Is it possible to feed seven billion people?

11/12/2011 Leonardo Boff2 Comentários

We are already 7 billion people. Will there be enough food for everyone? There are several answers. We will pick one, from the Agrimonde Group (see, Développement et civilisations, September 2011) based in France, that studied the food situation of six critical regions of the planet. This group of scientists is optimist, even when we reach 9 billion inhabitants. The group suggests two paths: to deepen the green revolution of the 1960s, and the so-called double green revolution.

The green revolution had the merit of refuting Malthus’ thesis, according to which an imbalance would develop between population, which is growing geometrically, and food production, which is increasing only arithmetically, causing the collapse of humanity. The green revolution showed that with new technologies, a greater utilization of land for agriculture, and massive application of toxins, previously destined for war and now for agriculture, we could produce much more of what the population demands.

This proved to be correct, because there was a significant rise in the sale of food, even though the inequities of the neoliberal and capitalist system causes millions and millions of people to continue suffering chronic hunger and misery. It is also true that this increase in food production has come at an extremely high ecological cost: soils were poisoned, waters contaminated, and bio-diversity impoverished, in addition to causing erosion and turning arable land into deserts in many regions of the world, especially in Africa.

It all got worse when food became just another commodity, instead of being considered a means of life that, given its nature, never should be subjected to market speculation. There is enough food for everyone, but the poor do not have access to it, for lack of money. The poor stay hungry, and their numbers are increasing. The current neoliberal system still supports this model, and experiences no need to change its logic, which allows it to cynically coexist with millions of hungry people, who are considered irrelevant to the goal of limitless accumulation.

This solution is not only myopic, but false, besides being cruel and pitiless. Those who still defend it do not take seriously the fact that the Earth is undeniably adrift and that global warming causes great soil erosion, the destruction of harvests, and millions of climate migrants. To them the Earth is nothing more than merely a means of production, not the Common House, Gaia, that must be cared for.

To tell the truth, the farmers understand about food. They produce 70% of all that humanity consumes. For that reason, they must be heard and included in any solution that may be taken by the public powers, by enterprises, and by society, because it is about the survival of all.

Given human overpopulation, all arable land must be used, but within the reach and the limits of its eco-systems; all organic residues must be used or recycled to the extent possible, the conservation of energy must be maximized, alternative energies developed, and precedence given to family farms, medium and small cooperatives. And finally, we must move towards a food democracy, where producers and consumers are conscious of their respective responsibilities, with knowledge and information about the realities of sustainability of the planet, and a different model of consumption, in solidarity, frugally and without waste.

Taking into account these facts, Agrimonde proposes a double green revolution in the following form: it accepts continuation of the first green revolution, with its ecological contradictions, but simultaneously proposes a second green revolution. This implies that the consumers incorporate daily habits different from the current ones, more aware of their environmental impact, and open to international solidarity, so that food may become in fact a right accessible to everyone.

Being optimists, we can say that this proposal is reasonably sustainable. It is being organized in an embryonic form everywhere in the world, through the organic family farms, small and medium enterprises, ecological agriculture and towns, and other ways of being respectful of nature. It is possible, and may well be the obligatory path for humanity in the future.

To Awaken the Shaman Dimension

06/12/2011 Leonardo Boff2 Comentários

The concept of sustainability, considered in its widest sense and not reduced just to development, embraces all actions focused on maintaining the existence of other beings, because they have the right to coexist with us. And only starting from this premise of coexistence do we utilize, with sobriety and respect, a part of them to satisfy our needs, while also preserving them for future generations.

The universe also fits within this concept. From the new cosmology, we now know that we are made of the dust of stars and that passing through us is the mysterious Basic Energy that nourishes everything and which unfolds into the four forces –gravitational, electromagnetic, nuclear strong and weak– that, by always acting together, maintain us as we are.

As conscious and intelligent beings, we have our place and our function within the cosmologic process. Although we are not the center of everything, we certainly are one of those forward points through which the universe turns into itself, that is to say, the universe becomes conscious. The weak anthropological principle allows us say that, for us to be what we are, all the energies and processes of evolution had to organize themselves in such an articulated and subtle manner that our appearance was possible. Otherwise, I would not be writing here.

Through us, the universe and the Earth look at and contemplate themselves. The capacity to see appeared 600 million years ago. Until then, the Earth was blind. The profound and starry sky, the Iguaçu Falls, where I am now, the green of the nearby jungles, could not be seen. Through our sight, the Earth and the universe can see all of this indescribable beauty.

