Come, let us be friends for once.
Let us make life easy on us
Let us be lovers
And loved ones
The Earth shall be left to no one.
Yunus Emre
[poema Sufi]
Come, let us be friends for once
storytelling
A wandering dervish arrived in a town where the natives didn't trust strangers. "Go away!" They shouted at him. "No one knows you here!"
The dervish calmly responded, "Yes, but I know myself, and believe me, it would have been much worse if it were the other way round."
Elif Shafak, in The Forty Rules of Love
das leis do mercado
"What is needed is not more moralising, but more money. This kind of talk
makes many environmentalists queasy. Greens generally view biodiversity
conversation as a moral cause, and any discussion of financial mechanisms and marketing schemes arouses strong and principled
opposition. Why should any other species, each with just as much right
to occupy this living Earth as us, be forced to 'pay its way'? This
objection is understandable but wrong-headed: what I am proposing is not
a liquidation of nature to make money, but using money simply as a
convenient means to safeguard its protection. Money is a measure of
value: put a price on wild animals and plants and we will put a value on
them too. This is a pragmatic strategy, only to be used in desperation
because others have failed."
Mark Lynas, in The God Species
Aquecimento global
"To achieve the planetary boundary of 350ppm, the global economy needs
to be carbon-neutral by mid-century and carbon-negative thereafter.
Meeting this target means we all — greens included — need to start
thinking like engineers. This is a huge industrial building project,
converting the energy basis of civilization from fossil fuels to a
variety of cleaner sources. If we do it right, it will not be a burden
or a cost to the world's economy, but a source of enormous potential
future growth, innovation and job creation."
Mark Lynas, in The God Species
dos transgénicos
"All over Africa and Asia there are publicly funded efforts aiming to
create transgenic varieties of subsistence crops that will be of benefit
to poorer farmers and will be made available without licensing
restrictions. A quick survey of of some recent initiatives includes
salt-tolerant rice for use in degraded land where salinisation is
reducing yields; a pest-resistant eggplant developed by a university in
the Philippines; Vitamin A-fortified mustard in India that could avoid 46,000 unnecessary deaths per year;
disease-resistant rice in Uganda; so-called 'iron beans' in Twanda to
reduce anaemia in pre-school children and women; and an African banana
that is resistant to devastating wilt disease courtesy of a gene
transferred from the green pepper. I am often told that genetic
engineering means monoculture by definition, and will therefore
eliminate crop diversity — but there is no logical reason why this must
happen either. The International Institute of Tropical Agriculture, for
instance, which is behind the disease-resistant transgenic banana, also
works to support the biodiversity of traditional crops: in September
2010 it helped launch a 'yam bank' in Nigeria to collect, store and
preserve some 3,000 varieties of this important subsistence crop. The
two strategies can go together."
Marl Lynas, in The God Species
Agricultura, pesticidas e efeito de estufa
"Researchers based at Stanford University in the US recently calculated
that the widespread use of mechanisation and artificial fertilisers
between 1961 and 2005 avoided the emissions of 161 billion tonnes of
carbon that would otherwise have been released through land-use change.
(Yes, this is a net figure: carbon dioxide exhaust from all the
tractors has been subtracted, as have agricultural nitrous oxide and
methane emissions.) In other words, had farms been run organically
during this period, huge areas of forest and savannah would have been
brought into production to keep people from starving, destroying and
releasing the stocks of carbon stored in trees and soils. During the
1961—2005 period global cropland area did increase by 27% — but total
yield rose 135%, a jump in productivity that spared vast areas of
natural land from the curse of the plough. The amount of additional land
that would have been needed to produce this quantity of food at 1961
levels of yields and inputs is truly vast: 1,761 million hectares, an
area larger than Russia."
Mark Lynas, in The God Species
da privatização da água
"But opposition to privatisation makes the implicit assumption that the
public sector is doing a good job — a notion that fails to stand up to
empirical analysis. In fact, most state provision of water is rather
inefficient and the public companies providing the service are
frequently starved of investment due to pressure on government budgets.
