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Amazonia is one of the planet’s last utopias. Before the New World was discovered, it already instigated the imaginary of people, travelers, and government. What is its future? The Future of Amazonia in Brazil: A Worldwide Tragedy is a study on the importance of protecting Amazonia and constructing its sustainable development.

According to Brazil’s new president, Jair Bolsonaro, “Environmental preservation should not be important for those who want to do business and produce.” At this juncture, at this time, Amazonia is a great border open to the predatory forces of capitalist production. Its continued existence is in danger. On the initiative of the UN, World Environment Day has been celebrated on 5 June since 1972. Its objective is to promote programs and actions that protect and preserve the environment, raise awareness on the need to protect life, the planet, and the future of mankind. The world environment has never been more threatened. This study approaches this subject of universal importance with Amazonia and worldwide processes as its central focus. It is organized on the basis of recent research and studies I have developed in collaboration with Marilene Corrêa da Silva Freitas since 2017. Its central axis is sustainable development in Amazonia and its articulations with worldwide socioeconomic processes. The authors integrate several themes that compose the theoretical and empirical substratum of sustainability, in the context of the development of Amazonia and worldwide processes, as illustrated in Figure 1. The destruction of Amazonia announced by the current Brazilian government has ←xv | xvi→accelerated the organization of this book. The threat to 68% of its protected areas and indigenous territories, this is equivalent to 390 million hectares (Barifouse, 2019), the state’s breaking with international import agreements on the ecological protection of Amazonia, and the complete opening up of the region to predatory capitalist development are the Brazilian government’s perverse political actions. It is a tragic picture, the return of the massive timber and mineral complexes, agroforestry companies, deforestation (cutting and burning) and the occupation for extensive agriculture and cattle breeding, the expansion of agribusiness, multiplication of huge hydroelectric plants, and infrastructure for highways, in addition to public policies on the research and exploration of fossil energy and natural gas, causing irreversible environmental destruction on Amazonia. Inadequate environmental protection from these initiatives will accelerate the irreversible ecological destruction of the region. These are the main threats to Amazonia, all of them legitimated by the current Brazilian government. In 2018, Brazil led the world in deforestation, with the disappearance of 1.3 million hectares of its primary forests (McGrath, 2019). In addition, the Report published by the UN registers the threat of extinction of 1 million species (UN News, 2019). Life has never been so threatened on the planet. The destructive interventions in Amazonia lead this civilizing ←xvi | xvii→barbarism that affects us all. Man’s relationships with nature need to change radically. Simultaneously, there is need for a radical break with predatory capitalism. At its limit, it is paramount to give new meaning to the foundations, the explanatory meanings, and the operative mechanisms of this type of capitalism. We can affirm that, in Amazonia, the growing poverty of its populations is proportionate to the degree of destruction of its cultures and biomes. These subjects are analyzed in this book. New proposals are made with a view to safeguarding life and nonpredatory development; for a better and sustainable world for us all, at this time and in the future.

Figure 1. Map of Amazonia with its two main cities, Manaus and Belem, and its main economic poles.

The second decade of this century has reaffirmed the importance of ecology to the processes underlying civilization. The environmental degradation of the planet is putting mankind’s future at risk. The environmental destruction of Amazonia deepens this crisis, and generates worldwide socioeconomic impacts. Changing the polluting industrial matrices and the relationship between man and nature is a mark of this new era. In a certain way, the solution of complex problems such as the matrices of occupation, production, and social dynamics of places and planets presupposes a new design and socioeconomic insertion of people in the contemporary world. This context has formalized the need to construct sustainable processes.

In counterpoint to the global economy’s pragmatic structures, worldwide public opinion builds new ethical foundations committed to the human condition and to universal rights. The overlapping of world issues with regional development in a process of mutual feedback has required a continuous recreation of social and economic realities, resonating in social groups, in general, and in the human psyche, in particular.

In spite of global environmental protection policies, deterioration of worldwide biodiversity has been aggravated at an increasing speed. Its main causes are the use of fossil fuel; inadequate use of soils and waters; commercial overexploitation of some species; introduction of predatory species in certain ecosystems; increasing soil, air, and water pollution; intensification of extensive agriculture using predatory techniques; territorial reordering and global climate change; and lack of political consensus among the world’s major nations on the implementation of ecological protection measures for the planet. The United States of America and, more recently, Brazil lead this political resistance.

