CLIMATE, ECOLOGY AND ENVIRONMENTAL AXIS
5 min readContribution of the Forum popular da Natureza to the WSF 2021
Globalized capitalism reaches a structural impasse. Even with the pandemic of the new coronavirus, economic growth continues to concentrate income, even more, maintaining and increasing the privileges of the few. The civilization crisis – largely caused by the eco-capillary system – will be increasingly affected by the climatic, ecological, and sanitary chaos generated by the systemic crises we are experiencing: the climate emergency, the decline in biodiversity, industrial pollution, the water, and agrarian issue and devastating mining.
The relentless pursuit of profit is hostile to human and non-human life and keeps us in a warmer, more biologically impoverished, more unequal and much more polluted world. This world makes humanity more vulnerable and sick by creating a favorable environment for more frequent and potentially lethal pandemics. Today we live in a state of dystopia, where the truth has reached the point of no return. Crises are created to justify investment cuts, notably in social programs and human development, in order to divert public resources to the financial market. Banks and finance are the engine of the world crisis and are the ones who invest in the exhaustive exploitation of natural resources, in the war industry, in the media, retro feeling the concentration of income and excluding low-income populations from the productive process, leading to extreme poverty.
For us to survive, we have no alternative but to invert this equation and bar the ecocidal process of the markets. Yes, this is possible if we invest efforts in building a new project of society that practices solidarity between humans and the rights of other beings, because we are interdependent and ecodependent beings. It is time to redefine the very meaning and purpose of economic activity, which must serve life; it is time to redefine our position as a society and as a species that is part of nature.
The original and traditional peoples have shown us that it is possible to be in this world in another way. Their ways of life and their struggles point to new ways. But not only have these peoples understood the power and urgency of a change in paradigms, but several segments of the popular strata have already been practicing and fighting for it, such as the defenders of agrarian reform, quilombolas, women’s movements, youth, organized faithful in their respective
religions, unions, civil society organizations, and countless social and popular movements. It is necessary to expand, strengthen, debate, build, create ties and new forms of struggle.
Faced with the speed and seriousness of the situation, the Popular Forum of Nature calls upon all of society to the urgent need to end greenhouse gas emissions and prevent the ongoing destruction of forests and other biomes. These are the first actions to mitigate the catastrophe ahead and lay the foundations for the construction of another possible world, anti-aphylst, anti-racist, and against all oppressions, in which human beings and nature are inseparable.
In the current context we want and can affirm that FPN is a space in the current context we want and can affirm that FPN is a democratic and horizontal space of articulation and action that repudiates all forms of oppression, discrimination, and authoritarianism, with the objective of including all those who are willing to defend nature, its biomes, territories, cultures, and forms of life, seeking to consolidate the principles of biocentrism as the fundamental basis of the relationship between human beings and nature, a concept according to which all forms of life are equally important, humanity not being the center of existence.
But we are living the opposite of what would be a model of coexistence in a virtuous ecosystem and respect for the limits of the planet, we are walking with conviction, towards the mass extermination of biodiversity, especially of our own species.
There are countless issues that we must address if we are to build a more just and equitable society for all living beings on this planet. We emphasize that in order to identify the relevant and structuring themes we must appropriate FPN as a space for debates and presentation of ideas, formulation of proposals and collaboration in the elaboration of projects.
We must identify the primordial factors that have led us to an unprecedented civilizing crisis of such gravity that is compromising life on the planet. It is a consensus that we must immediately combat environmental degradation and socioeconomic inequality, which are sides of the same coin that are mutually assumed, both latent in the socioenvironmental racism that permeates our society.
Already on the road to the post-Pandemic, we must fight the pressure of capitalism on society and the economy, which requires new structures, namely: (a) a program that guarantees food and environmental sovereignty and nutritional security, popular agrarian reform, democratization of land use and the use of agroecology and agroforestry, (b) demarcation of the lands of original peoples and quilombolas, as well as recognition of territories of other peasant and traditional communities, (c) universal health infrastructure, (d) free emancipatory and quality education at all levels, respecting the differentiated rights of peoples, (e) public health, universal and free medical and hospital care, valuing community, traditional and public health processes, (f) waste management, (g) an end to structural and socio-environmental racism, gender and ethnic equity, migrations, (i) minimum income programs and reduced working hours enabling a dignified existence, and finally, (j) an immediate anti-systemic action, with changes in pre-consumption, consumption and post-consumption habits, boycotting the ecocapitalists and capitalists and the rentista financial system.
Other demands are emergency, many involving various sectors of society. This is where we will share the space of FPN. We want everyone to be part of this change, making their contributions to the formulation of proposals and projects that contribute to the change we seek. Since Forum popular da natureza is a democratic and horizontal construction in process, we can affirm that this space is committed to receive ideas, knowledge and doings so that together we can act in defense of life, humanity and the entire planet.
These are some of the steps that will allow us to postpone the end of the world that capitalism condemns us to. They are steps to build another project of society, based on the life of human and non-human beings sharing the same planet.
Produced by the members of the Popular Forum of Nature on the occasion of the virtual event held in June 2020.
Revised in December 2020 as a contribution to the CLIMATE, ECOLOGY, AND ENVIRONMENT axis of WSF 2021.
Salvador, Bahia-Brazil, December 2020.