The original peoples, from the Andean to the samis of the Arctic, felt one with the universe, as brothers and sisters of the stars, making a great cosmic family. We have lost that feeling of mutual belonging. They felt that the cosmic forces balanced the paths of all beings and acted within them. To live in consonance with these fundamental energies was to have a sustainable life, filled with meaning.

We know from quantum physics that consciousness and the material world are connected and that the manner a scientist chooses to make his observation affects the observed object. Observer and observed object are inseparably linked. Hence the inclusion of consciousness in scientific theories and in the very cosmic reality is a fact that has already been assimilated by a large part of the scientific community. We form, in effect, a complex and diversified whole.

The figures of the shamans are well- known. They were always present in the ancient world and are now retuning with renewed vigor, as quantum physicist P. Drouot has shown in his book, The shaman, the physicist and the mystic (El chamán, el físico y el místico, Vergara, 2001) for which I was honored to prepare a prologue. The shaman lives a singular state of consciousness that allows him to enter into intimate contact with the cosmic energies. The shaman understands the call of the mountains, the lakes, the woods and the jungles, the call of the animals and of human beings. The shaman knows how to direct such energies towards healing ends and to harmonize them with the whole.

Inside each of us lies the shaman dimension. That shaman energy causes us to stand speechless in the face of the immensity of the sea, to sense the eyes of another person, to be entranced on seeing a newborn child. We need to liberate the shaman dimension within us, so as to enter into harmony with all around us, and to feel at peace.

Could not our desire to travel with the spacecrafts in cosmic space perhaps be the archetypical desire to search for our stellar origins, and the desire to return to our place of birth? Several astronauts have expressed similar ideas. This unstoppable search for equilibrium with the entire universe and to feel that we are part of the universe pertains to the intelligible notion of sustainability.

Sustainability includes valuation of this human and spiritual capital. Its effect is to generate within us respect, and a sense of sacredness, before all realities, values that nourish the profound ecology and which help us to respect and live in symbiosis with Mother Earth. This attitude is urgently needed, to moderate the destructive forces that have overtaken us in recent decades.

Greece and Italy: the Great Perversity

27/11/2011 Leonardo BoffDeixe um comentário

To solve the economic-financial crises of Greece and Italy, by demand of the European Central Bank, governments have been formed that are composed purely of technocrats, without the participation of a single politician. They start from the illusion that it is all about an economic problem, that must be resolved through economics. But those who understand only economics, end up not even understanding economics. The crisis is not from having mishandled economics, but ethics and humanity. Both are closely related to politics. Therefore, the first lesson of basic Marxism is to understand that economics is not just mathematics and statistics, but a chapter of politics. A great part of Marx’s work is devoted to divorcing political economics from capital. When a crisis much like the present occurred in England, and a government of technocrats was created, Marx criticized it harshly, mocking it with irony, because he foresaw total failure, and that is what followed. The poison that created a crisis cannot be used to cure it.

People from the highest levels of finance have been called upon to lead the governments of both Greece and Italy. The banks and stock markets caused the present crisis, that has almost destroyed the whole economic system. These gentlemen are like fundamentalist Talibans: they believe in good faith in the dogma of free markets and the role of the stock markets. Where in the universe is it that greed is good, and that it is good to covet, are proclaimed as the ideal? How can one make a virtue out of a vice (and, let us also say it, from a sin)? They sat in New York’s Wall Street and in the City of London. They are not the foxes that guard the chickens, but those who devour them. With their manipulations they transferred great fortunes to a very few hands, and when the crisis exploded, they were helped out with thousands of millions of dollars taken from the workers and retirees. Barack Obama appeared weak, bowing more to them than to the civil society. They continued the party with the money they received, because the promised regulations of the financial markets became a dead letter. Millions are unemployed and in a precarious state, especially the young, who are filling the streets, indignant, rising against greed, social inequality and the cruelty of capital.

Can it be that people whose minds were formed by the catechism of purely neoliberal thinking are going to lead Greece and Italy out of this mess? What is happening is that an entire society is being sacrificed on the altar of the banks and the financial system.

Since the majority of those in the establishment do not think (they don’t need to think) we will attempt to understand the crisis through the light of two thinkers who, in the same year, 1944, in the United States, gave us an illuminating clue. The first was the Hungarian-Canadian philosopher and economist Karl Polanyi, with his classic work, The Great Transformation. What does it consist of? It consist of the dictatorship of economics. After the Second World War, that helped overcome the Great Depression of 1929, capitalism achieved a master stroke: it annulled politics, sent ethics into exile and imposed a dictatorship of economics. Since then, there has been only a society of market, rather than, as it was before, a society with market. Economics structures everything and turns everything into merchandise, ruled by cruel competition and shameless profiteering. This transformation has destroyed the social bonds, and widened the gap between rich and poor within each country, and at the international level.

