When journalist Eliane Brum moved to Altamira, “the city in the Amazon that kills the most and deforests the most in the Amazon,” she stopped drinking vegan milk when she discovered that the only supermarket where she could buy it was owned by a criminal. “The climate crisis demands radicality,” proclaims the Brazilian in La Amazonia, this testimonial essay-chronicle that reads like a cry. At first it can be overwhelming, with the author marking the feminist-ecologist terrain in a steamroller mode, but it quickly interests, absorbs and, under the protection of data, facts and experiences expressed brilliantly from unusual angles, aspires to spread both her indignation and the desire to change something that helps “reforest” jungles and people.
You cannot understand the Amazonian peoples without nature, says Brum. Taking into account that in the last forty years 47 percent of the Amazon has been affected by human activity, and that thousands of indigenous people have been displaced, driven to poverty or executed, we are facing a history rich in violence. That they hit us all, says Brum, because the Amazon is the current center of the world. The jungle that will determine the evolution of the planet, and the survival or not of our species.
In 2020, journalist Jonathan Watts wrote “an anthological article” pointing out the fight for the Amazon as the great battle of the 21st century. Brum married him and they both settled in Altamira, where thousands of indigenous refugees from Belo Monte live. the hydroelectric plant that devastated a good part of the life around. Also in 2020, Jair Bolsonaro, president of Brazil, celebrated that “increasingly, Indians are becoming human beings like us.”
“Climate collapse is the result of a way of understanding the world that has been overwhelmingly defined by binary, white, Western and male thinking,” summarizes Brum, furiously inspired by the far-right president, whom she calls a murderer several times, among others. things for unprotecting Brazilians during the pandemic causing the death of his great photographer friend, Lilo Clareto. In any case, Ella Brum remembers that the former “leftist” president Lula da Silva already created predatory infrastructures. Bolsonaro only accelerated the pace of destruction by guaranteeing immunity to criminals. And both – although Bolsonaro much more so – turned murderers and criminals into “landowners” or “rural producers”, washing them with language.
Brum attaches capital importance to language. Thus, he dismantles the classic ideas of hope or happiness, stating that without them one can fight very well; he shudders at how the word Belo (beautiful) is used to disguise horrors; He slides in concepts like “prosperity theology” – he abhors it –; he charges against (kamikaze) sustainability; and he encourages scientists and intellectuals so that, when moving to non-urban spaces, they assume that the true centers of today are jungles, mountains, deltas… and transmit different ideas armed with new nouns and another sensibility. “Who determines what is the center and what is the periphery?” asks the reporter. To which she responds: “The centers of the world are where nature is, not where the markets are.”
How to count the new centers? If the jungle must be narrated in the form of the jungle itself, Brum proposes an exuberant book that moves between investigative journalism, the essay and the confessional nude in a wild and always suggestive way, where danger is felt and suffered but prevails. the tension of those who wish to live in harmony. And she, so incorrect, stands up shamelessly proud as an example of an associative spirit, a student of the indigenous people who lead the way: “The future is in the new old world of the native communities that have resisted.”
Eliane Brum The Amazon Translation: Mercedes Cowboy Salamander 432 pages 25 euros
