The future depends on us now

02/12/2021 Leonardo BoffDeixe um comentário

The COP26 in Glasgow disappointed in the central point: in the consensus about the mitigation of global warming because it still embraced the use of coal, although it is gradually being abolished as an energy source. But it had merit, never seen in the previous sessions of the 25 COPs. This time, without exception, the anthropogenic existence of climate change was admitted. The extreme events, the methane intrusion due to the melting of the permafrost and the polar ice caps, 20 times more harmful than CO2, the increasing erosion of biodiversity, the range of viruses such as Covid-19, the Earth Overshoot that frightens us every year, because the current consumption demands more than one and a half Earths (1, 75), which impedes its biocapacity, and the crossing of some of the 9 Planetary Bounderies that may jeopardize our civilizational experience, have bent the deniers who would rather defend their fortunes and capital than the life of the planet and our common future.

Such events have given rise to apocalyptic scenarios and a veritable metaphysical terror, in the sense that we fear for our survival on this planet. Many are the warnings of this eventuality on the part of renowned scientists and especially Pope Francis, who in his last encyclical, Fratelli tutti (2020), stated categorically: “we are in the same boat; either we all save ourselves or no one is saved” (n.34).

There is a heated worldwide dispute about how history will follow the post-pandemic. Several models are on the agenda. I think that the most radical ones should be discarded, because they are too cruel and anti-life, like the Great Reset. It is a despotic capitalism, suggested by the parasitic Prince Charles and taken up by the 0.1% of the world’s billionaires.

Also the tempting “Green Capitalism” that aims to cover the whole planet in green but never poses the question of social inequality that penalizes and claims millions of human lives. Acceptable and, in a way, promising are the eco-socialism and the Andean bien vivir y convivir. Both would be viable under the assumption of a global and pluralistic governance, willing to find global solutions to global problems such as pandemic and a minimum planetary order that would include everyone in the one Common House, also nature.

I believe that Pope Francis in Fratelli tutti presented some of the fundamental values from which we could project a paradigm that guarantees the future of the species and our civilization: a biocivilization centered on a fraternity without borders and a universal social friendship.

The first is to overcome the paradigm that has been in force for centuries, that of the human being as dominus (master and lord) who does not feel part of nature but dominates it with the instrument of technoscience. The second, to assume an alternative to dominus that would be frater: the human being, man and woman, brothers and sisters of each other and of all beings in nature because we all have a common origin, the humus of the Earth, because we are carriers of the same basic genetic code and because we feel part of nature. The third, activate the “principle of hope,” deeper than the virtue of hope, that inner impulse that knows no time or space and that is always present in the human being, leading him to indignation against social wrongs and the courage to transform them by projecting new worlds, viable utopias, and self-improvement.

The values will not be taken from the great narratives that have already been tried out, that of the Enlightenment, capitalism and socialism that resulted in the current systemic crisis, therefore, that did not achieve their purposes. It will drink from its own well, in the essential nature of the human being.

There he discovers that we are essentially beings of unlimited relationship, whose best expression resides in loving-kindness; beings of solidarity, which in the early days of hominization allowed us to make the leap from animality to humanity; beings of cooperation, for only together can we build our habitat, which takes place in coexistence, in society and in civilizations, in a word, in the general good-common; beings of care, for this defines human nature, of all living beings, and which also emerges as a cosmological constant: everything exists because all the factors subtly combined to erupt life, and as a sub-chapter of life, human life and the universe itself that without the due care of all the elements, would not allow us to be here writing about these things; spiritual beings, able to ask the most radical questions about why our existence, absolutely free, what is our place in the set of beings, to what destiny we are called and by the fact that we intuit that behind everything that exists and lives. Underneath lies a powerful and loving Energy (the Quantum Vacuum, the Energy of the background of the universe, or the Abyss that generates everything that exists?) with it we can establisch a relationshiep wit veneration and a silent reverence.

From these values, another possible and now necessary world can be forged. Logically, the passage from one paradigm to another will not happen overnight, and not without great difficulties, opposition, and crises. But we have no other alternative. As Eric Hobsbawm wrote in his “The Age of Extremes” (1995) on its last page: “We do not know where we are going. If humanity is to have a meaningful future, it cannot be by prolonging the past and the present. If we try to build the third millennium on this basis we will fail, and the price of failure, that is, the alternative to changing society, is darkness.

This is especially true for those who wish to revert to the old normality, which is perverse to the life of nature and to human life. We have to change, or else, as UN Secretary Antonio Guterrez said, when opening the work of COP26: “If we do not act now, we will be digging our own grave.