Many international studies now show that privatisation tends to increase
the number of piped household connections, benefiting the poor, who no
longer have to buy bottled water at a premium or rely on dirty wells or
rivers. Privatisation of water in Argentina has even been linked with a
decrease in child mortality, confounding the expectations of leftist
social campaigners. The reason is simple: private companies seek to make
a profit, so in competitive market they tend to increase the efficiency
of their service to consumers so as not to lose earnings
unnecessarily."
Mark Lynas, in The God Species
Nuclear? Sim se faz favor.
"Do ponto de vista das alterações climáticas, a oposição à energia
nuclear foi um tremendo erro dos Verdes, que irá ecoar através dos
tempos à medida que a temperatura global vai subindo. Algumas pessoas
nos movimentos ambientalistas já começaram a aperceber-se deste erro,
incluindo membros do Partido dos Verdes e o anterior director do
Greenpeace do Reino Unido, Stephen Tindale que, corajosamente, se juntou
a mim numa declaração 'mea culpa', no jornal The Independent em 23 de
Fevereiro de 2009. Nos EUA, tanto Stuart Brand como o cientista da NASA,
James Hansen, também deram o seu forte apoio ao nuclear na batalha
contra as alterações climáticas"
[...] Apesar de tudo, Chernobyl está longe de ser aquilo que muitos apontaram
como 'o pior desastre industrial do mundo'. Nem sequer a mortalidade se
revelou na casa das dezenas, nem das centenas, nem sequer na dos
milhares, como as campanhas dos ambientalistas antinuclear e dos média
muitas vezes afirmaram (45). Estudos exaustivos feitos às populações
afectadas, aos bombeiros que frequentaram a zona incendiada (muitos dos
quais receberam doses colossais de radiação), e aos milhares de
'liquidadores' que, mais tarde, limparam o local, resultaram num
estimado nível de mortalidade que actualmente soma menos de 50. Alguns
milhares de crianças vieram a sofrer, de facto, de cancro da tiróide,
como resultado de exposição a doses de iodo radioactivo de Chernobyl —
mas como o cancro da tiróide é relativamente tratável, por volta de
2002, felizmente, apenas 15 dos estimados 4000 casos de cancro de
tiróide infantil se provaram fatais (46). Tudo isto podia ter sido
evitado se as autoridades soviéticas tivessem distribuído comprimidos de
iodo às populações afectadas.
[…] Mas os impactos mais graves de
Chernobyl serão sociais e psicológicos: níveis mais elevados de
depressão e de ansiedade foram relatados, em vítimas de exposição
radioactiva ou que foram evacuadas — e este stresse parece ter passado
de pais para filhos. O status auto-identificado de 'vítimas de
Chernobyl' levou à dependência, à fraca saúde, ao abuso de álcool e,
até, ao suicídio, de acordo com dados da UNSCEAR (48). A infeliz verdade
é que a histeria geral antinuclear, pós-Chernobyl, reforçada por anos
de publicações exageradas efectuadas por grupos ambientalistas sobre os
impactos e níveis de mortalidade, talvez tenha piorado o estatuto de
'vítima traumatizada' sofrido pelas pessoas que viviam nesta área. Há,
certamente, uma forte evidência que o medo da radiação tem sido muito
mais prejudicial do que a radiação propriamente dita: consideremos, por
exemplo, o grande número de abortos adicionais praticados por mulheres
na Europa de Leste, que se acharam vítimas de exposição radioactiva e,
por isso, sujeitas a terem bebés malformados ou doentes.
