By starting this column for the Journal of Unicamp, focused on examining contemporary socio-environmental crises, it is worth defining its field of reflection. In its most comprehensive and essential formulation, the multiple socio-environmental crises of our time can be grouped into four major dossiers: 1. Energy; 2. Anthropogenic deterioration of the biosphere; 3. Pollution and chemical intoxication of organisms; 4. Concentration of economic and political power in the hands of corporations and regression of democracy (as this fourth dossier is at the same time the main cause of the three previous ones and the main obstacle to any concerted political action to mitigate their impacts).
To these four dossiers belong, in one way or another, all the crises of our time. Destabilization of the climate system, global warming, decline of forests, corals, marine life, vertebrates, pollinators, eutrophication and acidification of the aquatic environment, scarcity of water resources, impoverishment of soils, rising sea levels, increasing demographic pressures , threats to food security, uncontrollable increase in waste, agro-industrial poisoning of organisms, imponderable technological risks, unprecedented inequality of assets and income, crisis of employment, governments, States, global governance and diplomacy, resurgence of wars, ideological and religious obscurantism, brutal displacements of human and animal contingents, infestations, risks of epidemics and health crises resulting from all these factors, and all of this is accelerating. These are, behind the news in the mainstream press, the truly defining trends of the 21st century.
No one with access to serious press and scientific dissemination ignores them. And growing percentages of humanity suffer its consequences in their own skin. The perception, informed or experienced, that the immense advance in social well-being brought about by technology and industrialization since the 18th century is being nullified by the growing environmental cost of this advance is gaining ground by leaps and bounds. In recent decades, it has become the central motto of countless NGOs and scientific collectives and, in the end, one of the most unquestionable consensuses in the history of knowledge. Kevin Anderson, deputy director of the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research and advisor on climate change to the British government, sums it up well: “We are consciously heading towards a failed future”.[1]
The idea of a worse future is unprecedented in our time. In the Modern and Contemporary Ages – shaped by technological revolutions and continuous increase in human well-being (excluding societies and species victimized by Western expansion) – the prospect of a substantially worse future is an unprecedented historical reversal of trend. Hence the still widespread disbelief in this idea and the growing political, ideological and psychological resistance to science and its warnings, even from sectors with greater formal education (traditionally open to scientific prognoses), an equally unprecedented phenomenon in Contemporary History.
In fact, although electorates are the priority targets of disinformation campaigns promoted by the political and corporate interests at stake, their effectiveness at the University should not be underestimated, as there is still a strong belief among us that the environmental impacts created by the logic of accumulation can be overcome by applying correctives to this logic. Educated in the anthropocentric paradigm that nature is a resource, something available to man, the university world – social scientists and natural scientists – generally consider themselves capable of dealing with environmental problems such as problems arising from poor technological choices, poor management economic or political policies that serve the interests of elites. It is clear that we need policies aimed at popular interests, technologies with a lower environmental impact and all the economists' prescriptions: carbon tax, end of subsidies for fossil fuels, pricing and internalization of environmental costs, the polluter pays principle, gains in efficiency, waste minimization, decoupling, circular economy, etc.
If adopted, I repeat, these proposals would be very beneficial. What would the treaties, protocols and global governance agreements signed over the last 45 years be like, if adopted, aiming to mitigate the degradation of the Earth system. The fundamental problem, however, is that neither these proposals nor diplomatic resolutions are effectively adopted, despite their evident advantages, including, to a certain extent, for the very logic of capitalist accumulation. And they are not because these resolutions and these certainly more rational economic policies have lost the power to influence corporate strategies in a decisive way. The large conglomerates became masters of the game and the States, dependent on them and identified with the mindset corporate, have become Corporation-States or, as in the case of Donald Trump's United States, Corporation-States.
The environmental issue is, perhaps, not insoluble. But the first step in trying to resolve it is to recognize its extreme severity and, consequently, give it absolute priority in our scientific and political agenda. The environmental problem, in essence, is not one of poor management or bad corporate behavior. Its meaning and scale are not graspable by the efficiency-disability antinomy or by the opposition between state regulation and savage liberalism. The environmental problem is, in short, not within the sphere of traditional knowledge. Because of its unprecedented global scale, because of the tangle of interfering problems it raises, it is something radically new in human history and infinitely more complex than the field of reflection of any specific academic discipline. It ultimately requires a philosophical redefinition of man's position in the biosphere and, in the particular scope of the University, a new interaction between knowledge. It is, in a word, a problem that encompasses the problematic and “unsustainable” relationships between, on the one hand, our species, our history and our deep ideological structures, and, on the other, the parameters of the Earth system that allow and yet make life on our planet enjoyable. To the best of its ability, this column aspires to be part of this collective effort of reflection and political action.
[1] Quoted by Terry Macalister, “Complacency threatens climate change action”. Climate News Network, 6/IV/2017: “We are knowingly meandering into a failed future”. http://climatenewsnetwork.net/complacency-climate-change-action/.