is not a dynamic of a socially amorphous Anthropogen or a globalist Capitalogen in interaction with Nature in general. This is a distinctively Chinese dynamic, in its own environmental context.

Then, at the turn of the century, China recognised that limits of its own land-water resources were such that it could no longer equate food security with food self-sufficiency. Especially to meet the demand for increasing meat consumption, pork in particular, for a population previously unable to afford it, China decisively shifted to importing soya beans from Brazil to feed its expanding pig production.

Enter Brazil. Although Europe had led the way in using soya protein to replace animal protein after the BSE crisis, China followed on to become its biggest market. Brazil’s climate change crisis is almost the opposite to China’s. From the time of the military dictatorship there has been a politically driven process of expanding agricultural production through extensification, converting uncultivated land into agricultural land, in an inexorable progression from timber extraction, to cattle and soya production. This led to the earlier ‘arc of fire’. Brazil is now the largest exporter of beef, poultry, coffee, orange juice, and, overtaking the USA, soya. Where China’s agricultural land was shrinking, Brazil’s was increasing by 5 million hectares every year since the 1990s, particularly into the Legal Amazon.

In Brazil, big multinational capital, much of it Brazilian, is certainly involved, dominating agricultural production. The top 1% of farms with over 1000 hectares occupy over 45% of cultivated land. The Roncador Group has a farm of 150,000 hectares, the Amaggi Group Tanguro farm, 80,000 hectares. JBS is the top global meat producer and exporter in the world, and the total Brazilian beef herd now exceeds 200 million. It is calculated that the methane production of this herd from enteric fermentation exceeds the CO2 emissions from Brazilian land clearance and deforestation.

This is the distinctive Brazilian climate change crisis, not a generic Capitalogen, but a politically fostered national economy in interaction with a unique resource environment. And, until the arrival of Bolsonaro, a distinctive set of policies was put in place to limit land extensification: the registration of land-ownership, pioneering satellite tracking of land incursions, moratoriums on soy and beef production on any newly converted land. These mitigation policies succeeded in radically reducing, but far from eliminating Amazonian deforestation, and significant ecologies, notably the Cerrado in Mato Grosso, were much less protected.

One more sociogenic contrast. In both China and Brazil, with increasing per capita income, there has been a transition to eating more meat. China now outstrips the USA for pork consumption, and in overall meat consumption had reached an annual per capita quantity of 52.4 kilos in 2011. Brazil has overtaken the European average, with 92.6 kilos, with beef the premier meat with its much higher GHG impact. None approach Trump beef steak America, with an average of 135 kilos for all meats. At the opposite extreme, India with its Hindu nationalist vegetarianism, persecuting Muslim beef eaters, has the lowest per capita meat consumption, with a less pronounced transition to more people eating more meat. Cultures of consumption – not individual consumer choices – have major climate change consequences.

Out of sociogenic contrasts come sociogenic connections. Global food trade is not from anywhere to anywhere. Trade flows are highly structured, and in the case of China and Brazil, opposites attract. China’s lack of land and water resources creates the demand for Brazil’s abundance. China’s politics of trade condition this trade: it imports only whole soyabeans, for its own animal feed industry to process. A deal between Brazil and China to trade in national currencies escapes the dominant dollar as reserve currency for international trade. This is a specific nation-to-nation connection between production and consumption. From Brexit, as we know only too well, trade connections are politically made and un-made.

One of the major limitations of the UN brokered Paris Agreement with its national plans for climate change mitigation is that it only treats nations as GHG producers. Trade, and the connection between producers and consumers, is a sustainability black hole. As has now become only too clear from President Macron’s finger-pointing at Bolsonaro, the trade agreement between the EU and the Mercosur failed to enshrine legal commitments on conserving the Amazon or the Cerrado. The soya connection between China and Brazil shows that nation-to-nation trade is a critical dynamic of the sociogenic climate change emergency.

This takes us back to the beginning. Trump and Bolsonaro have just pressed the accelerator on that dynamic. Economies are political, and the politics of economies are driving the climate change emergency. Combatting climate change involves contesting those politics within our different societal and environmental contexts. One more reason to be European in a European Union context, engaging in the politics of our shared environmental resources and for legally enforceable sustainable international trade. Or go down the route of environmental catastrophe with the Trump-Bolsonaro politics of planetary destruction.