The future is today, as the 100,000 people at the parallel COP26 in Glasgow proclaimed. If we do not start guiding ourselves by the values mentioned above right now, we will be paving the way for an ecological-social disaster of unprecedented proportions. But I believe and hope, I hope and believe that the life drive, stronger than the death drive, will lead us to the necessary changes. We will live and still shine.

Leonardo Boff, philosopher and ecotheologist wrote: The painful birth of Mother Earth: a society of fraternity without borders and of social friendship,Vozes 2020.

COP26 has not responded to the climate emergency

11/11/2021 Leonardo BoffDeixe um comentário

With the melting of the polar ice caps and the parmafrost, the methane released has heavily aggravated climate upheavals in addition to the other greenhouse gases: CO2, ozone (O3) and nitrous oxide (N2O). Therefore, we are not heading towards global warming. We are deep in it. The 2015 Paris Agreement on greenhouse gas mitigation that gave some hope has not been observed. On the contrary, emissions have grown by 60%. China is the largest emitter with 30.3%, followed by the USA with 14.4, the Europeans with 6.8%. The deterioration was widespread.

Climate scientists and scholars have already declared a climate emergency. In the harsh words of Patricia Espinosa, UN Executive Secretary on Climate Change, at the opening of COP26: “We are heading for a global temperature increase of 2.7 degrees C. when we should reach the target of 1.5 degrees”. We know that with this level of warming, most species will be unable to adapt and will disappear. Millions of poor and vulnerable humans will be at grave risk.

What is the cause? Data from the scientific community sent to the COP26 to assist in the right decisions, give an answer: “climate change is caused by the character of social and economic development, produced by the unsustainable nature of capitalist society”. Therefore, the problem is not the climate but capitalism that does not know environmental and socio-political ecology.

Given the seriousness of the ecological alarm, the results of COP26 were disappointing and frustrating. Only recommendations were made to reduce gases by 2030. It should be half. But no one took on this goal. Vaguely, many, coerced by the criticism in their countries, like Brazil, made promises but without any binding. China and India, decisive for mitigation and adaptation, omitted.

We can understand: in the Conferences of the Parties (COP) there are representatives of governments, practically all of them under the capitalist regime. This, by its internal dynamics, is not at all interested in the changes, because it would be contradictory. They are supported by the coal, oil and gas megacorporations that have always opposed change in order not to lose their profits. They are always present at the various COPs, putting strong pressure on the participants, in a negative sense.

There was a lot of discussion about coal-based thermal energy and the transition to clean energy. But only 13 countries, small ones, made a commitment, not China and the USA, which use coal the most, although these two ended up making an agreement at the end of the Conference to start reducing the use of coal, but without specific targets.

Another scenario is the parallel COP26 that takes place in the street with thousands of representatives of all the peoples of the world. There, they are telling the truth that the governments do not want to hear: we have little time, we have to change course if we want to save life and our civilization. Many posters read: “they are stealing our future, we want a living Earth”. Hence the words of Pope Francis, with other religious, in a message sent to COP26: “We have been given a garden and we must not leave our children a desert”.

In this context, the Fifth International Tribunal for the Rights of Nature and Amazonia was important. Representatives of the nine countries that make up the Amazon region were present, among other supporters. The fact that nature and the Earth are subjects of rights was reaffirmed, as it already appears in the constitutions of Ecuador and Bolivia, and more and more it is a new fact of collective consciousness.

Special attention was given to the Amazon, with its nearly 6 million square kilometers and inhabited by some 500 different peoples. The basic motto was: “Amazonia: a living entity under threat“. Indigenous people came with their various organizations, giving testimony of their resistance, the murders of their leaders, the invasion of their territories, bringing videos of their cultures, dances, expressions of their high ancestry.

From deep in the jungle a cry of another way of living and of fraternizing with nature was heard, proving that it is possible to live well without destroying. The native peoples are our masters, for they feel that nature is an extension of their bodies, which is why they care for and love it as themselves.

After a thorough scientific reasoning that served as a substratum for both face-to-face and virtual discussions, the verdict was reached:

“The Court condemns for the crimes of ecocide, ethnocide and genocide in the Amazon and of its peoples, those directly responsible, namely: banks, financiers of the megaprojects; international companies: mining and private companies, agribusiness companies; and finally, the States for allowing the criminal actions against the Amazon. …by structural violence, supporting the actions of criminal organizations that invade the territories of traditional peoples and are unpunished authors of assassinations, kidnappings of indigenous leaders, and defenders of human rights and the rights of nature”.

The verdict details several measures to be taken mainly in favor of indigenous peoples, such as natural defenders of the Amazon, the recognition of the Amazon as a subject of rights, the repair and restoration of its integrity, and the demercantilization of nature. The expression was created: we have to Amazonize ourselves to regulate the climates and guarantee a future for biodiversity.