The other is Max Horkheimer, a philosopher from the Frankfurt school, exiled in the United States, who wrote Eclipse of Reason (1947). There he sets forth the reasons for Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, that fundamentally consist of the following: reason no longer seeks truth and the meaning of things, but has been sequestered by the process of production and lowered to a mere instrumental function, «transformed into a simple tedious mechanism to register facts». He laments that «justice, equality, happiness, and tolerance, which for centuries have been deemed inherent in reason, have lost their intellectual roots». When a society eclipses reason, it becomes blind, loses the meaning of togetherness, and finds itself stuck in the swamp of individual or corporative interests. That is what we see in the present crisis. The most humanist Nobel laureates for economics, Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz, have written repeatedly that the Wall Street players should be jailed, as thieves and bandits.

Today, in Greece and in Italy, The Great Transformation has acquired another name: The Great Perversity.

The Meaning of the Brazilian Cultural Experience

19/11/2011 Leonardo Boff1 comentário

1. The people of Brazil are used to «facing life» and to getting everything in «the struggle», that is, to overcoming difficulties and with lots of hard work. Why then could they not also «face» the latest challenge, of making the necessary changes to create more equalitarian relationships and end corruption?

2. The Brazilian nation has not yet finished being born. What we inherited was the Brazil-Enterprise, with an enslaving elite and masses of dispossessed. But from the womb of these masses were born leaders and social movements, with conscience and organization. Their dream? To reinvent Brazil. The process began from below and it cannot be stopped.

3. In spite of poverty and exclusion, the poor invented paths of survival. To overcome a negative reality, the State and the politicians need to listen to and evaluate what the people already know, and what they have invented. Only then will the division between the elites and the people be overcome, and we will become a complex but unified nation.

4. The Brazilian is committed to hope. Hope is the last thing to die. That is why the Brazilian is certain that God writes with crooked lines. Hope is the secret of a Brazilian’s optimism, it lets him put the dramas in perspective, dance at his carnival, be a fan of his soccer team, and keep alive the utopian vision that life is beautiful and that tomorrow can be better.

5. Fear is inherent in life because «to live is dangerous» and always carries risks. They force us to change and strengthen hope. What the people, not the elites, desire more is change, so that happiness and love are not so difficult.

6. Courage is the opposite of fear. It is the faith that things can be different and that, organized, we can move ahead. Brazil has proven to be good not only at carnival and soccer, Brazil is also good at agriculture, architecture, music and her inexhaustible joy of living.

7. The Brazilian people are religious and mystical. More than thinking about God, Brazilians feel God in their daily life, which is revealed in the expressions: «thanks be to God», «may God pay you», «be with God». God is not a problem for Brazilians, but the solution to their problems. The Brazilian feels protected by the saints, female and male, and by the good spirits and by orixás that anchor their life in the middle of suffering.

8. Among the characteristics of Brazilian culture are happiness and a sense of humor, that help alleviate social contradictions. That happiness is born from the conviction that life is worth more than anything else. This is why life is to be celebrated with feasts; and failure must be faced with humor. The effect is the lightness and enthusiasm that is so admired in us.

9. A unification that we have not completed in Brazil is that of academic and popular knowledge. Popular knowledge is born from the experience of suffering, from the thousands of ways to survive with such scarce resources. Academic knowledge is born of study, of drinking from many fountains. When those two forms of knowledge unite, we will be invincible.

10. Caring belongs to the essence of all of life. Without caring, life gets sick, and dies. With caring, life is protected and lasts longer. The challenge now is to understand politics as the caring for Brazil, for her people, her nature, education, health, of justice. That caring is proof that we love our country.

11. One of the trademarks of the Brazilian people is their capacity to relate to the whole world, of adding, joining together, syncretizing and summarizing. This is why Brazilians are neither intolerant nor dogmatic. They like and welcome foreigners. These are fundamental values for globalization with a human face. We are showing that it is possible and we are building it.

12. Brazil is the principal new-Latin nation of the world. We have everything needed to also be the main civilization of the tropics, non-imperial, but in solidarity with all nations, because Brazil incorporated into herself representatives of the 60 peoples who have come here. Our challenge is to show that Brazil can be, in fact, a part of the paradise that was not lost.