2019 got off to a bad start in Portugal. In January, the leader of a far-right group – who spent 12 years in prison for his role in a racist murder and other hate crimes – was invited to speak on one of Portugal’s most popular TV talk shows. On air, he argued that the country needs a new dictator.

Two weeks later, a video of police violence in Bairro Jamaica, a predominantly black neighbourhood in Lisbon’s suburbs, went viral. The next day, hundreds of mostly black demonstrators protested in the city centre against racist police violence. Police responded with rubber bullets.

Tiago Lila and João Caçador, musicians and activists in a group called Fado Bicha (roughly translated: ‘Queer Fado’), told me they could not stay silent. Lila took a classic Portuguese song and rewrote its lyrics to challenge the violence around them. Caçador picked up his electric guitar.

“Lisbon, don’t be racist,” sings Lila in a video posted on Youtube in February, and since then watched tens of thousands of times. Caçador sits on a living room couch, clutching his guitar. “Revisit your history”, the song’s lyrics continue. “Let’s stop glorifying an empire built on slavery”.

The guitar chords are well known in Portugal, taken from the classic fado song “Lisbon don’t be French”. But the lyrics have been changed to reflect on structural racism and colonial history. This is what Lila and Caçador do: transform traditional fado classics into anti-discrimination anthems

And their following is growing. Before 2019 their group had only played in smaller, alternative spaces in Lisbon and a few other cities. But now Fado Bicha are also performing in bigger and more well-known music venues across the country, and are planning to release an album next year.

The video (subtitles were added):

Fado is Portugal’s most famous music style. In 2011, it was recognised as part of UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. But instead of a traditional 12-string fado guitar, Lila and Caçador use an electric guitar and rewrite the lyrics of famous songs to talk about current social issues.

Fado Bicha was formed in 2017. Lila, who was performing in Lisbon’s bars under the stage name “Lila Fadista”, joined forces with guitarist João Caçador. As gay artists, they say they wanted the project to tell the stories of LGBTIQ people – and confront homophobia and racism in Portugal.

Lila described how she wanted to combine a drag show with fado – and create a safe space to explore “non-normative” forms of expression. “I wanted to explore my feminine side and find a safe space to do it through music,” says Lila, who identifies as agender, meaning she rejects all gender labels.

In 2016, Lila signed up for classes at a fado music school but soon realised that she would not fit in its traditional circles. “Fado schools have a very rigid, tense environment and I didn’t feel comfortable there”, says Lila, who often uses she/her pronouns but was assumed to be male by her teacher.

“Once I wanted to sing a fado song called “Ai Mouraria”, and the teacher said I couldn’t sing it because it was meant to be sung by women. That was when I knew I wouldn’t be able to sing the way I wanted to, and that there was no space for me there, to express myself and to experiment”, she explains.

“I wanted to sing a different fado; songs that would allow me to explore my gender identity”, Lila says. Fado Bicha would create a safe space for LGBTIQ people and challenge the ‘rules’ on what is fado and how it should be sung.

Fado’s 19th century roots are in the poorest neighbourhoods of Lisbon, amidst marginalised working classes and migrants. Famous fado singers including Severa were sex workers who performed with sailors. Fado classics are full of mourning and the bitterness of long hardships and oppression.

The genre was later appropriated by upper-class entertainers. Radio stations helped to popularise and commercialise fado songs. From the 1930s, the authoritarian regime that ruled Portugal for more than four decades imposed censorship on artists. Fado musicians were required to have licences to perform, while fado houses were regulated and institutionalised.

“Fado was born among the oppressed”, says Lila. “We are going back to its conceptual origins”. The song “Lisbon don’t be racist” mentions the name of Alcindo Monteiro, a black 27-year-old Portuguese man who was murdered in on 10 June 1995 by a group of far-right ‘skinheads’ who took to the city’s streets armed with knives, iron knuckles, sticks and metal bars.

The authoritarian regime had celebrated 10 June as a nationalist holiday, the “Day of the Portuguese Race”. One of the men involved in the rampage that killed Monteiro, and injured at least 10 other black people, was the far-right leader invited onto one of Portugal’s most popular talk shows earlier this year.

