Amazon in Danger

This is an excellent Op-Ed by a Brazilian journalist about the threats the Amazon faces. What makes it so interesting is that it goes beyond recitation of distressing facts about rate of destruction, assassinations of activists, displacement of indigenous people, soil depletion and erosion, and the myriad other disasters the relentless expansion of sugar, cattle, and soy have caused. What caught my attention was the argument currently playing out in Brazil about its sovereign right to develop autonomously without interference and how the author used Brazil's history to counter it quite effectively.

While the "right to develop" is a common argument by some development theorists, and one that has a large amount of moral suasion--after all, why should the world's poor stay poor because rich countries now value the environment they spent centuries destroying as they developed--it is ultimately unsatisfactory. For starters, we now have technological options that can help developing nations bridge the gap over some of the dirtiest technologies. This is particularly true, ironically, in some of the least developed nations, such as Laos, where there is very little infrastructure that needs upgrading or replacing. One of my friends just finished a year working with a Laotian company that is working on installing small, locally assembled solar panels for off-grid villages. There are many other efforts do similar things on both small and large scales. There is also the substantial question of whether it is right to say that societies must develop, need to develop, and, most importantly, need to follow the pattern of the Industrialized West. While that is a very interesting and complicated philosophical and ethical question, it is not really what I want to discuss right now. Besides, there are much better places you can get a thorough examination of it.

Really what I wanted to highlight is the way Leão Serva takes the argument and demolishes its purported moral and nationalistic force by exposing both the corrupt corporate interests behind it and comparing it to another shameful piece of Brazil's experience: it's reluctance to abolish slavery and its claims that outsiders who condemned it had no right to meddle. He does it well, with grace but to devastating effect. Perhaps this will help clear the eyes of some who are less responsive to environmental concerns for their own sake (or their very real human consequences).