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Good morning, Amazon! Good morning, Brazil!
Good morning, Latin American! Good morning to the entire world!
I have very bad news to share with you,
and then some really good news.
The very bad news is that humanity has gotten lost
on the way to the construction of our civilization;
it has forgotten nature.
And what we have to find out now was how humankind,
*** sapiens, sapiens, sapiens, lost its way
and got to an environmental crisis,
which has been the theme of our times
for forty years.
It’s an environmental crisis which is not just a passing one,
but indeed a crisis of civilization.
And to say it is a crisis of civilization, these are bigger words.
It means we have not yet fully understood
what the nature of the nature of the living planet
from which we emerged as a species is,
what the nature of human beings is
and how we can reconcile
our complex nature as human beings
with the natural complexity of this living planet which is Earth,
which is our habitat, which is the place where we have to live,
where we must build our destiny.
Where have we failed? Where did we get on the wrong path?
The most influential philosopher of the last century, Martin Heidegger,
began a huge task to dethrone philosophy,
or within philosophical thought,
from metaphysics to transcendental phenomenology,
this idea of a transcendental "I".
A metaphysics that was unleashed
in the form of thought: the being of world,
the being of things, the being of the human body.
And we started a civilizing task
based on the purpose of penetrating deep inside the bowels of being,
of being converted into a “thing”.
And so began this odyssey of building
an objectified world, one transformed into “things”.
What have we lost in all this, in this huge round,
in this wide path of civilizing construction?
We have finally gotten to the Renaissance,
the foundation of modern science.
The Cartesian paradigm dissociated the knowledge of being / object / spirit.
We have dissociated the culture of nature,
feelings, passions, and reason,
and so we built a world completely transformed into “things”,
one which is completely objectified.
What is it? Where can we find, clearly and visibly,
the absurdity of this civilizing construction?
Maybe the key nowadays is to look at the economy.
The economy, supposedly a human science,
was built basically by taking the mechanistic paradigm of physics:
factors of production,
the idea that we were destined for unlimited progress,
which is borrowed also from the Judeo-Christian tradition.
This principle which was provided to human beings,
which is not only the right,
but practically the duty to dominate nature.
But what happened to this economy?
The economy thought that it should build this progress
based on the meeting between capital and labor.
The workforce,
see that this implies a human being isolated from its own being,
is only socially necessary labor time,
as proposed by Karl Marx.
But Karl Mark may have missed a second contradiction.
We were in this same process destroying life’s plot.
We were converting nature into natural resources;
in other words, we were objectifying nature,
we were transforming it into fragments,
we were disassociating it from this complex web of interrelationships
between living communities and ecological environment.
We forget that this is the fundamental condition
for the maintenance of life
and also the condition for maintaining a sustainable economy.
It is not easy to understand that we have built a world
based on this total aberration.
For the economy, nature is, as economists say,
an externality;
that is to say that they are not compelled to take care
of this complex web of life.
See, then, how can we make a move
to get out of this rationality prison
that Max Weber, the great sociologist, called the cage holding rationality?
It is one which locks our subjectivity
and destroys the plot of life.
To do this, we need to create a new rationality.
A new rationality where passion and reason can coexist,
where we can deconstruct the unitary building of the world
that today appears as a forced unification
guided by the law of the market.
What globalized the world the most was the law of the market,
which has led to a constraint of reason, of thought and being,
a destruction of nature.
Because the economy feeds itself,
to survive it nourishes itself with nature.
But what is the connection between economy and nature?
The great economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen said very clearly:
the relationship between economic process
and the second law of thermodynamics, the law of entropy.
The economy nourishes itself with nature, with matter and energy,
according to the economic process and the technological process.
But nature, which enters this large oven,
in this great machine of the world economy,
changes according to the second law of thermodynamics,
which means that there is an irreversible process of energy degradation.
And this irreversible process is what marks
what the Wheat Chin called "the entropic death",
the entropic death of the planet.
We, we the world economy,
what is being generated is the acceleration
of the entropic death of the planet,
depleting resources, rationalizing biodiversity,
streamlining habitats, where the traces of coexistence
and co-evolution of several human communities with nature were very clear.
How do we get out of this prison?
We have to think of something
that was done for a long time by the indigenous communities,
the indigenous and the peasants,
which is learn to coexist with their territories.
We have to build a new productive rationality
based on two fundamental principles
that would no longer be capital, labor,
and scientific and technological progress,
but a new economy based on the ecological productivity of regions.
We are located in the Amazon,
which is the ideal place to understand this idea.
The Amazon is the producer, and all tropical forests,
of a natural productivity, a biomass productivity
that achieves rates up to 8% to 10% per year in a natural way.
Merging the productivity of nature with cultural creativity
and then generating different ways of life is the goal.
In conclusion,
we have to state that this is not only about a new production paradigm,
a new economic rationality.
We also have to adopt an environmental ethic
that is not only the ethics of conservation,
but also the ethics of otherness.
We also have to get out of individualism,
of the subject created by the same Cartesian paradigm,
because the subject is not different from the subject of science.
Leave behind this individualistic thinking
of conceiving a single subject
and build a world of otherness,
and this is our greatest challenge.
The other is not an alter ego just like me;
the other, each one of you who are here,
each culture of this world, is an absolute otherness.
It means I cannot ever judge
and try to know the other based on knowledge of myself,
based on my own principles.
That implies opening ourselves to the construction of a future
through a dialogue of knowledge,
which is a dialogue between diverse cultural beings.
This is to end the obsession of building a unitary
and generalized world, with an absolute principle
as the models of thinking have gone, from metaphysics
to Hegel's absolute being.
It is learning to live with the politics of difference,
learning to live in absolute otherness
where the epiphany of the face becomes a dialogue of knowledge,
where we go to the future without knowing it at all;
it is knowing how to live with what we know, with our knowledge
but also with all the knowledge that we do not know.
It is the beginning,
the hope that does not mean only to live hopefully,
but also to live with commitment to an ethics of responsibility for life,
knowing that this world,
to be sustainable, has to allow the coexistence of differences,
of otherness, of cultural diversity
that is the greatest wealth in our world.
Thank you.