Extreme weather events are proliferating around the world, threatening the survival of the species that inhabit the Earth. The symptoms of the acceleration of an environmental collapse are increasingly alarming and frequent, as evidenced by the fact that the month of July 2023 was considered the hottest in history. The reaction of society and governments, however, is still not up to the severity of the problem.
The climate emergency and the socio-environmental crisis are the theme of this edition of Analisa. The person who comments on the subject is the retired professor from the Department of History at Unicamp, Luiz Marques, author of the books Capitalism and Environmental Collapse (2015) and The decisive decade: proposals for a survival policy (2023). For him, agribusiness and extractivism do violence to the land, and the idea that nature has a price is leading us to the abyss.
“You cannot pay [for] the destruction of nature. Nature is not an artifact, it is not here to be explored. This root of the capitalist mentality, which is the idea that nature is a raw material, that it is simply here to be incorporated into the economic process, this is the idea, if we get to the root of the problem, that is killing us.” , points out.
To reverse the situation of degradation of living conditions on Earth, Marques indicates, it is necessary to redefine life based on the notion of limits. “When you increase the capacity to interfere in the Earth system, with more mining, with more extraction, with more arable land, you eventually have an immediate benefit, but you are incurring harm that is increasingly greater. [...] So, the notion of limits needs to be rethought again.”
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