Categoria: Idiomas

                    The rights of nature and the Earth

Leonardo BoffDeixe um comentário

                                                   Leonardo Boff

With the intrusion of Cvid-19 and the increase of extreme events, nature and the Earth have entered the radar of human concerns. The fact is that we find ourselves within the sixth mass extinction, aggravated by the anthropocene and necrocene of the last decades. Therefore, another type of relationship with nature and with the Earth, our Common Home, is required to maintain its biocapacity.

This will only happen if we redo the natural contract with the Earth and if we consider that all living beings, carriers of the same basic genetic code (the same 20 amino acids and 4 phosphate bases), form the great community of life as understood in the Earth Charter. The Earth Charter states categorically that all of them have intrinsic value, regardless of the use that we make of them, and therefore deserve respect and are subjects of dignity and rights. Repeatedly in his ecological encyclical Laudato Si’ Pope Francis emphasizes that “every creature has a value and a meaning of its own” (n.76).

Every contract is made on the basis of reciprocity, exchange, and recognition of the rights of each party. From the Earth we receive everything: life and the means to live. In return we have a duty of gratitude, of retribution and of care. But we, long ago, broke this natural contract. We have subjected Mother Earth to a veritable war, in our eagerness to snatch from her, without any further consideration, all that we found useful for our use and enjoyment.

If we do not reestablish this bond of lasting mutuality, she may eventually no longer want us on her earthly face. This is why sustainability here is essential, as it is the basis of a real redo of the natural contract.

The President of Bolivia, the indigenous Aymara Evo Morales Ayma in his speech at the UN on April 22, 2009, when discussing whether April 22 would continue to be Earth Day or whether it should be Mother Earth Day he listed some of these rights of Pacha Mama:

“Right to life and to exist;

Right to be respected;

Right to regeneration of her bio-capacity and continuation of her life cycles and processes free from human alteration;

Right to maintain its identity and integrity as differentiated, self-regulated and interrelated beings;

 Right to water as a source of life

 Right to clean air

 Right to integral health;

 Right to be free from contamination, pollution, and toxic or radioactive waste;

Right not to be genetically altered and modified in its structure, thus threatening its vital and healthy integrity or functioning;

 Right to full and prompt restoration after violations of the rights recognized in this Declaration and caused by human activities.”

His proposal was unanimously welcomed by the Assembly of Peoples. On April 19-23, 2009, the Peoples’ Summit on Climate Change and Mother Earth’s Rights was held in Cochabamba, convened by Evo Morales. From there came the Charter of the Rights of Mother Earth with the items affirmed by him in the UN in which I myself was present with the charge of theoretically founding these rights in the Assembly.

This vision makes it possible to renew the natural contract with the Earth that, articulated with the social contract among citizens, will end up reinforcing the planetary sustainability and guaranteeing the rights of nature and the Earth.

Today we know, through the new cosmology, that all beings possess not only mass and energy. They are also carriers of information that results from the permanent interactions among themselves and that grows until it erupts as self-consciousness.

This fact implies levels of subjectivity and history. Here lies the scientific basis that justifies the extension of legal personality to the living Earth.

Since the 1970s as a hypothesis, and since 2002 as scientific theory, the view that the Earth is a living Super Entity that behaves systemically, articulating the biogeochemical factors in such a way that it always remains alive and a producer of life, has been accepted.

By claiming to be a living Super Entity, it is entitled to the dignity and respect that all life deserves. The clear consciousness that everything that exists deserves to exist and everything that lives deserves to live, grows more and more. And it is up to us to welcome its existence, defend it, and guarantee it the conditions to continue evolving.

Furthermore, no one doubts that the human being is the subject of inalienable rights and that he or she enjoys subjectivity and history. Now, this human being, as many cosmologists and anthropologists maintain, is the Earth itself, which at an advanced moment of its complexity began to feel, think, love and care. These human rights, because we are Earth, must also be attributed to the Earth.

also be attributed to the Earth. The moderns called her Gaia, the ancients Great Mother, and the Andeans Pacha Mama.

This subjectivity has history, that is, it is inside the immense cosmogenic process making the Earth alive through human beings see itself, contemplate the universe, and represent the most advanced stage of the cosmos so far known.

Michel Serres, a French philosopher of sciences, said with propriety: “The Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789, of the French revolution, had the merit of saying ‘all men have rights’ but the defect of thinking ‘only men have rights.

It took a lot of struggle to fully recognize the rights of women, indigenous people, black people, just as it is now taking a lot of effort to recognize the rights of nature and of Mother Earth, made up of all ecosystems.