It was decided to hold a Pan-American Social Forum in July 2022, in Belém do Pará, in the Brazilian Amazon. It will deal with alliances among all native peoples, in the conviction that the Panamazonic forest is fundamental to regulate the Earth’s climates and to guarantee the perpetuity of life on the planet. Human life may eventually disappear. But the Earth will continue to revolve around the sun, however, without us. This can be avoided if there is a global alliance of humans in favor of life in all its diversity. We have the means, science and technology. We only lack the political will and the emotional bond with nature and the great and generous Mother Earth.

Leonardo Boff is a member of the International Earth Charter Initiative and was a participant in the Fifth International Tribunal on the Law of Nature and Amazonia, held hybridously, in person and virtually, in Glasgow during the COP26.

The big player absent at COP26 in Glasgow

22/10/2021 Leonardo BoffDeixe um comentário

Leonardo Boff

From October 31 to November 12, the twenty-sixth edition of the COP (Conference of the Parties) of the UN will take place in the city of Glasgow, Scotland. According to the recent report of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) the world scenario looks grim, more than ever before. We have only a decade to reduce CO2 emissions by at least half, otherwise we will reach a warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius. With this temperature there would be a serious devastation of nature, because most living beings would not adapt and could disappear; it would also dramatically affect humanity, with millions of climate migrants, because their regions have become too hot to live and produce; moreover, there could be the intrusion of a wide range of viruses that would surely sacrifice an unimaginable number of human lives, much more than the current Covid-19.

Because of what has already accumulated in the atmosphere, as CO2 remains there for 100 to 120 years, the changes we make now will not change the increasing course of extreme events caused by this accumulation; on the contrary, they tend to get worse as we have seen from the flooding of New York City’s ocean waters. Not even geoengineering, as proposed by science, would stop the level of climate change. This is why many climate scholars maintain that we are too late and there is no way back. This realization has caused many scientists to become skeptical and techno-fatalists. However, they maintain that if we can no longer change the course of increasing warming, we can at least use the available science and technology to minimize its disastrous effects. The current climate compared to the one to come will seem mild to us.

The IPCC report is emphatic in stating that this situation is the absolutely certain consequence of human activities that are harmful to nature (deforestation, excessive use of fossil energy, erosion of biodiversity, increasing desertification and poor treatment of the soil, etc.). It is imperative to recognize that these climatic upheavals have little to do with the vast majority of impoverished humanity, who are victims of the prevailing system. Unfortunately, this system produces a double injustice: an ecological one by devastating entire ecosystems, and a social one by increasing poverty and misery worldwide. The real culprits are globalized industrialist and extractivist megacorporations that do not respect the limits of nature and that start from the false premise of unlimited growth/development because natural resources would also be unlimited. Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Sí declares this assumption to be a lie (n.106).

What to expect from COP26 in Glasgow? Many question whether there will be sufficient consensus to maintain the Paris Agreement, with its commitment to reduce CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050. We know, however, from the previous COPs, that the agenda is controlled by the agents of the mega-corporations, particularly those in the oil and food sectors, among others. They tend to maintain the status quo that benefits them and oppose fundamental transformations that would force them to also change their mode of production and reduce their profits for the sake of the planetary general good. This is how they create obstacles to consensus and put the brakes on more drastic measures in the face of the evident deterioration of the Earth’s climate balance.

Avoiding a long argument, I would simply say what the Earth Charter (2003) and the two ecological encyclicals of Pope Francis, Laudato Si: on the care of the common home (2015) and Fratelli tutti (2020) state in all seriousness: we must operate a “profound ecological conversion” because “we are in the same boat; either we all save ourselves or no one is saved” (Earth Charter, preamble and final: Fratelli n.30.34). It happens that the theme: how is our relationship with nature, of plundering or of care? Of preservation of its biocapacity or exhaustion of its goods and services necessary for our life and survival? Since it is not posed, it is also not considered and answered.

Earth and nature, however, constitute the Great Player. On their preservation depend all the other projects of the pleyers and the future of our civilization. The analysis of the degraded situation of the Earth, undeniable and rampant, is never considered in the various COPs. Centrality is occupied by the prevailing political economy, the dominant player, the real cause of climate imbalances. It is never called into question.

The real savior player is nature, the Earth-Gaia, but they are totally absent in all COPs and will be, we presume, also in Glasgow. From Fratelli tutti’s perspective: either we move from the dominus paradigm, the human being disconnected from nature and perceiving himself as its owner and dominator, to the frater paradigm, the human being feeling part of nature and brother and sister with humans and all other beings of nature, or else we will be heading for the worst. This is the quaestio stantis et cadentis, that is to say, the fundamental question, without which all other questions are invalidated.

