I hate the Amazon. And you?

With the arrival of Brazil’s election year, this relevant article by a Brazilian science journalist is worth a read. Originally published by the well-respected Companhia das Letras last year, we’ve translated the text for our English readers.

It places us among the avowedly most environmentalist people in the world and, at the same time, makes us watch the planet's highest deforestation rates and support politicians and businesspeople who are causing the problem.

Our environmentalism is “macumba para turista” [fortune telling for tourists], posited the journalist Ricardo Arnt, in a book that deserves to be reread in Bolsonaro's times: “Um Artifício Orgânico - Transição na Amazônia e Ambientalismo” (An Organic Artifice - Transition in the Amazon and Environmentalism) published by Rocco in 1992. Written in partnership with anthropologist Steve Schwartzman, who introduced Chico Mendes to the international ecological movement, the work is divided into two parts: in the second, the pair seeks to profile the main public actors involved in forest protection policies at the time of its birth, the late 1980s. In the first, Arnt makes a historical and philosophical exploration of Brazil's relationship with its largest biome.

From Rio Grande do Sul, the journalist Ricardo Arnt (disclaimer: he was my boss at the end of the last century; no, I don't owe him any money, as I recall) notes that, historically, Brazil is the only country in the world named after a tree that has never stopped praising its forests. From the green of the flag to the forests that “have more life” in the country’s anthem, the profusion of nature has always been a mark of national pride. “It is disputed by political parties and samba schools. It nurtures systems as disparate as the doctrine of the Armed Forces and the ideology of the Communist Party.” This is a result, he says, of the enormous impact that European naturalist thinking had on the formation of the Brazilian elite.

The naturalist philosophy, which inspired the French Revolution, humanism and socialism, sees the possibility of man in “a natural state” and urges contemplation of good, evil and culture. This was, in turn, tremendously influenced by the discovery of America, which proved to the Europeans, in their encounter with the indigenous people, that such a man in a natural state does indeed exist—Rousseau's “noble savage”.

But Brazil, Arnt argues, provided only the backdrop for the development of naturalism, engendered in the Old World, which was furthermore profoundly racist; it wanted to dress the noble savage and send him to work. Once it was imported here from Europe, this ideology necessarily came into conflict with the brutal reality of the colony, which is based on the depletion of nature–considered infinite–and on genocide. “The foundation stone, which gave Brazil its name and identity, was the colonial monopoly of the extraction of the pau-brasil tree in the coastal forests, a project of predatory exploitation of nature, which, in a few decades, having exhausted the best of the forest, ceased to interest,” he writes. And concludes:

“Brazil carries ecocide in its name.”

In the 20th century, naturalism drifted to environmentalism and updated its mythology: we now have the forest—formerly Eden, mistakenly converted into the “lung of the world”—and the “noble savage” giving way to the wise indigenous people who live “in harmony with nature". The original addiction, however, remains. By coming from abroad and at the same time finding such a familiar scenario in Brazil, environmentalism becomes the “organic artifice” that gives the book its name.

“Nature gave Brazilians its longest lasting representation, but they don't expand upon it, they grudgingly entertain it. It celebrates in rhetoric a naturalism devalued in practice, perceived as inferior to the civilized form and which insinuates a hidden, racist disdain for the society that inhabits nature.” The Brazilian is the guy who has açaí in his backyard, but drinks Coca-Cola. It's the guy who beats his chest to roar "the Amazon is ours and no one else can have it!" but who actually hates the forest, thinks that indigenous people are cheesy (and woe to him if he decides to hold a cell phone or put on sneakers: he will automatically be “acculturated” in the Brazilian's racist imagination and will lose, along with his innocence, his right to land) and thinks that progress is really soy in Santarém. The Brazilian is, in a precise but unscientific analogy by an anthropologist friend, the São Paulo native, descendant of Bandeirantes, who lives in a city without trees, because a tree is the jungle and the jungle is something for the indigenous.

Understanding the roots of this environmentalist facade is a necessary shock of humility for people like me, involved in the exasperating exercise of winning the hearts and minds of Brazilians, trying to logically argue the advantages of protecting the Amazon and the cerrado [tropical savanna].

Communicating to Brazilians the climate emergency and the role of tropical deforestation in it—and, who knows, helping them to make electoral choices against ecocide and collective suicide—requires understanding that the forest is a foreign body to them, despite its proximity. We razed the Atlantic Forest, home to the majority of the country's population, before we managed to develop it; the Amazon is our second and last chance. Anyone who wants to save it needs to be aware that he is fighting five centuries of hatred disguised as sympathy in each of us, including the Amazonians. The task is tougher than opinion polls suggest, and requires much more than common sense and technical data.