Conference in Portuguese with simultaneous translation.
Abstract
I'd like to talk about metropolises and their civilizational effects from the point of view of an Amerindian who lives on the banks of the Rio Doce river, which was hit in November 2015 by a toxic mudflow caused by mining. My talk is motivated by two stories that I'd like to echo. The first story is an anecdote from a trip to Athens in the late 1990s with my friend, the Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa, who lives in a region of the Amazon rainforest threatened and invaded by gold miners. Athens is the city that can be considered the mythical origin of European civilization. That's how Kopenawa saw it. Uncomfortable during our visit to the ruins of the Temple of Zeus, he quickly distanced himself, before telling me: "Well! Now I know where the gold panners who came to devastate our forest started from." In fact, European civilization was built on the destruction of forests. The second story is that climate and environmental scientists now recognize that urbanized humanity weighs far more on the Earth's body than any other. In Brazil, for example, the Belo Monte hydroelectric dam, which has devastated the way of life of entire populations in this region, is typically a production born of the exponential energy needs of these metropolises.
From my point of view, urban sprawl is an effect of the colonization of my continent. Urbanization sees what it leaves outside, beyond its walls, as a threat to be protected from. What characterizes these metropolises is, as Quilombola thinker Antônio Bispo dos Santos puts it, their "cosmophobia", i.e., their fear and hatred of living things, their disconnection from the multiplicity of living beings and their focus on merchandise. The human characterizes the anthropocenic, Eurocentric city, in contrast to the myriad of beings that meet and differentiate themselves from outside the metropolis. What if Davi Kopenawa's provocation - he who lives in a living, breathing forest - were true? The cosmophobic city is a concrete nightmare that devours its surroundings. The time has come, in the age of the Anthropocene, to close this parenthesis of disconnection between humanity and nature, and "counter-colonize" the city, breaking down its walls to let other forms of life through. There are two experiences that can enliven our imaginations trapped in the Anthropocene: florescidade and florestania.
Florescidade, a Portuguese neologism (untranslatable) composed of the terms floresta (forest) and cidade (city/town), designates the necessary becoming-forest of the city. Recent advances in Amazonian archaeology have taught us that the forest, contrary to colonial myth, was not "virgin": in fact, at the time of the conquest, it was home to towns of a different kind to the Eurocentric city. These sites were harmoniously integrated into the body of the forest, delicately treading its soil. We can resurrect the spectre of the forest in the city.
Florestania, another Portuguese neologism (untranslatable), born from the words floresta (forest) and cidadania (citizenship), stems from a historic experience of alliance between seringueiros (latex harvesters) and indigenous peoples in the late 1970s. At that time, the government of the Brazilian dictatorship wanted to promote the development of the Amazon rainforest by fragmenting its large tracts in the state of Acre. The idea was to open up roads and allocate privatized plots of land to settlers. Union leader Chico Mendes and his followers put up peaceful resistance to the state's actions by standing between the trees and the chainsaws, preventing the intrusion of urbanization into the forest and its division into enclosures. They defended the free flow of the river and the continuity of the forest. As a result of their prolonged life in the forest, the seringueiros were positively contaminated by the thinking of the Amerindians: wanting to live like them, they wanted to assimilate their latex collection lands to the status of indigenous lands recognized in 1988 by the Federal Constitution.
In reality, this claim goes beyond what is permitted by the Constitution, which only recognizes the usufruct of land for indigenous communities. The alliance between the Amerindians and the seringueiros is motivated by two affects: on the one hand, a love of the forest that manifests itself in their way of living in it, and on the other, a shared struggle against dispossession and exploitation. It's an affective alliance, then, the fundamental affect here being love for the forest. In other words, the political thinking of "forest citizenship" is a critique in deed of the dominant model of white urban citizenship: against the disconnect between town and country, which exploits the countryside for the needs of the city, and against the private property characteristic of this European civilization, forest citizenship is a practice of dwelling that combines the land as common and the measured harvesting of resources. Florestania is, quite literally, an indigenization of the concept of citizenship.
By seeking a different way of inhabiting the Earth and breaking with the civilizational trajectory that began with the conquest of my continent, florescidade and florestania are two inspiring experiences for the new cosmopolitics in the age of the Anthropocene.