“Always remember Alcindo,” sings Lila. The song also mentions anti-racist activists like Mamadou Ba and Joacine Katar Moreira, as well as the (mostly black) cleaning ladies who live in Lisbon’s peripheries who are not granted “the right to dream”. Other songs tell the love stories of LGBTIQ people.

Fado Bicha wants to give voice to minorities and marginalised people who don’t easily find spaces to be listened to. “Most words used to refer to gay people are insults and related to abuse and violence. So we grow up without positive references associated with love and happiness”, says Caçador.

Homosexuality was illegal in Portugal until 1982. The authoritarian Catholic regime that ruled over the country for 48 years persecuted the LGBTIQ community. After a long fight for equal rights, gay marriage became legal in 2010 and adoption rights were given to same-sex couples in 2016.

But attitudes take a long time to change. “In recent years we’ve witnessed a lot of progress, but Lisbon is still a difficult place to live for anyone who doesn’t have a ‘normative’ identity”, says Lila. For her, the stage is a safe space to explore diversity in gender expression and confront discrimination.

“The word ‘bicha’ is a homophobic insult, but it is also a misogynist word. It’s a word of violence used to name the men who give up their masculinity to get closer to their feminine side”, explains Lila.

But the slur has been appropriated by some LGBTIQ people as an empowering term. “We are reclaiming the name bicha, overcoming negative experiences of bullying and subverting what was once used as an insult”.

Revolutionary music

Music has been a central tool of Portuguese activists for decades. Under the dictatorship, many artists sang in opposition to the far-right regime that imprisoned, tortured and killed thousands of dissidents. The term “música de intervenção” (‘music of intervention’), refers to these subversive songs.

The young officers behind the 1974 coup to overthrow the dictatorship, and establish a democratic regime, also used music to start their revolution. They took over a radio station and played songs as coded signals – like “Grândola Vila Morena”, which became an anthem and symbol of the revolution.

Fado Bicha is drawing on Portugal’s history of activism through music – and giving growing audiences a way to engage with social and political issues.

The new lyrics that Lila writes for well-known fado songs are not only aimed at confronting homophobia and reflecting the experiences of the LGBTIQ community. They challenge all forms of discrimination.

“As queer people there are issues that we care deeply about, like racism and the rise of the far-right,” she explains. Caçador adds: “We realised how these struggles are interconnected, we don’t think we can separate them”.

The group’s most recent music video, uploaded to YouTube this month, opens with the musicians reading a text about Portugal’s long history of Atlantic slave trade and how Brazil is a former Portuguese colony which had the largest number of slaves imported to the Americas.

The music video is based on a song by Brazilian singer Elza Soares and says: “On the avenue you left, the black skin and your voice. You are the woman at the end of this world. You are. And you will sing until the end".

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A few weeks ago, we convened and moderated a “justice and equity” reading group for students, staff, and faculty at a local college. Our inaugural meeting centered on an essay in which the author calls attention to the shortcomings of organizing racial justice interventions in higher education around the sanitized and depoliticized language of “diversity.”

While nearly every participant agreed that programs and initiatives captured under the banner of “diversity” would fail to remediate historical and contemporary racial wrongs, we quickly noticed something else: a number of white discussants began describing racism as a “disease,” as a “mental illness,” and as a form of “deviant behavior.” In a private conversation after the gathering, one staff member approached us with the suggestion that we should consider “lobotomizing the racists that hold our country back.”

The subtext was palpable: racism is little more than a behavior-based psychopathology that discloses itself in discrete manifestations of bigotry, prejudice, and misunderstanding. According to such a construction, racism can only be treated with medical intervention. Racial inequity, therefore, is simply the sum of the actions of individual bigots and racial justice can be achieved by “curing” those individuals.

The presumption that one can eliminate racism by snuffing out a few “bad apples” misses the mark. In fact, such a paradigm misdiagnoses the systemic and ideological production of race itself, which is squarely centered in white supremacy.

The “racism as disease” paradigm only seems to make sense if one were also to believe that racism is: 1) a matter of (mis)recognition and (mis)perception meted out in an apolitical and behaviorist colorblind present; 2) an unfortunate holdover from slavery, a past mistake that has yet to be rectified; and 3) an anomaly, a radical deviation from the telos of dominant political institutions and practices.

