opinion

The environment:
to love the world
by Raúl Leis R.

The 2008 State of the Region Report says that, although discussion about sustainable development has become pointed, things environmental have notoriously been pushed aside in order to focus attention on other socio-economic priorities. This, in the face of increasing demand for natural resources, leads one to foresee more serious problems in the future, and the emergence of new pressures against protected areas and the environment.

We are in a region of great natural diversity and wealth which, in recent years, has developed territorial schemes for the protection and conservation of its biodiversity, of its various ecosystems, and of the valuable assets and environmental services that these generate for the population.

These schemes have been born and grown in a context of a large population of poor people, few technical resources and skills, and scant financial resources to support the protected legacy; as well as land and natural resource use practices that are hardly sustainable from the environmental perspective. As a consequence, the population, the demand for resources, and little-regulated productive activities generate great pressure on both protected and unprotected areas.

Although the formal guidelines were established with the support of various actors, such as indigenous people, rural communities, governments and international cooperation agencies, and although they represent significant advances, they provide no escape from the threats to these areas from within and without and are weak when it comes to harmonizing conservation actions with the other dimensions of sustainable human development.

Ecosystems of great importance are not adequately represented within the protected areas and there's a persistent weakness of institutions that lack effective political support, and the result of this is budgets and staffing that are insufficient to fight the threats, mitigate environmental impacts and control illegal activities in protected areas, the report notes.

One visible threat is posed by such megaprojects as open pit metal mining, hydroelectric dams and so on, which with the consent or passivity or complicity of governments threaten to devastate the environment, and even the health and very survival of communities.

But there's ever growing environmental consciousness among the citizenry, which is mobilizing in different contexts to resist the blows of a culture of death and promoting a culture of life, which Paulo Freire explained in this way:

I don't believe in love between men and women, between human beings, when they are incapable of loving the world. It's urgent for us to assume the duty of fighting for fundamental ethical principles such as respect for the lives of human beings, the lives of other animals, the lives of birds, the lives of rivers and forests. Ecology is of fundamental importance. We must consider the ecology in any radical, critical or liberating education.... In this sense it seems to me to be an unfortunate contradiction to formulate a progressive, revolutionary discourse and yet maintain practices that deny life --- practices that pollute the seas, the water and the fields, that devastate the forests, that destroy trees, that threaten the lives of the animals and birds.