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ISIS Special Miniseries - Life of Gaia
This miniseries is dedicated to our planet earth, so we may better
appreciate how she lives and sustains all creatures large and small, that we
may learn to dance to the complex rhythms of her life music without stopping
her in her tracks.
Space scientist and inventor Jim Lovelock first proposed in the 1970s
that the entire earth is a self-organizing, self-regulating entity, rather like
an organism. He named the earth Gaia, after the Greek earth goddess.
The idea that Gaia is alive and has a life of her own immediately caught
fire. It inspired many earth scientists to look for the dynamic processes that
organize and regulate the currents of the earth, to make a congenial home for
all her inhabitants. These scientists are richly rewarded.
Records from ice and deep sea cores show detailed globally correlated
changes going back at least 800 000 years, leaving us in no doubt that the
earth behaves from moment to moment as one coherent whole, just like an
organism.
Not only can we can read Gaia’s life-history from her deep memory
stores, we can also tune in to her life-force pulsing as she is living
today.
Gaia spinning in her perpetual dance around the sun, her mighty breath
tumbling from hot belly to the poles, swirling across the continents, bringing
welcome rain to forests, grasslands and crops, or torrential downpours, floods
and hurricanes. Vast slow vortices of water connect her oceans from the
furthest northern reaches to the southernmost haunts, from the shimmering sea
surfaces to the dark deep beds, distributing warmth and nutrients, sustaining
life with life.
Gaia’s breath is our breath, her water our water. Let Gaia live
that we may live.
Soya Destroying Amazon
Brazil has been clearing vast stretches of virgin forests to make way
for non-GM soya in order to capture world market. Will it stop under President
Lula? Peter Bunyard reports.
It’s still early days for President Lula. With his country diving
into economic recession, the division accelerating between the many poor and
far fewer rich, Lula has declared that his first concern is not with
Avança Brasil - massive investments in the Amazon region to
advance the industrial and agricultural sectors into ‘virgin’
regions.
On the contrary, Lula has come to the presidency of Brazil determined to
take on the campaign Fome Zero, or ‘Zero Hunger’ for
Brazil’s diverse population, especially in areas, such as the Northeast,
which traditionally have suffered from recurrent droughts and failing
agriculture.
Avança Brasil is by no means dead, but it is clear from
Lula’s choice of environmental minister, Marina Silva, that he is
determined that policies affecting the future of Brazil’s Amazon Basin
should necessarily take into account both ecological prerogatives and social
needs. Silva is the daughter of a rubber tapper, whose family were close
friends with Chico Mendes, all of whom were instrumental in the establishment
of ‘Extractable Reserves’ in which the forest, with its rubber trees
(Hevea brasiliensis) and Brazil nut trees would be protected. Meanwhile,
Mary Alegretti, the minister with a special mandate for the Amazon, who also
was associated with the Chico Mendes movement, continues in the job she first
undertook under the Cardoso administration.
Perhaps, most revealing is the recent government statement ‘on the
place of Amazonia in the development of Brazil’. There, undisguised
criticism of past policies and their consequences must be seen against a new
appraisal of how best the region can serve the long term interests of
Brazilians. The old way of measuring success - gross national product
(GNP)- is seen for what it is – a brute indicator that gives no idea of
wealth distribution nor of environmental degradation. Between 1970 and 1996,
the GNP in Brazil’s Legal Amazonia, jumped from US$8.5 billion to $53.5
billion, while the population in the region increased from 7.7 million to 18.7
million, a six-fold increase in ‘wealth’ compared with a 2.4 fold
increase in population; but at what cost? In terms of indices of ‘human
development’, all the Amazonian states had a much poorer showing than was
found in the rest of the country, with a large proportion of the local
population earning less than the minimal wage. All that can mean only one
thing: the wealth generated in Brazil’s Amazonia had mostly been exported
at the expense of the environment and people.
