We are able to keep breathing by clinging to the small openings that life gives us. Now is the time to widen these openings to the horizon.
As we move forward, we must stop worrying about what the Bolsonaroists are doing every day — because, as the Trump sect has shown us, even after the attack on the Capitol, if we If they could, they would probably continue to do so as a society, finding remedies for the diseases of 58 million Brazilians.
This by no means means ignoring the realities they represent, but means acting not in relation to them, but in developing a deep relationship with life.
we want Yes. is not Yes Against them, as we have up to now, but Yes In the current suture, this is only possible in the present imagination.
liberation
I no longer talk about the future, but about the present. Here and now. Do things that make us feel good.
Back to art, dance and poetry, Paulo Freire’s liberating education, spirituality, religion or otherwise, back to the joy of living together and talking about those things that bring us joy.
Restart the debate about expanding our minds because the other side expands our minds, not threatens us.
We need to imagine our own lives, to imagine a nation, to liberate our subjugated subjectivity, which spent four years waking from troubled sleep to discover what them What have you done them say what they are Conspiracies, and what we need to do to protect ourselves.
Right now we have a very small window and we need to use all of our power to expand it. As a complete beginner, that’s what I’ve learned living in the forest and watching the forest people. If a forest survives an attack, it’s because it lives in such a ferocious environment.
bloom
Where there is death, there is life. What had been dried and charred, came violently back to life with the first rain. The dead are immediately devoured to ensure the life of the living.
Flowers bloom in the worst-hit places, animals disperse seeds in forests, fungi communicate in vast communities, and trees engage in endless conversations.
I often think of butterflies that lose their color so that they can blend into the wildfires of the arsonists, no longer yellow, blue, green, pink, red, but gray, like the ashes of a burned forest.
live together
A commitment to life is not an act that begins and ends with the individual. It is an act in which people who understand themselves as individuals find that they can only be so in relation to others.
The public realm’s promise to life is to work together to feed the hungry.
The commitment to life in the public sphere is – to work together – to investigate, try and punish Bolsonaro and all criminals of Bolsonaroism.
The commitment to life in the public realm is — to work together — to identify and hold accountable those who ordered the killing of Marielle Franco and who stood alongside her in the killing of Anderson Gomez.
To commit to a life in the public sphere is to fight racism — all racism, including racism against other species every day.commitment to life is coexist– live together.
struggle
The hardest part is after avoiding disaster. This is what I believe. Not from faith, but from experience and investigation. But for me, fighting is fighting like a forest. It lives fiercely, is fascinated by every bit of life, and forces every opening of life.
Lula’s victory, not just the reconstruction of Brazil, but also the possibility of reconnecting with reality. For that, we need to resist any desire to confuse Lula himself, because then we’ll just continue in the same place.
We don’t have a country to rebuild, we have a country that can be imagined. imagination. imagine-action. We must imagine a nation free from racism and hunger.
Above all, we must imagine, because this is the structural change that will determine all other changes, a planet centered on life, not markets. We must imagine, liberating the present from the absence of the future.
Diversification
To do this, the forest must always be the forest. According to scientists, the Amazon has reached the point of no return, when the rate of deforestation is between 20% and 25%, the forest will no longer serve as our great climate regulator. We’re very close to 20%.
Clearly, the damage is not homogeneous: some parts of the forest have reached the point of no return, emitting more carbon dioxide than it absorbs. There are others further afield, such as Aboriginal lands, the most protected areas.
But forests are interconnected, and what happens in forests is like part of a chain on a diverse but tightly connected planet.
Bolsonaro’s defeat means a unique opportunity to stem the damage amazon And find ways to restore degraded areas before it becomes too late to save.
The most effective way to achieve this is to delineate indigenous lands that are not yet protected. It’s no boon: In 1988, Brazil’s constitution stipulated that all indigenous lands should be demarcated within five years. Thirty years later, this resolution has still not been implemented.
unprotected
The new Brazilian government also needs to formally recognize and grant legal title to the fugitive (residents of communities originally established by escaped enslaved people) land, expand conservation units, and protect everything that was not protected under the Bolsonaro government.
Lula’s government needs to implement land reforms in the Amazon that recognize and support local communities of sustainable agricultural workers.
Those who have lived in the Amazon, or have followed the massacres of settled family farmers, know that protecting the forest is impossible without land reform.
We already knew what needed to be done. There are plans and projects for all of this, including the immediate removal of 20,000 miners – some of them indentured labor – from Yanomami Indigenous Land. It just needs to be done.
identity
Lula’s campaign promise can only be achieved by listening to Brazil’s indigenous and Traditional crowd (maroonriver communities, and dozens of others). But just being heard is not enough. These people must play an active role in power.
As the Black and Afro-Brazilian activist movements in Brazil have taught our society, social structures cannot be changed without divisions of power. Forest people and people from other natural enclaves must occupy the highest positions in government.
The transition team and the official image of the government that will take over in January must include more women, more Afro-Brazilian — the ethnic identity of the majority of the country’s population — and more indigenous and natural peoples.
Make no mistake: we are at war. This is not a war between us and Bolsonaroists.In shamanic terms, it’s a war among the few David Koppenavayanomamieating the planet, while most humans already live on a more hostile planet.
lie
Brazil played a vital role in this war not because of its agribusiness that destroyed the Amazon and Cerrado rivers to produce soybeans to feed enslaved animals around the world, but because of the largest tropical forest on Earth 60% of the country is within its territory.
The presidents of the United States and European countries rushed to congratulate Lula not because of Brazil, but because of Amazon.
If the Amazon is destroyed, interest in our country disappears and we will forever remain pariahs no matter who rules us because we put all of humanity at great risk. Now is the time to act on our reality: Brazil today is the outskirts of the Amazon, not the other way around.
affim
Choose not to fight or not to fight. But you can choose how you fight. Let us fight like a forest, seize the voids of life and turn them into horizons, use joy as a tool of resistance, imagine the country we want to live in.
Occupy every open space like nature. Find the last breath of life on a dead earth and be born again, destroying the agents of death day after day, choosing the affirmations of life.
let’s fight live together, Or live side by side with each other. In the words of forest social movements, what we need now is not development, but participation. Fighting Like a Forest is just that: basically blending into life.
the author
Eliane Brum is an award-winning Brazilian journalist and it won’t dry out – A rainforest-based trilingual news platform that puts nature at the heart of storylines by amplifying the sounds of the forest.She is Remnant Collector, published by Granta. Her new book, “Banzeiro òkòtó – Amazon as Center of the Worldwhich will launch alongside Indigo next March.
