The Rachel Carson of Brazil

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The crowning irony, however, is that the energy flow of modern chicken farming makes it a net absorber of food available to humans, whereas the traditional system was a net provider of food energy.

DALY: Anyone in Brazil who criticizes the government as strongly as you do is likely to be called a Communist. What do say in reply to that charge?

LUTZENBERGER: How could a man or a woman with any ecological understanding advocate Communism? In a capitalist system you have a lot of little or large bandits, and you can play them off one against another and find some living space in the gaps. Under Communism you have one big centralized, allpowerful, unified mafia . . . and there's nowhere to hide.

Communist countries lack the stabilizing negative teedback of a parliament, the separation of powers, an independent conservation movement, and a free flow of information. Worse yet, they're even more dedicated to megatechnology and growth than are capitalist !ands. In short, they do all the things that the Brazilian technocrats and their leaders want to do . . . so maybe I should be calling the government Communistic!

We need something better than either Communism or modern capitalism: We need an ecologically sane, homeostatic, steadystate economy. No system that depends on continuous growth can be ecologically viable. The fact that Communism is worse than capitalism should be cold comfort to those of us in capitalist countries. I believe that all centralization of power is bad.

DALY: Lutz, we have yet to consider the most fundamental and controversial environmental issue in Brazil: population. Twelve years ago I wrote an article on overpopulation in South America, and I'm amazed to see how little the debate has progressed since then.

LUTZENBERGER: We desperately need a serious effort to reduce our nation's population growth. The necessity can be proved by elementary arithmetic! If, in Brazil, we still have a bitter debate about the need for birth control, it's due not only to lack of knowledge of the facts, but also to ideological commitments and the crassest kind of class interest in maintaining an unlimited supply of inexpensive labor to promote ever—increasing concentrations of power.

The fact is that the upper and middle classes already practice birth control, but not the lower class. This incomplete "de mocratization" of birth control reinforces the inequality in the distribution of per capita income ... or, as the old saying goes, "The rich get richer and the poor get children."

Historically, population explosion has almost always been the result of the destruction of traditional cultures by conquerors. For 20 or 30, thousand years, Brazil's Indians lived in relative harmony with Nature, and even though the forest must have seemed unlimited to them, they were very conscious of the demographic problem and applied deliberate controlsincluding infanticide—when a tribe became too large. Today, though, the villages of the "civilized" Indians display tremendous population growth and horrible devastation of the environment.

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