Avança Brasil to date has been concerned almost
exclusively with establishing the infrastructure for the export of millions of
tonnes of soya, as well as of minerals and wood. Through a mixture of private
and public investment, the plan envisaged as much as US$228 billions being
spent over 8 years, which would lead, according to INPA, the Institute of
Amazonian Research, to a rate of forest clearing of between 269,000 and 506,000
hectares per year up until 2020. This ‘additional’ deforestation
would give rise to an increase in carbon greenhouse gas emissions from 52.2
millions of tonnes a year to 98.2 million, equivalent to an annual cost of up
to US$2 billion. Lula’s report claims that all that investment, plus its
environmental costs, will result in few local benefits and in poor social
participation.
Electricity projects of the past, such as the Tucuruí and Balbina
hydroelectric schemes, come under heavy criticism for their failure to meet
with expectations, while having a disastrous impact on the surroundings.
Balbina, for instance, despite causing the flooding and destruction of around
3,000 square kilometres of forest is incapable of meeting the electricity needs
of nearby Manaus during dry summer seasons. Far from being benign sources of
energy with regard to carbon emissions, such hydroelectric plants bring about
the release over their lifetimes of at least as much carbon greenhouse gases as
from a coal-fired plant generating the same amount of electricity.
In essence, Lula and his ministers are using their mandate for social
reform in Brazil to give Amazonia something of a breathing space. Nonetheless,
the pressures for making a quick buck are ever present, thereby creating
something of a schizophrenic situation. A few months back, a delegation from
the Mato Grosso visited Europe to inform on new initiatives to regulate and
curb deforestation in Amazonia’s most southern state. According to
officials, the legislation, ‘Environmental Licensing System on Rural
Properties’ brought the rate of deforestation down in the State by
one-third in its first year. That achievement resulted from focussing on large
rural enterprises - above 500 hectares - which, although accounting for less
than 10 per cent of the total number of rural properties, have been responsible
for over 85 per cent of total deforestation. The claim is that other benefits
have resulted, such as a better partnership between government and civil
society, more government revenue and of tying environmental concerns in with
development agendas.
But how does all that square with 2002 being one of the worst years for
forest destruction, and particularly in Mato Grosso? Some of the answers may
lie with the governor of Mato Grosso, Blairo Maggi, who is one of the
world’s biggest soya producers. He, it seems unilaterally, has been
offering land at dirt-cheap prices to US farmers. Earlier this year, he told a
visiting delegation from the American Soya Association that only 5 per cent of
‘agricultural land’ in the State was currently being used. He was
looking to 40 per cent of that land being developed over the next few years.
Some farmers have taken up the offer of land at US$20 per hectare in the
North of the State, compared with $300 in Goias and $1,215 in the United
States. Three years ago, Douglas Ferrell bought 10,000 hectares. He has started
cutting back the forest. "This year, (2002)" he said, "we cleared 500 hectares
and we will open up a further 500 hectares next year."
Current legislation in Brazil demands that rainforest deforestation must
first be authorized by IBAMA, the Ministry of the Environment. Just how the
governor’s plans to expand the agricultural base in Mato Grosso will
comply with government jurisdiction on environmental grounds remains to be
seen.
We will have to see how environmental protection of Amazonia will fare
in a region where frontier politics have so far largely held sway. It took just
13 years for more than half of all the forests to be eradicated in Southern
Pará. In recent years, a similar process of deforestation and
degradation has been taking place in other States of Amazonia, such as
Rondonia. There will need to be some dramatic changes in the rate of
deforestation if we are going to see significant reductions from the tally of
more than 2 million hectares a year of forest destruction over the Legal Amazon
of Brazil.
Sources
- Programa de Governo 2002, Coligacao, Lula Presidente. O lugar da
Amazonia no desenvolvimento do Brasil. Indicadores, pp13-16. December
2002.
- Raquel Ulhoa. Precisamos de ajuda na Amazonia, diz Marina Silva.
Folha on Line – Brasil. 16 dec, 2002.
- Pronunciamento da Ministra do Meio Ambiente. 3rd January, 2003.
- Soya. Di rio de Cuib. 25 February, 2002.
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