The Future of Amazonia in Brazil. Marcílio de Freitas
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so that we value nature and life at all times.
The possibility of the planet’s ecological instability reaffirms Amazonia’s worldwide importance. At this time, climate change is its main “driving force.” Amazonia’s cultural and environmental complexity qualifies and problematizes its inclusion in the world’s political and economic processes. Nature and culture, territories and peoples, economy and technological innovations, environmental services, and sustainable development are categories that drive the cycles of its physical and political existence. Its exploitation by predatory capitalist forces and its laboratory-like condition for great international scientific experiments have ←1 | 2→generated contradictions and controversies that create new world political tensions and diplomatic agendas. The emergence of sustainability has added new elements to this framework.
The invention of new industrial matrices, and the integration of communication networks with new forms of financial market organization and the technical occupations are indications of globalization processes. New world geopolitics and links between education, science, religion, and the financial market have radically changed our relationship with nature and society. The incorporation of sustainability within this framework and in people’s fictional imaginary has enhanced the creation of new tendencies and forms of social organization.
These broad issues direct the globalization of sustainability towards the economic, religious, and scientific foundations of the civilizing process, generating a new political and ethical centrality. This centrality promotes and appoints local enterprises, based on an ethical system installed on the structural revaluation performed on the basis of notions of value and rights. Value and the right to life; the intrinsic value of nature and environmental services; culture, nature, and symbolic value; individual rights and environmental preservation; collective rights; and international relations, among others, constitute controversial themes that underpin projects, research programs, public policies, and international agreements. Giving new meaning to the foundations, explanatory meanings, and operative mechanisms for the notion of value also requires reviewing approaches and evaluations of human beliefs and desires. In this context, three classic categories, truth-value, utility-value, and beauty-value (Latour and Lépinay, 2008) have been replaced by life-value, mankind-value, culture-value, and universe-value, more complex categories and with a greater heuristic range (Freitas et al., 2017). This new conformation of mankind enhances the sustainability ethic and Amazonia.
The globalization of hypocrisy and the political barbarity have fortified the ethic’s importance, considering sustainability as a universal paradigm. Its incorporation as a civilizing foundation demands changes in the relationships between man and nature, between nations, between consumers and the market, and between technical training institutions and national state organizations. Developed countries are redefining their productive and occupational matrices, assuming the paradigm of sustainability and its links with public policies and ecological issues. For this reason, national states are seeking to integrate science and technology with the market in an ethical perspective that values social promotion. This to require structural changes in teacher training in all fields of knowledge.
The sustainability ethic embraces different themes and programs designed for the production and construction of human life and of public policies, generating contradictions and ruptures between ecocentric and anthropocentric ←2 | 3→conceptions. This historical framework has weakened the public consensus based on sustainability’s regulatory guides and standardizations. It is now necessary to institute principles and criteria that guide the organization of methodologies and priorities for individual and collective classifications (Routley, 2007), from a perspective that considers culture to be imbricated in nature, and that it reaffirms the basic relations of this sustainability’s new ethic. An ethics guided by the brief period it has been associated with human needs and, simultaneously, by the extended period it has been articulated to the permanence of mankind and the planet (Meunier and Freitas, 2005). The fusion of mankind’s history to the history of matter enhances this ethical dimension according to which man does not behave as nature’s owner thus proposing to modify, internally, the predominant morals.
This new framework from the twenty-first century enhances social promotion and the protection of nature. National states and societies exert key roles in the proposed technical and judicial regulations, as well as in its political legitimatization. These changes are producing a new understanding of the concepts of economic development and citizenship. From the standpoint of social solidarity, its main causes are the structural changes in education, science, and technology. Ecology, climate change, and sustainable development gain prominence in this new world scenario.
Brazil as the primary environmental power in the twenty-first century and Amazonia as the primary world reference for sustainable development are central to this process, which raises new challenges in science education because of the planet’s environmental degradation. Today, there is a worldwide focus on new technologies related to the following themes: clean development mechanisms; environmental policies associated with climate change; management processes dealing with environmental education and culture; scientific and technological mechanisms applied to the biogeochemical cycles and environmental services; institutional strategies and methodologies applied to the preservation of landscapes; processes of land use, climate, and integrated management of ecosystems; and methodologies to use and integrate meteorological networks and water resources. Sustainable development is a key element in this process, as it proposes new forms of organization and relations between societies, national states, and man and nature. Five new commitments from the twenty-first century are required to improve societies and mankind: a worldwide political contract; democracy as a universal political system; a new worldwide contract on nature; a new social contract; and a new contract on ethics.
A new contract on nature has been discussed by presidents of national states in various international forums. The planet’s social and ecological stability is the ←3 | 4→central focus of this contract, which also has Amazonia as its primary reference (Freitas and Silva Freitas, 2013). This new contract on nature, with sustainability as its paradigm, has highlighted contradictions in the capitalist regimen.
The central question can be put as follows: How to accomplish economic development concurrently with social inclusion and the protection of nature? Economic systems are integrating research on novel industrial matrices and sustainability through networks and technological platforms. The models of development based on a polluting industrial matrix and on the use of fossil fuels contribute massively toward fast worldwide ecological degradation and exploitation. These models are in the process of extinction. They are being redimensioned and adapted to sustainability’s new requirements. However, these changes are implemented at a slower rate than the impacts of climate change. Amazonia is a key element in this process. The construction of a market that values the preservation of natural environments also constitutes a new dimension of world economic processes.
But, Amazonia is also not exempt from the deleterious effects of climate change. The atmospheric modeling legitimized by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2007) predicts that the planet’s warming process also presents the feasible possibility of savanization of Amazonian biomes, directly impacting the eight countries that make up Pan-American Amazonia, and more than 250 endogenous cultures. This thermodynamic scenario impacts the region’s biogeochemical cycles, endangering the survival of the largest tropical rainforest on the planet. Global climate change models need to be improved. Again, Amazonia is a key element in this process.
The world’s environmental crisis, caused by predatory development, has resulted in a worldwide synergy for the preservation of natural resources, including soils, waters, and the earth’s atmosphere. It has also contributed to the creation of new educational matrices committed to mankind’s future and the struggle against social inequality. Even so, the financial market’s