Such a psychopathological paradigm, however, is not an appendage of 19th century scientific racism, but rather 20th century liberal social science. In An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944), Swedish Nobel laureate economist Gunnar Myrdal argued that “[racism] is a terrible and inexplicable anomaly stuck in the middle of our liberal democratic ethos.” His popular study – funded by the Carnegie Foundation – provides a forceful, if incomplete, framework for explaining the persistence of racial injustice in the United States. Myrdal’s book quickly became an authoritative text for defenders of racial integration in the postwar period, and his work gained popularity in the U.S. imagination after it was cited in Brown v. Board of Education (1954).

Together, Myrdal’s study and the Brown decision helped to shift race discourse away from systemic critiques of white supremacy emblematized by DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903) to diagnoses based on “psychological knowledge” and personal attitudes. Addressing and eliminating quantifiable racial inequities gave way to treating individual racists (i.e. the few “bad apples”) in an otherwise racially just country. Structural white supremacy, in other words, became conflated with individual bigotry.

According to Google Books Ngram, from 1900 to the mid-century the terms “white supremacy” and “racism” were both used at a similar rate in popular and scholarly usage. Beginning in the late 1950s, however, “racism” began to surpass “white supremacy” as the preeminent term for marking, diagnosing, and ameliorating various forms of racial injustice. The deficiency of this term rests in its ability to make invisible both its locus and its origin: whiteness. Avoiding the term “white” overlooks the policies, practices, and hierarchies of domination and exclusion that has shaped U.S. and global history.

Myrdal’s study continues to set the parameters of mainstream race discourse in the United States. His anomaly thesis casts racism in the vernacular of deviance and abnormality, providing the discursive basis for thinking about racism as illness or disease.

White supremacy, however, is unexplainable by the anomaly thesis. In School Desegregation (1984), scholar Jennifer Hochschild rightly argues that “racism is not simply an excrescence on a fundamentally healthy liberal democratic body…Liberal democracy and racism in the U.S. are historically, even inherently, reinforcing; American society as we know it exists only because of its foundation in racially based slavery, and it thrives only because racial discrimination continues. The apparent anomaly is an actual symbiosis.” White supremacy is not an unfortunate, anomalous stain on an otherwise virginal tapestry of democracy, but rather, to paraphrase Hannah Arendt, it’s terribly, terrifyingly normal.

In fact, the American Psychiatric Association has for decades admitted that racial injustice is too normal to be considered a mental illness or a disease. In 1969, a group of black psychiatrists urged the organization to acknowledge that racism is the “major mental health problem of this country” and to include extreme bigotry as a recognized mental illness in the Diagnostics and Statistics Manual.

Though the APA endorsed the “general spirit of reform and redress of racial inequities in American psychiatry,” it rejected the psychiatrists’ desire to classify extreme bigotry as a mental illness. In order for racism to be considered a mental illness, the APA declared, racism must deviate from normative behavior. Because racism is ubiquitous, it could not constitute a mental illness. The APA used this rationale to keep racism out of the DSM in 1980, 1987, 1994, and 2013.

The ideology of race itself leads back to whiteness and white supremacy. U.S. immigration and naturalization legislation, race-based marriage statutes, inheritance law, redlining, and the segregation of public facilities are all examples of how whiteness informs policy and practice. They draw, secure, police, and legitimize the parameters of whiteness and non-whiteness.

So-called anti-miscegenation statutes reinforce this argument. From a strictly etymological perspective, “anti-miscegenation” most closely refers to a proscription against “race-mixing” in marriage or conjugal entanglements. The term, however, does not accurately depict the ideological underpinnings of the law. Most anti-miscegenation laws, in fact, did not prohibit marriage or sexual relations between two non-white people.

What architects of anti-miscegenation laws feared most was race-mixing between white and non-white people because such a social practice would compromise the prospect of white racial purity, white national purity, and global white supremacy. Similarly, U.S. naturalization law from 1790 to 1952 carried with it an explicit prerequisite of whiteness. For instance, the first U.S. Immigration and Naturalization law, in 1790, restricted naturalized citizenship to “a free white [male], who shall have resided within the limits and under the jurisdiction of the United States for the term of two years.”