Various other factors are also contributing to this process, among which are the acceleration of demographic growth, policies of forcing nonadaptive and nonintegrated economic development on local and regional environments, nonregulation of the rights of access to the natural resources; and insufficiency of scientific knowledge on regional and worldwide ecological dynamics.

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Promotion of sustainable development depends on the solution of complex problems, among which are the development and consumption of efficient nonpolluting energy sources; reorganization of the land transport sector and better management of traffic systems; substitution of the industrial pollution matrix; protection of the sea’s natural resources and of soil and air use; institutionalization of the mechanisms of measurement and control of air pollution; better management of the impacts of climate change; combating noise pollution; better management and protection of water resources; preservation and adjusted management of biodiversity and natural heritage; development of mechanisms to minimize risks and protect human health in unhealthy occupational matrices; better management and control of ecotoxicology and the impact of fungicides and pesticides; mobilization of the theoretical and empirical structures of the economic and social sciences; development of human resources for the management of sustainable development; and elimination of extreme poverty.

The transformations of these dynamic variables into quantitative indicators to be incorporated into national and worldwide socioeconomic policies are problems without short-term solutions. These problems are part of the world guidelines of research on the world sustainability.

It has become necessary to create new technical and political foundations to put pressure on the structures of current economic models that relate to increasing privatization of world biomes. This “surge in privatization” contradicts the conception of management of access to the planet’s wealth in the long term. Religion, politics, and science, also worried about the future of its existence, have incorporated environmental issues in their agendas without breaking with the economic processes. A new international division of environmental enterprises has taken form in articulation with the interests of NGOs, important actors in the construction of worldwide citizenship, especially in Amazonia. The presence of these actors in Amazonia has been tense and contradictory. Therefore, the need has arisen to construct political instruments to keep the democratic system committed to new world political, social, ethnic, and ecological contracts reaffirming the geopolitical importance of the countries from the African, Asian, and Latin America continents. This book incorporates new elements into this framework, reaffirming the importance of Amazonia at this world juncture.

The sustainability paradigm proposes to construct a network of global integration through sustainable structures. This presents a new political perspective: the world’s economic restructuring. The struggle against the social inequality will incorporate new socioeconomic tendencies into public policies and the market. It also enhances the possibility of the opposite: market and the national ←xviii | xix→state creating new tools to increase social inequality. The degree of friction and asymmetry between these two processes is highly dependent on the evolution of the economic and political powers of the richest countries, the worldwide integration of basic public policies-health, education, and culture-and the politicization and organization of worldwide public opinion. The role of science and technology in the confrontation of “economic crisis vs. sustainability,” embedded in the process of developing models of economic sustainability, is still under construction.

This complex socioeconomic universe has been designed and consolidated into the public policy of science and technology and integrated into Amazonia’s cultural characteristics and production matrix. This region is being projected as the primary world center for sustainable development over the next decade.

However, its full opening to the predatory economic market and the structural changes to federal laws made by the current Brazilian government complicate the policies on environmental protection and climate change in this region. These actions from the Brazilian government also risk jeopardizing the possibility of Brazil becoming a developed country through the sustainable use of this region.

There is a fascist dimension of the current Brazilian government that potentiates the rapid ecological destruction of Amazonia

There are signs that the international community has already begun to discuss the first political steps to make Amazonia into common heritage of mankind. The implementation and unfolding of this issue are still unpredictable.

More radically, Professor Stephen Walt of Harvard University published on May 08, 2019 an article in Foreign Policy magazine asking: Who will Save the Amazon (and How)? Stephen proposes invading Brazil to stop the ecological destruction of the region. International pressure to protect Amazonia is ongoing. Global warming is the main trigger of this type of political action that is in the process of rapid dissemination around the world. The protection and development of Amazonia, without reifying it, is a challenge for many generations of young Brazilians. A tenacious fight against human stupidity and the financial market’s greed.

This book will allow the reader a consistent understanding of the heuristic range of the concept of sustainability and its nexus with Amazonia and worldwide processes.

Through this book, the authors honor the Prussian scientist Alexander-von-Humboldt (1769–1859) for his brilliant works on the earth sciences. We also honor the photographer and activist Claudia Andujar (1931 – ….), Swiss-Brazilian, for her long struggle to protect the indigenous peoples of Amazonia.

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We thank Professor Bruce Patrick Osborne for the competent grammatical review of this book. Special thanks to Michelle Smith, Divya Vasudevan, and to Editorial Team of Peter Lang Publishing.

Manaus, November 25, 2019

Marcílio de Freitas