NO PLANET B

I want to thank my friend Sean Gabriel for saying exactly what needed to be said. This is his facebook post, a letter to the world and I felt it was important to share his words.

I’ve always considered myself lucky to have been born in Brazil, a country so rich and diverse in its culture and natural exuberance. Although politics there have always suffered from a high level of corruption, i would have never thought i could feel so much shame and repulsion towards the gov policies running the current shit show, but here we are.
What started with the inflammatory rise of this new dis-government continues to take the most deplorable measures of leadership ever seen in Brazil, speaking especially in the context of environmental conservation, which as most will not deny is the primary priority in this time of global climate crisis.
The science is clear in the most recent IPCC reports where we read that by 2030 if we continue to pass the tipping points, with business as usual, we will find ourselves not being able to undo irreversible climatic breakdown. We have a remaining C02 budget wether we like it or not. Without being alarmist, humans at current emission levels will not further much into the future if we keep going this way.

The amazon is exploding in deforestation, 7.400 fires this year …an 80% rise from last year, almost all of which, is illegal and stirred by the rhetoric and policy of Jair Bolsonaro who is responding to the call of the agrobusiness barons of beef, soy, as well as hydroelectrics and mining cronies who brought him to power and demand him to keep opening up protected areas… so that extractive industries, militias and mafia who are operating with wanton and impunity may keep running rampant.

The amazon is approaching the tipping point , the moment it crosses it will no longer be able to support its own climate.. produce its own rainfall and sustain itself as the life giving rain forest we all need as an ally against our increasing global temperatures.

The antagonism of this motherf*cker in relation to the environment and human rights is a calamity. His pathological denial of truth is now globally mocked and he still boasts with hubris to be indignant to international critique, somehow finding the audacity to deflect the blame of the fires onto NGO.. unashamedly driving out dissent and droning fake news propaganda. The Blood on his hands is evident to the world, we saw the steps he took removing obstacles to subvert discredit and eliminate environmental protection agencies, human rights and liberal institutions,.

In this kind of democracy capitalism comes with murder. The corporate greed. The mind that can’t create and therefore extracts … paving the way with destruction, privatisation, evangelisation, militarisation. To suit the Xenophobe with a gun. The evangelical in fear of armageddon. The cow rancher in the desert.

These fires are clearly a power grab for indigenous land… this is their way of pressuring the guardians of the forest to abandon their sustainable lifestyles by being in a symbiotic relationship with the movement of nature. They are being driven out of their homes because of the psychological infection that perpetuates our consumption epidemic. They are being killed for defending the ecological balance that gives us the opportunity to continue life on earth.
Indigenous people across the globe are the true leaders of resistance to the corporate politics of man made disaster, they know we can’t thrive by upsetting the balance between what we give and what we take, constantly transgressing the limits of nature and the rights of people… even if thats what a “free market” economy of infinite growth urges us to do.

It seems that as a race we only start to listen and understand after greater powers bring us to humility, that we learn the hard way.. through humiliation. As our dominant cultural mythology falls apart we will have to redeem the failure of our cherished flawed systems of education, politics, medicine, law and religion.
Only with an overarching ignorance can we deny that the grand project of “civilization” is failing. The signs are more than clear. We see now that what we do to nature we do to ourselves; that its conquest brings our death. We mutilate the world because we don’t remember the Great Mother. We don’t remember what we are an intrinsic part of.

Eating more meat and ignoring the crisis we are in won’t help. And as long as we are supporting the coloniser- we allow the old spectre of imperialism to continue predating through corporations… and at this point the most direct power we have on a monetary level is boycotting brazilian products in general and calling for accountability from international buyers of brazilian commodities, brazilian markets are very dependent of the sales of their commodities including beef soy and timber that are vulnerable to market pressures and political pressure abroad, especially europe, which is the second largest importer of brazilian commodities.

Europe must push back and not stand for illegal deforestation and human right abuse there should be no free trade under these conditions that so radically ignore humanitarian principles of dignity and responsibility.

It seems for a change the majority is starting to see the big picture and we are abandoning the slavery of being comfort-prisoners of trivial-self-gratification in our absence of belonging and meaning to the whole.

Love is Love

Such is our spiritual, moral, scientific and technological challenge in our great struggle for life and love on this planet.