This time, the future is in our hands. As the Earth Charter states at the end: “as never before in history, our common destiny calls us to seek a new beginning. Do we go back to the old, terrifying way for most of humanity, or do we have the courage for a “new beginning,” as opposed to the billionaires’ Great Rezet? We want a true “new beginning” beneficial for the whole community of life, especially for the Common House and for us, its inhabitants, nature included. It is the condition of our continuity on this small and splendorous planet Earth.

Leonardo Boff is an ecotheologist and wrote Caring for the Earth, protecting life: how to escape the end of the world, Record, Rio de Janeiro 2010; with J. Moltmann, Is there hope for the threatened creation? Vozes, Petrópolis 2014.

Love belongs to the human being’s DNA

05/10/2021 Leonardo BoffDeixe um comentário

We are witnessing, appalled, in our country and also in a large part of the world, a wave of hatred, contempt, exclusion, and symbolic and physical violence that raises the question: What inscription does this sinister data have within human life? As we will see in a moment, researchers into the secret of human life assure us that love, cooperation, solidarity and compassion are inscribed in our DNA, by nature and not simply by a personal or social project. Those who live and nurture hatred are enemies of themselves and of life itself. For this reason, they produce nothing more effective than misfortune, exclusion, crime, and death. This is what we are unfortunately witnessing.

In this matter, the first name to be mentioned is, without a doubt, James D. Watson with his famous book “DNA: the secret of life” (2005). Together with his colleague Francis Crick they scientifically sustain that love is present in the essence of DNA. Both in 1953 decoded the genetic code, the structure of the DNA molecule, the double helix that contains the program of all life, from the primigenic cell that appeared 3.8 billion years ago until it reaches us, human beings.

We all consist of the same basic genetic code, which makes us all related to each other. Watson states: “against pride, the sublime achievements of the human intellect reveal, we have only twice as many genes as a lowly earthworm, three times as many genes as a rotting fruit fly, and only six times as many genes as simple baker’s yeast”.The stretched DNA cell reaches a meter and 85 centimeters; reduced to its original form is a trillionth of a centimeter and is present in every cell, even the most superficial of the skin of our hand. Watson defines: “Life as we know it is nothing more than a vast array of coordinated chemical reactions. The secret of this coordination is a complex and overwhelming set of instructions inscribed chemically in our DNA.

Much new knowledge enriched the Watson/Crick vision especially by the two Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. The best of this research was wonderfully summarized in the book by the ecologist and quantum physicist Fritjof Capra in his book “The Web of Life” (1997). Living beings, in open systems that make them dialogue with all the surroundings, are not static, they are always in a process of self-creation (Maturana’s autopóiesis). They not only adapt to changes, but create new ones together with other beings in such a way that they continuously co-evolve.

A decisive contribution was brought by Humberto Maturana who studied the biological basis of love. He sees love present from the very beginning of the universe. Each being is governed by two processes: the first is of necessity to interconnect with all the others to more easily guarantee its survival. The second is of pure spontaneity. Beings interrelate by rare gratuitousness, creating new bonds among themselves and by affinity, as if they were reciprocally in love. The love that emerges between two beings, millions of years later, had its origin in this ancestral, spontaneous loving relationship.

All this occurs as a given of objective reality. When it reaches the human being, it can become something subjective, a love consciously assumed and lived as a life project.

All this reflection is aimed at delegitimizing and accusing as inhumane, contrary to the movement of the universe and to the biological basis of life, the prevalence of hate, exclusion, and rage present in our country, encouraged by a head of state who excels in hate, deviant and necrophilic behavior. He has made himself an enemy of the lives of his compatriots by allying himself with Clovd-19, presenting himself as a master healer through chloroquine and compounds, as if he were a doctor and a specialist. He passed for a mere charlatan and, with reference to the indigenous people, a genocide.

I end with Watson’s testimony in the aforementioned book:

“Although I am not religious, I see profoundly true elements in St. Paul’s words about love in his epistle to the Corinthians: ‘If I could speak all languages…if I had the knowledge of all mysteries and all knowledge…if I had not love, I would be nothing. Paul, in my understanding, has clearly revealed the essence of our humanity. Love, that impulse that makes us care for others is what has allowed us our survival and success on the planet. So fundamental is love to our human nature that I am certain that the capacity to love is inscribed in our DNA. A secular Paul (he Watson) would say that love is our genes’ greatest gift to humanity”(p.433-434).

Such words lead us to respond to the Bolsonarist hatred with love, to the offense of his fans with love: Such attitudes give us the certainty and guarantee that these harmful times of anger and hatred will pass.

Leonardo Boff is a theologian, philosopher and writer and has published The house,spirituality,love,Paulinas,SP 2017; The rights of the heart, Paulus,SP 2015.