Because of their mutual intertwining, Earth and Humanity have the same destiny. It is up to us, its conscious portion and its caretakers, to make this common destiny succeed on the condition that we respect the dignity and the rights of Mother Earth.

Leonardo Boff, wrote: Dignity of the Earth: ecology, cry of the Earth-cry of the poor Vozes 1999/2015/ Orbis Books 2000/2010.

  The future depends on us now

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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.

De banqueiro a companheiro:Eduardo Moreira

Leonardo Boff1 comentário

Publicamos aqui o prefácio que escrevi ao livro `TRAVESSIA:de banqueiro a companheiro’ de Eduardo Moreira presidente do Instituto Conhecimento Liberta. Era um rico ban,queiro na área de investimentos. Curioso, começou a desconfiar de sua bolha, a dos endinheirados e das teorias livrescas sobre riqueza, pobreza e desenvolvimento. Decidiu ir para o outro lado, ao mundo da pobreza e da miséria, ter uma experiência de pele, convivendo, trabalhando, passando fome com quilombolas, assentados do Movimento Sem Terra, com favelados e com indígenas sempre ameaçados de morte e realmente assassinados em Dourados-MT. A realidade desborda os conceitos e preconceitos. Deu-se conta de que as grandes virtudes de solidariedade, coragem, resiliência, humanidade emigraram dos centros do mundo civilizado e moderno para as periferias, onde tais virtudes são vividas e dão sustento às vítimas do sistema desumano que os faz oprimidos, para seguirem vivas, esperando e lutando por um mundo melhor. É comovedor ler as histórias do banqueiro rico que virou companheiro de todos estes. Fez mais. Criou O Instituto Conhecimento Liberta no qual são ministrados os principais saberes atuais desde a culinária, línguas como o mandarin chinês, até a cibernética, resumindo, temas nas áreas cultural, técnica e espiritual. Os cursos são de baixíssimo preço ou gratuitos ministrados pelas melhores cabeças deste país que têm um sentido ético do saber a ser o mais possível democratizado. Vale ler este livro pois poderá entusiasmar outros que buscam uma humanidade melhor do que esta metida em cifras, em dinheiros, em acumulação individualista e em consumo. LBoff

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O livro de Eduardo Moreira –  Travessia: de banqueiro a companheiro – contém uma promessa e uma profecia.

Em primeiro lugar é uma promessa de que nem tudo está perdido, de que podemos mudar o mundo, fazê-lo ser melhor ou menos perverso. Basta auscultar nossa própria humanidade, aquilo que está presente mas recolhido em nossa existência: o amor, a solidariedade e o cuidado.

 Eduardo Moreira era por 20 anos um banqueiro de sucesso, um homem do stablisment financeiro.Mas mente aberta e sempre com vontade de aprender mais e mais, compreendeu o legado de Paulo Freire: aprendemos primeiro ao pronunciar o mundo e somente em seguida a pronunciar as letras. Eduardo não procurou o mundo que já conhecia sobejamente. Foi ao mundo ignoto, dos condenados da terra, dos feitos invisíveis, aqueles que para o sistema de produção e de consumo equivalem a óleo gasto e queimado.

Percorreu o país, o sertão tórrido, as favelas, as comunidades quilombolas, várias tribos indígenas, os assentamentos do Movimento dos sem Terra(MST) e outros. Não entrou pela porta da frente como especialista em finanças. Entrou pela porta dos fundos (quando a  havia) para ser companheiro, para ouvir, aprender e resgatar a sua humanidade perdida no meio de tantos intesses egoístas, de tantos preconceitos e real desprezo aos filhos e filhas da pobreza.

Uma coisa é conhecer os índices da pobreza pela literatura científica. Outra coisa é fazer uma visita e dar-se conta da pobreza e da miséria.Mas o extraordinário e realmente singular é inserir-se na vida dos pobres e marginalizados, participar de suas agruras, comer o que tem, mesmo recolhido do lixo,sofrer e alegrar-se com eles. Trata-se de uma experiência de pele, de sentir o  pulsar do coração do outro, de, não raro, assistir a violência brutal e sentir-se impotente, mas estar ai a seu lado, sofrendo junto e confortando.

Esta é a Travessia real e não retórica operada por Eduardo Moreira. Ela me recorda aquilo que Jesus chama da “metanoia”, vale dizer,  mudar a mente e o coração. Foi,  pois, esse processo alquímico que irrompeu na vida do banqueiro Eduardo.