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Ultimately, framing white supremacy as exceptional, individualized, and through the language of disease obscures its origins and movements. As George Lipsitz argues, “whiteness has a cash value” that produces advantages and “profits” for white people in virtually all areas of social organization including housing, education, employment, and intergenerational wealth. Lipsitz continues: “White supremacy is usually less a matter of direct, referential, and snarling contempt than a system for protecting the privileges of whites by denying communities of color opportunities for asset accumulation and upward mobility” and access to full and legitimate citizenship.

Those who continue to explain racial injustice through appeals to disease or illness implicitly reinforce a discourse that misdiagnoses the machinations of white supremacy. If we are truly to craft an antiracist politics capable of threatening the endurance of white supremacy, we must reject analyses and interventions that individualize social injustice by relying on notions of disease, mental illness, or deviance.

This article was originally published by Black Perspectives and then appeared in edited form in YES! Magazine.

Marina Silva, the Brazilian former Minister for the Environment for Lula’s government, environmental activist and Goldman Prize winner, is raising her voice to challenge the policies of the current Brazilian government that have led to an 83% increase in forest fires in the Amazon since last year.

Silva, who was elected as a senator in 1994 for the state of Acre, already had a long history of environmental activism when she entered into the political sphere. She was born into a humble family who were descendants of African slaves and Portuguese immigrants near the city of Rio Branco on the border between Brazil and Bolivia.

Her family faced many difficulties, such as the death of Silva’s mother when she was only 14 years old, and the subsequent deaths of her two younger brothers. When Silva was 16 years old, she became seriously ill with hepatitis and she left her home for the city of Rio Branco where she would be treated and where she would later also learn to read and write, in preparation for becoming a nun.

At the age of 17, she saw a poster in her local church advertising courses in rural trade union leadership, she signed up, and it was there that she met the famous environmental activist and ecologist, Chico Mendes, who would change her life forever.

From then on, she abandoned her ambitions to become a nun and became an advocate for the rainforest, working alongside Mendes until he was murdered in 1988 by landowners who saw his activism as a threat to their economic activity.

Now, Silva advocates against the environmental policies of Bolsonaro’s government in Brazil, in Latin America and around the world. Her voice is increasingly relevant given the current forest fires in the Amazon that have been devastating the region over the past two weeks: “the fires in the Amazon are a crime against humanity” says Silva, “the Brazilian government is undoing all the environmental policies that previously existed”.

When she was the Minister for the Environment during Lula’s government, she managed to reduce deforestation by 80% in her own words, so she’s well aware of the important role that public policies play in dealing with climate change and preserving the Amazon rainforest.

“When I became Minister for the Environment in 2013, deforestation was very common, so we created a Plan for Deforestation Prevention in the Amazon region”. The idea, she explains, was to bring together different ministries to create a comprehensive plan of action that dealt with the issue quickly and effectively.

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“We joined together the Ministry of Agricultural Development, with the Ministry of Technology and the Ministry of Defence to create a deforestation detection system in real time”. She also toughened punishments for those who were illegally deforesting, and demarcated territories that were at risk. “We created 24 millions of hectares of conservation areas, we applied 4 billion in fines, and we sent lots of illegal loggers to prison”. Due to these actions, Silva drastically reduced deforestation rates whilst she was Minister for the Environment.

Brazil, like many other Latin American countries, has been deeply divided and politically polarised between the left and right, and Silva is also critical of how these political forces have co-opted environmental issues in their political agendas. “Some of the more traditional sectors of the left in Brazil, in this context of polarisation, began to create a discourse that defending the environment was exclusively a left-wing issue”, and consequently, many people didn’t want to become involved. “But we have to overcome this discourse, because caring for the environment has no political ideology. It’s not left-wing nor is it right-wing".

Many challenges lie ahead in Brazil to defend the rainforest and create a culture of political mobilisation among citizens, given that the left has been discredited by several corruption scandals, and the right has overtly authoritarian tendencies. However, people must take to the streets to defend the Amazon rainforest if they really want things to change.

The last point that Silva emphasises: “Now more than ever we need sustainable development, and not the kind of development that we’re seeing right now. That means, a country that is environmentally sustainable, politically democratic, and socially developed”. If we can’t combat this crisis of values we’re currently suffering from in Latin America, this sustainable development will become increasingly difficult to achieve.