[…]
Acontece que, numa visita a Chernobyl, em Maio de 2010, com uma equipa
de filmagem do Channel 4, eu tive a oportunidade de olhar nos olhos,
precisamente, de um idoso, Leonid Petrovich, de 81 anos, que entrevistei
à porta da igreja de Chernobyl. Apesar de ter regressado à sua velha
casinha mesmo no centro da zona de exclusão, Petrovich, de modo algum,
se assemelhava às tristes vítimas descritas pelo Greenpeace — nem
qualquer uma das restantes pessoas, maioritariamente velhas, nem todos
os restantes residentes de Chernobyl, com quem falei nesse dia, que o
acompanhavam à igreja. Todos regressaram a Chernobyl [depois da
evacuação], de livre vontade, e nenhum parecia particularmente
preocupado com os perigos da radiação, que consideravam terem sido
sobrevalorizados pelas autoridades.
[…] Caso os leitores estejam
preocupados, a dose de radiação que recebi durante os dois dias que lá
passei foi cerca de 0,1 millisieverts, 100 vezes menos do que uma única
TAC médica (51). O que mais me impressionou foi a tremenda profusão de
vida selvagem. As mangas compridas, as pulseiras de cheiro estranho e os
chapéus que ordenaram que usássemos revelaram nada ter a ver com as
radiações — eram para espantar as nuvens de mosquitos que emergiam de
cada arbusto e árvore da nova frondosa floresta. A poucas milhas do
reactor, na vila abandonada de Prypiat, avistei uma cobra, um lagarto e
uma enorme lebre saltitando por entre as estruturas ferrugentas de uma
feira popular. O chilrear dos pássaros era quase ensurdecedor. A vida
selvagem brotava numa verdejante abundância — nada a ver com a imagem de
paisagem devastada com que cresci. Um vidoeiro prateado — espécie
resistente — crescia através das tábuas do pavimento de um ginásio
abandonado. O canto dos cucos ecoava através dos prédios de
apartamentos.
Nada disto é suposto sugerir, de alguma forma, que a
radioactividade seja benéfica para a biodiversidade. O que beneficiou a
vida selvagem local foi apenas uma coisa: a exclusão de pessoas.
Mark Lynas, The God Species — Tradução livre
Das emissões de carbono
"Having examined the published geological evidence of major carbon
releases over the last 500 million years, I cannot find any episode —
even during the darkest days of the worst mass extinction — that comes
close to the current rate of human carbon emissions."
Mark Lynas, The God Species
da acidificação dos oceanos
"I have already said a lot about human interference with the carbon
cycle, because of the supreme importance of the climate change planetary
boundary. But climate change has an evil twin, whose very existence was
barely noted until comparatively recently, but which is now considered
by the planetary boundaries expert group to be sufficiently critical to
the Earth system to deserve separate consideration. This new boundary is
the acidification of the world's oceans, which, as they absorb the
carbon dioxide released by human burning of fossil fuels, are gradually
turning more hostile to many forms of marine life. […] one group of
experts suggests ocean acidification 'could represent an equal (or
perhaps even greater) threat to the biology of our planet' than climate
change alone."
Mark Lynas, The God Species
Why Cultivating Nonconformity is More Important Than Ever
"Along with the natural fact that physical frontiers have receded, four
social trends have conspired to root out belief in secrets… First is
incrementalism. From an early age, we are taught that the right way to
do things is to proceed one very small step at a time, day by day, grade
by grade… Second is risk aversion. People are scared of secrets because
they are scared of being wrong… Third is complacency. Social elites
have the most freedom and ability to explore new thinking, but they seem
to believe in secrets the least. Why search for a new secret if you can
comfortably collect rents on everything that has already been done?…
Fourth is “flatness.” As globalization advances, people perceive the
world as one homogeneous, highly competitive marketplace: the world is
“flat.” Given that assumption, anyone who might have had the ambition to
look for a secret will first ask himself: if it were possible to
discover something new, wouldn’t someone from the faceless global talent
pool of smarter and more creative people have found it already?"
The Smart Parent series suggests 10 tips:
- Choosing a school where critical thinking is valued
- Modeling creative work and service
- Advocating that every learner is unique
- Go outside, raise a wild child
- Dropping everything and exploring the world
- Talk about the world at the dinner table
- Build a portfolio of creative work product
- Abandoning gender stereotypes
- Find a mentor
- Promote powerful learning experiences
Aqui