Há um similar a ele, Francisco de Assis. Filho do mercador mais rico da cidade de Assis, Pedro Bernardone, que frequentava os mercados de tecidos desde Veneza, o Sul da França até Flandres ao norte, hoje Holanda. O filho da juventude dourada da época, Francisco. levava o bastão ornado que simbolizava o organizador das festas juvenis, cheias de canções de amor e de algazarras. De repente, depois de um crise existencial, abandonou os amigos e a casa paterna. Foi morar com os  mais desprezíveis do tempo, os leprosos. Confessa, o que antes lhe parecia abominável se lhe tornou uma doçura. Comia da mesma escudela deles e de braço com algum deles ia pelas vilas pregando o “amor não é amado”. Filho rico de um habitante da Comuna, fez sua travessia para o mundo dos semimortos. Tornou-se o poverello de todos e o Irmão , universal. Outro, filho do Mercado, fez sua travessia e buscou companheiros entre os mais covardemente marginalizados. E ai encontrou o que se perdeu no grande mundo dos negócios: a solidariedade, a colaboração e o sentido humano das relações.

Esse passo corajoso e sem retorno é testemunhado por este pequeno e rico livro Travessia. Não escreve palavras. Narra experiências vividas e sofridas, fonte de reflexões de grande atualidade.

Travessia é também uma profecia: Ele antecipa, assim creio, um mundo que vai chegar.  Não porque queremos ou não queremos. Seremos forçados a isso. Chegará um momento do estado da Terra – estamos dentro da sexta extinção em massa e da nova era geológica do antropoceno – em que se apresentará a alternativa: ou mudamos ou não teremos mais futuro.

Há 40 anos, mesmo antes de me agregar ao pequeno grupo que, sob a coordenação do ainda chefe de Estado Mikhail Gorbachev, que elaborou a Carta Terra, assumida pela UNESCO, acompanho assiduamente os estudos sobre o estado da Terra. De ano para ano os dados pioram. Quando parará o processo de degradação planetária? Para onde vamos?

Os donos das fortunas e das finanças mundiais exploraram de forma tão devastadora os bens e serviços da Terra que lhe sequestram a sustentabilidade. Todos os sinais entraram no vermelho. A intrusão  do Covid-19 é um dos sinais de que Gaia, a Mãe Terra, a  Pachamama dos andinos encostou nos seus limites. Ela não aguenta mais. Como o sistema do capital se globalizou, ele entrou em rota de colisão com o sistema-vida e o sistema-Terra. A continuar esta lógica depredadora, azeitada por estes grupos antivida,  cruéis e sem piedade face à miséria que causam à humanidade, percorreremos um caminho sem retorno. Ao não mudarmos nossa relação para com a natureza, sendo amigáveis e cuidadores, estamos engrossando o cortejo dos que rumam na direção de sua sepultura. Mas podemos mudar esse rumo. Eduardo Moreira aponta indicações inspiradoras.

Por isso, se fizermos aquilo que o homem das finanças, Eduardo Moraes, fez com os indígenas guarani-kaiová que com seu saber e experiência os assistiu na montagem de um projeto salvador, salvaremos a vida e garantiremos o futuro para nossa civilização. Creio que o exemplo de Eduardo é uma profecia que antecipa, na pós-pandemia, um futuro bom para a humanidade.

Levada ao extremos risco de desaparecer, ela dará um salto quântico, mudará o estado de consciência e extrairá de nossa própria natureza cujo DNA contém o amor, a colaboração e o cuidado, os meios que resgatarão um caminho promissor para a nossa curta existência nesse belo e radiante planeta.

A experiência de Eduardo Moreira e seu texto aponta para essa promessa e profecia. Se o  pensador italiano Antônio Gramsci disse: “A história ensina mas não tem alunos”, em Eduardo Moreira encontrou um diligente aluno. Socializou seu saber criando uma iniciativa do maior significado cultural o Instituto Conhecimento Liberta (ISL) que oferece, por preços irrisórios e até gratuitos dezenas de cursos, ministrados pelas melhores cabeças de nosso país. Imaginemos um país coberto por filiais deste Instituto: será uma nação sem analfabetos e de cidadãos instruídos, livres e libertados.

Tudo isso me foi inspirado na medida em que lia A Travesia. Por isso sou grato à criatividade e à grande generosidade de Eduardo Moreira.

                                           Leonardo Boff

COP26 has not responded to the climate emergency

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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.