The Rachel Carson of Brazil

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Given its actual style of living and level of consumption, Brazil is already badly overpopulated . . . because the current situation is unsustainable. In that respect, however, the U.S. is even more overpopulated than Brazil . . . and is especially so if you count the depredation and waste caused by your suicidal armaments race with the Soviet Union.

DALY: That's a good point. And the U.S. has yet to make any official effort to limit either its population or its per capita consumption. Nor have the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. agreed to eliminate a single bomb or missile from their arsenals. Until we do something ourselves, our preaching on population will not be taken seriously.

LUTZENBERGER: Exactly!

DALY: Many people in your nation claim that environmental concern is an elitist hobby ... and that it distracts attention from Brazil's more pressing problems of poverty and injustice, which—according to the argument—require rapid growth for their solutions. How do you answer such individuals?

LUTZENBERGER: I point out that, contrary to their claims, it is the growth mythology itself that has allowed us to put off dealing with questions of distributive justice. As long as faith in the myth of the eternal growth of the cake persists, we can say that those with the smallest proportional slices should wait patiently for the cake to grow bigger before we redivide it more fairly. Otherwise, premature redistribution would hurt the poor ... by slowing down the cake's growth rate.

But when we finally realize that the cake is not growing—that, in fact, it is even shrinking—then no longer will we be able to avoid facing up to demands for at least a minimum of justice in the distribution of income. For this reason, the myth of perpetual growth is most strongly championed by those who no longer believe it themselves, but who find it in their interests that everyone else should accept it.

Ecological concern and social justice are as inseparable as are the two faces of a coin.

DALY: One last question, Lutz. What principles do you feel we must build upon if we are ever to reverse the destruction of the world's ecosystems and arrive at a sustainable homeostatic society?

LUTZENBERGER: First, we must arrest the process of desecration of Nature, and stop excluding from our code of ethics all concerns for anything not related or useful to humanity. We all have to adopt Albert Schweitzer's fundamental ethical principle of Reverence for Life in each of its forms.

Second, we must accept a symphonic vision of Organic Evolution in which humanity is only one instrument in the orchestra. The idea of a symphony emphasizes cooperation, harmony, and mutual adjustment. In an orchestra, every instrument is complementary and indispensable to all the others. It's in this complementarity that greatness resides!

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print